Jack Salmon writes about the drawbacks of federal funding and government regulation of child care:
Romney’s plan is just the most recent episode in a burgeoning and bipartisan effort to expand the role of the federal government in American family affairs. The Biden administration’s American Families Plan includes federally mandated paid leave, a massive expansion in child-care subsidies, and expanded tax credits, much of which was not paid for with corresponding revenue.
But it isn’t just progressive policy-makers who are driving this agenda. Non-left advocacy groups are also calling for these policies to be implemented, while conservative policy-makers have recently introduced legislation to expand Child Tax Credits (CTC) and fund paid leave by pulling from already financially fragile Social Security funds.
However, few of these proposals do anything to address the underlying driver of high child-care costs — namely the dwindling supply of care providers. Instead of throwing money that we just don’t have at the problem, policy-makers would do better to remove the regulatory hurdles that are keeping prices high and potential care workers jobless.
Read the whole thing here.