Affordable Child Care
By 
The number of policy options that would make people’s lives better while also spurring the economy is quite large. These commonsense choices would be a huge boon for 99 percent of Americans while having the singular downside of making rich people pay higher taxes. Therefore it is of course impossible. But the government taking the lead in creating affordable child care makes more sense than just about anything else and the election is the time to talk about these issues.
Affordable day care, for instance, would stanch the income loss experienced by parents who now must leave the work force while their children are young. The damage of such career interruptions does not end when a parent goes back to work; among other things, there are the raises that were missed and the savings that otherwise would have accrued. A 26-year-old mother who takes five years off from a median-paying job — $30,253 in 2014 — would forfeit $467,000 over a work life, reducing her lifetime earnings by 19 percent, according to a calculator by the Center for American Progress.
The losses are even more profound when multiplied over the economy. International comparisons indicate that more family-friendly policies in the United States, including quality child care, would allow roughly 5.5 million more women to work, assuming the economy was adding jobs at a reasonable pace. All else being equal, that surge could generate an astounding $500 billion a year in economic growth, or about 3.5 percent of gross domestic product.
Proper child care also lays the foundation for future productivity gains. Research shows that public investment in early education yields benefits for children far in excess of its cost, including higher academic and career achievement well into adulthood, as well as better health. McKinsey researchers estimated that closing academic achievement gaps between low-income students and others would increase the size of the economy by roughly $70 billion a year; closing racial and ethnic gaps would add $50 billion annually.
But hey, taxes might go up on the wealthy. And those parents shouldn’t be having kids if they aren’t millionaires. Why can’t the breeding poor just pull themselves by their bootstraps like I did by being born to a corporate lawyer who graduated from Yale?
Hillary Clinton has something of a plan to deal with these problems. Donald Trump does not. But both parties are the same, amiright? Stein ’16!