In many American cities, it costs more to send an older child to a state university than to drop off a baby at a day care center. This is a little unsettling. It doesn’t get as much attention as a financial crash. However, parents who work across the country know this all too well in kitchens, parking lots, and break rooms. It’s just that the math doesn’t work anymore.
What’s going on with the numbers is hard to understand. According to estimates, not having enough child care options could cost the U.S. economy up to $329 billion over the next ten years in lost productivity, lower payroll taxes, and people leaving the workforce. They quit their jobs because the cost of child care is higher than the money they’d make by staying. Most of these parents are mothers. One policy might not be able to fix this on its own. That being said, more and more mayors and local officials are sure that giving families cash directly is an important part of the solution.
It’s not a new idea. Universal basic income, which means giving everyone a regular, unconditional cash payment, has been talked about in policy circles for decades. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was already pushing for something similar. He said that poverty itself had to end before its effects on housing and education could ever really get better. For a long time, the idea stayed mostly in the abstract. Then it was tried in Stockton, California.
When Michael Tubbs became mayor of Stockton in 2017, the city was still going through a municipal bankruptcy filing and had one of the highest rates of poverty in the state. As a test, he gave $500 a month to 125 residents with no rules about how they could spend the money. Researchers kept track of the participants and compared them to a control group. They found improvements that could be measured, such as less stress about money, better mental and physical health, and a better ability to look for new work. Tomas Vargas was stuck in a part-time warehouse job and didn’t want to take time off to look for something better. The payments every month were just enough to help him get a job in the nonprofit sector. His wife also went back to work. “I changed my mentality on being present as a father and a husband,” he stated.
These kinds of results are good news, but researchers are careful not to oversell them. A principal investigator at Appalachian State University named Leah Hamilton studies economic policy for families. She says that getting out of poverty doesn’t usually happen in big jumps. It takes place when nothing terrible happens for a long time. My car broke down, so I missed my shift. I lost my job, which meant I lost my apartment. She said, “Those little emergencies will really set you back.” Guaranteed income makes these small disasters happen less often and less badly.
That idea seems to be sinking in with politicians in a way it hadn’t before. A big part of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was making sure that all kids up to age five could go to child care. Abigail Spanberger, who will be governor-elect of Virginia, wants more early childhood pathways and bonuses to make up for a lack of providers. The new governor of New Jersey has promised to make pre-K available to all children. These positions are no longer on the edge. Their platforms are doing well.
Some states aren’t waiting, though. On November 1, New Mexico became the first state in the country to offer free child care to all families. The program is partly paid for by oil and gas tax money. Families in Connecticut who make less than $100,000 a year can now get free child care. Even though neither program is a UBI, they both share the same basic idea: child care is infrastructure, not a luxury, and it needs public funding just like schools and roads do.
There are still many things to do. Scaled-up UBI costs a lot of money. The political will is weak. And the problem of child care—finding providers, paying for facilities, and making sure workers get paid enough to live on—needs more than just cash transfers. People who work for unions like AFSCME and SEIU have spent decades fighting for better working conditions for care workers. They have been successful in getting contracts that include health care and higher pay. That work is important in addition to any program that helps people make ends meet.
Still, it’s hard not to feel like something has changed as you watch this policy moment play out. The question of whether families need help has been replaced by the question of how quickly that help can be given. That change, no matter how slow, is the most important one for the parents who have to do the math every month on care costs vs. take-home pay.
