Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi everyone. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry in for Tanzina Vega and this is The Takeaway. During the past year, the pandemic revealed many of the cracks in our national foundation from racial health inequities to uneven WIFI capacities, but perhaps none more critical than the utter lack of an infrastructure to ensure all families have access to quality affordable childcare. This is a burden shouldered disproportionately by women who remain primary caregivers in many families, and make up the majority of the childcare workforce.
One statistic gives us a glimpse at the scale of the childcare crisis. Between February and April 2020, 4.2 million women left or lost jobs, 2 million have yet to return. The American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed into law in March sought to remedy this, at least in part, by expanding the childcare tax credit. While it's not a full-scale solution, it is a powerful tool for many families.
Here with me to discuss what this credit will mean for families is Dorian Warren. Dorian is the Co-President of Community Change & Co-Founder of the Economic Security Project. It's so good to have you with us.
Dorian Warren: Hi, Melissa. It's so great to be with you. I'm so glad to hear your voice. I've been listening all week to you guest hosting. I'm a regular listener, but I've been regularly tuning in to you this week, so it's great to be here.
Melissa Harris-Perry: We should probably tell listeners that we've also been friends for 21 years so that this enthusiasm is part of that.
Dorian Warren: I wasn't going to out you like that, but okay. Yes. Hi. Hi friend. Hi, sis.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, friend. Hi. One of the things I know about you because we've been friends forever and ever is that you and your wife welcomed your first child just eight months ago in the midst of the pandemic and so, although this is the work you've been doing, it also got real personal for you. Tell me what you think about this childcare tax credit and what kind of impact it might have?
Dorian Warren: Thank you, Melissa. I am a new daddy, and that means I change a lot of diapers, and diapers cost money. It adds up. It's like $2 a day basically for diapers. Why that's important is because a lot of people miss that Melissa, but with the stroke of a pen, President Biden delivered what's probably the most ambitious anti-poverty legislation in generations, and particularly something in the American rescue plan called the Child Tax Credit.
Now, a lot of folks don't know what this is. This was something that actually passed over 20 years ago. It was in 2001 under the Bush tax cuts that this little provision by frankly grassroots activists who have been organizing around it got snuck into that tax cut. Then all of a sudden, here we are 20 years later after the leadership of many champions in Congress I'm thinking of Representative Rosa DeLauro for instance, who's been on this from the late '90s. There's this new program called the Child Tax Credit that got expanded, so let me say what it means.
It means that if you are a parent and you have a child, you will get roughly $3,000 a credit in terms of your taxes, for each child ages 6 to 17. For kids under 6, that's $3600. Now, what does that really mean? It means $250 or $300 a month per child, and it's something called fully refundable meaning, Melissa, here's the key. There's no work requirement to accept this benefit. If you didn't make income or let's say you made $8000 a year last year, you're going to get $250 or $300 a month no strings attached. Let me say that again no strings attached, to pay for whatever you need.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, that's some diapers.
Dorian Warren: For diapers, for food, for whatever it is you think you need for your child.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You articulated why matters to families with children. Why should I care about this If I don't have kids?
Dorian Warren: Let me just say it's 39 million households, Melissa, covering 88% of children who benefit. What we do know is that half of people surveyed don't even know about this. But your question is, "Why should you care?" That is the question because you have to move to, "Why is this a public good that benefits me even if I don't have kids?" Here's what we know from research. Investing in ending child poverty means everybody benefits and in this way. It improves maternal health, and we have some evidence of this from Canada's child allowance for they've been studying the effects of this for years when they did something similar because they're a little ahead of us on this.
Think of it this way, Melissa. Child poverty in America costs us somewhere between $800 billion to a trillion dollars a year in lost economic output. We're making the wrong kinds of investments by investing in child poverty. We're making that choice to say, "We're cool with child poverty," in the richest country in the history of the world. When you say, "I'm going to invest to make sure there is an income floor for children no matter their race, no matter income," that actually benefits us in the long-term because there's something like 8 to 1 return on societal benefits.
$100 billion investments produces $800 billion for the country further down the road, whether it's frankly like better employment outcomes, or better mental health, or better physical health. We have the social science on this and there's no reason why we can't garner the political will to say, "This should be the new social contract in this country."
Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're talking about these big issues of how it improves the economy overall. There's one specific sector connected to that, and that is childcare workers themselves or often folks who are working full-time but still living below or very close to the poverty line while trying to provide this profoundly necessary care. Is there anything in the pipeline or in this current legislation that assists on that side of the childcare question?
Dorian Warren: We have relegated childcare to an individualized issue for most Americans for too long. It is a public good. There was a little bit of a down payment, Melissa, on providing high-quality access to childcare for everybody in the American Rescue Plan. It was about $40 billion. But, there is $700 billion on the table and pending legislation that would actually reconstitute so to speak, reconstruct our entire childcare system in America so that particularly low-income parents, Black and brown parents have access to childcare. As you pointed out, childcare providers, and especially the teachers, can get a living wage. It makes no sense. It just makes no sense.
If you work full time caring for other people's children so that they can go to work or they can live their lives, why should you have to live in poverty? This is the most important work we can do as a country, is investing in the care of our children and our families. This is exciting that there is potentially almost a trillion dollars on the table that would invest in childcare for the first time in this country. We almost did it in the early '70s under Nixon. He killed it. This is our next opportunity to do it.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You have actually made me feel excited about public policy this morning, like something could actually happen that would make a big difference. As always, a pleasure to talk with Dorian Warren. Co-President of Community Change and Co-founder of the Economic Security Project and, again, just to be completely honest, Dorian and I also co-create and cohost the System Check podcast.
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