“Child Care Is, Well, It's Child Care…”
Politicians are so insulated from the problems of real people.
Here is Trump, talking to some Wall Street types in NYC yesterday, with some liberal commentary on top of it:
If you recall the first Prez debate — the one that ended Biden’s public career, in other words — Jake Tapper also asked a question about child care, and Trump and Biden started debating their golf games in that answer.
The whole “replacement rate” thing is a current moral panic, with guys like Peter Thiel out there saying there will be no humans in 991 years.
While that’s probably not true, the reality is that children are expensive, and child care is especially expensive (most parents I know bemoan this, or rely on a network of caregivers, I.e. what J.D. Vance would call “post-menopausal women”). The child care problem is what prevents people from having three kids. If you’re rational, you will have 1–2 kids unless you make big money, you’re not good at birth control, or you just have what we’d call “a pregnancy kink.” Many people fall into all three categories. But for most of us humans, children are expensive and time-consuming, and going to three (as every dad at a backyard party says: “We went from man-to-man to zone…”) weighs on people.
Now, of course Trump would have no idea how to answer that question. Trump is not a policy guy; he’s an anger and ideology guy. I doubt Harris can answer that question either, because she’s a child-less cat lady, eh? But seriously, most politicians are so close to money and power (or use their position to extract money and power) that “child care” is not a thing they worry about. You think Don ever wondered what Eric was doing during the day when Eric was six or seven? I would doubt it. He had a network of people and private schools to deal with that. That’s not a man issue, ya know? Men do deals and make money. Others handle the kids.
I doubt Harris or Trump have a cogent plan here, in part because now child care centers are being bought by private equity, which is a race to the bottom. Ironically, though, private equity will get out if the replacement rate keeps dropping, because then child care isn’t a “growth area.” Ha.
It's also hysterical in the above clip to see Trump give a completely non-sensical answer, including saying “child care is child care,” and all these rich guys (and two women) just clap. Guys like that have no idea how children get cared for during the day. If anything, they think of it as a line item. “Woman’s work.” I’ve long thought that rich guys have kids as social and economic currency — it’s an easy thing to talk about as you’re approaching a deal. I grew up on the Upper East Side, and while I wouldn’t say my parents socialized with tons of these types of people, they did sometimes. Kids always felt like a currency to males. It’s depressing, because I thought I could do better as a dad, but so far I haven’t gotten that chance. Onward.
I don’t know whether the answer is tax credits, free Pre-K, etc, etc… better parenting support models including more paid time off, etc, etc… but I think if we’re going to presuppose a moral panic about declining birthrates, we need to have some kind of answer to make this stuff a bit more affordable for those birthing kids.
Yes/no?