The GOP’s Childish Cut

I’ve always been skeptical about the idea of throwing a bunch of money at a problem. Even as a liberal mayor I launched a handful of programs that attempted to measure actual progress on the ground for the dollars spent.

But one general area where I do think we need to do a lot more — while being accountable for results — is investments in kids.

And one big element of that is child care. Here’s the basic problem. Average child care expenses run about $1,000 a month. That’s 11% of the annual average income of a Wisconsin couple and it’s 36% of the income of the average single mom. And yet, that only supports average wages among child care workers of $10.66 an hour. That amount shot up all the way to $12.66 thanks to some money provided in the federal pandemic relief bills. Of course, that still wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better.

Gov. Tony Evers proposed taking over that federal subsidy at a cost of $340 million in this state budget. The other day Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee rejected that. They plan to propose $15 million instead.

I’m not blind to the risks of taking on a substantial new state fiscal responsibility. We’ve got a $7 billion surplus today, but nobody knows how much of that will be sustainable in the long-run. But I think this, and other investments in young kids, are worth it.

There are studies out there that will tell you that for every dollar invested in this or that related to kids we’ll save a trillion dollars on less crime, less need for social programs, more productivity in workers, etc., etc. I haven’t bothered to look those studies up because the exact numbers are meaningless. Nobody can measure this stuff with any accuracy.

But I buy the argument. When you invest in kids that will be good for society and, yeah, it will mean that we’ll be wealthier. We’ll also be happier and more secure. I’d like to live in a society where there weren’t any kids who were hungry, abused or neglected and where they got really good educations from day one. That would be good for them, for their parents and for me, a guy who isn’t even a distant uncle.

So, I don’t mind Republicans pushing back on spending. It’s what Republicans used to do before they started spending all their time attacking Mickey Mouse and obsessing over every line, looking for subversion, in a children’s book. It seems they’d rather “save” kids from imagined threats lurking in their school libraries than do much of anything to actually improve their situations and their (and our) prospects.

But when you look at this child care subsidy it sure seems worth it to me. If they wanted to do something productive, the GOP could have attached some kind of monitoring program to the money so that we could see the outcomes. Maybe establish a higher minimum wage for child care workers. But nope, they just rejected the money.

And that was a mistake. No kidding.