The inescapable problem with Elizabeth Warren's child-care plan

Subsidies could help a lot. But public child care would be better.

Elizabeth Warren.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Alex Wong/Getty Images, zsv3207/iStock)

Virtually everyone with young children knows through personal experience that the structure of the American economy is viciously anti-family — particularly for the period between birth and school age. Raising a baby is both enormously expensive and enormously time-consuming, creating an awful choice between staying at home and foregoing work income, or going back to work and having to pay for expensive child care (that is, a nanny or a day care to look after the child while its parents are at work).

That is the motivation behind Elizabeth Warren's new proposal for a child-care subsidy, which would drastically cut child-care costs for most families. It's not a bad idea, but it could be better. It raises a key question: Should Democrats start pushing for direct state provision of things like child care, instead of subsidizing private institutions?

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.