Government Daycare—Eliminating Families?     1/9/1998

President Clinton hosted yet another warm and fuzzy press conference this week to announce a $22 billion dollar daycare program benefitting government bureaucracy at the expense of parents and their children. The plan? To take your hard earned tax dollars and give them to businesses, the day care lobby and already failed big government programs like Head Start. The goal? To benefit parents only if they let non-family providers care for their children.

Articles have been written, studies have been published and most everyone agrees that parents, not government, are the best caretakers for their children. Is there truly a daycare crisis that merits a $22 billion dollar fix from taxpayers?

First, one must ask, who is watching the children? According to the last Census Bureau Report, nearly half of all children under age five in the U.S. reside in a home where the mother is not employed. Another 21% of those Moms work part-time. So, less then one in four children under five have a mom who works full-time outside the home.

Who's watching the kids with working moms? Again, according to the U.S. Census Bureau only 13% of children are cared for by center-based daycare. The vast majority (73%) are cared for by their parents or a relative. Another 9% are cared for by a neighbor and 3% have a nanny living in their home. Polls in which mom's are asked to list their preference for types of childcare have consistently ranked daycare centers last.

So why does the White House insist on discussing heavily subsidizing institutional daycare to the disadvantage of other types of childcare? The White House is quick to point out poor working single moms who need inexpensive care for their children. Clearly that is a reasonable goal, but that has already been addressed. The 1996 welfare reform act increased funding for child care by 50% and made available excess AFDC moneys, from people leaving the welfare program to be converted for childcare.

What about middle class working moms? What could government do to empower them in the caring of their children? A recent CWA commissioned poll by the Wirthlin Group found that over 80% of women said that if economic factors were not an issue they would prefer to leave the workforce to stay at home with their kids.

Therefore, if the White House really wants to help working women, then instead of federalizing institutional daycare they should reduce the tax burdens on parents. Allowing families to keep more of their paycheck would empower them to make their own choices about when and how often to work outside the home. The recently passed $500-per-child tax credit is a wonderful first step, but not enough. The tax code must stop penalizing marriage.

In the meantime, if Americans shudder at the thought of Hillary's vision of healthcare, how much more should we be concerned with her vision of Uncle Sam as Nanny? Moms and Dads are the best caretakers of their own kids. What they don't need is Hillary, or Uncle Sam interfering with their God given authority to do so.

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