Candidates for the Presidency 2020 - Going Down the Rabbit Warren

None of the individuals in the large field of candidates running for President this year are very inspiring. They are all starting from pretty much the same premises and are proposing pretty much the same programs. All that distinguishes one from the other are slight differences in the way each would tweak tax rates to pay for these programs. However, some of the candidates have distinguished themselves by some specific lapse of logic they’ve demonstrated in the course of their campaigns.

For Elizabeth Warren, this lapse is evident in her proposal to subsidize childcare for everyone. Her plan includes providing a network of government-supported childcare facilities, paid for with a 2% tax on those in the highest income brackets. But the problem(s) with her proposal should be apparent from the moment she introduces the topic in the many public forums where she has appeared. Listen again to her introductory remarks when she appeared on the TV show The View.

Warren launched into her proposal by recalling the frustration she had experienced getting childcare as she was pursuing her political career. She said she went through a series of childcare providers, but none of them proved to be suitable. Potential sitters and nannies would appear – then disappear. Or else they just weren’t equipped to responsibly care for children. Warren followed up with her proposal for universal subsidized childcare.

But isn’t it obvious that there’s a disconnect, a non sequitur, implicit in her proposal? Warren always had the money to pay for the best childcare. Funding wasn’t a problem for her. And yet she couldn’t find suitable caregivers. If she, a relatively wealthy person, couldn’t find a single acceptable childcare provider long-term – how can intelligent, capable caregivers be found for a whole nation of families?

While paying for childcare is a problem for many people, the more fundamental problem is the sheer lack of decent, loving people willing to commit themselves to caring for other people’s children. A single father I know summarized the situation as it is faced, not in theoretical proposals, but on the ground, in the lives of real people on a daily basis.

My friend was also fairly well-to-do and was willing to pay top dollar for help caring for his two young daughters while he was at work. He thought he had exercised reasonable care in selecting people from the job applicants available. But what he faced was a procession of irresponsible, incompetent, and uncaring people. He gave me a litany of his childcare woes.

One person he hired brought a stack of religious pamphlets with her to the job the first day and concentrated on proselytizing his children into “The Rising Moon Cult” or some other such absurdity, rather than simply, sanely seeing that they got a hot lunch. Another caregiver stayed a few days, then disappeared. She walked out in the middle of the day, leaving the door wide open in her wake. (His children thought she met a boyfriend who drove up in front of the house – someone who naturally took immediate precedence over the children.) Another caregiver could be seen after-the-fact on the nanny-cam slapping his daughter smartly across the face when she wouldn’t finish her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Another immediately filled his medicine chest with anti-fungal creams, something that bode a problem he didn’t want to invite into his house. On the first day of another caregiver’s employment, my friend came home and found the back of one of the sturdy family chairs had been snapped off. The caregiver said it had simply “fallen apart.” But when a second chair lost its back on the second day, and then a bit later, when a third chair turned up backless – my friend got the creepy feeling that some secret, bizarre ritual was being enacted while he was out of the house. And on and on and on.

Finally, while there were a few caregivers who might have been more grounded and sincerely caring, my friend found their inability to drive to present more of a problem than he initially thought it would be. Or else, their English was much more limited than it had seemed during their interviews, something which he felt could present a real problem during emergencies or during any unforeseen situation.

My friend starkly summed up the situation. He said real life is NOT like television. TV sitcoms are filled with witty, wise, responsible, and often beautiful housekeepers – from Hazel, through Alice of The Brady Bunch, down to Fran Drescher’s depiction of The Nanny. But in reality, he concluded – “Such people do NOT exist!” So if my friend, like Elizabeth Warren, couldn’t find even one competent childcare provider at top salary - where can we find several million of them to satisfy the demand that Warren’s proposal would create?

It’s true that Warren’s proposal generally envisions childcare that takes place in credentialed facilities. That would bring a degree of professionalism to the occupation of childcare provider. There wouldn’t be lone sitters bringing their individual derangements into a home. Presumably each childcare facility would have a staff of people who had been qualified in some way. Being part of a staff would also help drown any individual’s potentially dangerous quirks in the general pool of activity and supervision that exists in places of business.

There’s still a glaring problem though. Elizabeth Warren tells about the problems she had finding childcare in the context of the necessity she faced of leaving the house in pursuit of her career. She gives off the bustling vibe of someone who has places to go, people to see - of someone who has an important contribution to make in the larger world. She wants all women to be put on a more equal footing with men in their ability to be released from strictly housebound occupations so that they can express themselves in more diverse ways, so that they can paint on a larger canvas.

But that sort of attitude automatically assumes or creates an underclass of people, inevitably consisting mostly of women. These women presumably wouldn’t have places to go and people to see, and presumably wouldn’t have contributions to make in the corridors of power. Caregivers who work in credentialed facilities might be given somewhat higher status than those individuals who work in private homes, the more so because the latter often are drawn from pools of immigrant workers without green cards and without the ability to demand perks such as health insurance, paid vacations, and a minimum wage. 

Whether Warren’s projected army of caregivers consists of professionalized caregivers or whether it would continue to include many catch-as-catch-can laborers – the fact remains that this army must consist primarily of women who have few pretensions or aspirations to make “important contributions” to society-at-large. They will necessarily be women who don’t want to run for higher office, who don’t feel a calling to climb any corporate ladder, who aren’t inspired to lock themselves away in laboratories to research the causes of cancer or in observatories to contemplate the nature of the universe. Instead they must necessarily be women who are either satisfied with or who are bound to the traditionally circumscribed role of tending children. They must be women who have little ambition beyond the walls of the playroom. Implicit in Warren’s proposal is the creation and relegation of all such women to second-class citizenship. For every handful of Warrens who importantly rush out of the house each day to make contributions and to express themselves – there must be at least one woman with no such pretensions, one woman who is acknowledged as having no larger contribution to make, no important seat of power to occupy.

But assuming our willingness to create such an underclass of women, who is going to willingly consign herself for any length of time to that class? Most Americans, fired by the motivational speaker’s ringing assurance that “You can do anything – you can be anything!” – do want to be out there running for President, or designing the next new fashion craze of a shawl, or driving in the Indie 500, etc., etc. There aren’t nearly enough Americans to fill the care-giving jobs that already exist in this country. Almost everywhere, there are severe shortages of teachers, nurses, senior care facility workers. (Which last point incidentally highlights another logical and practical gap in Elizabeth’s Warren thinking. If it’s important that parents be freed from the confinement of around-the-clock childcare so that they can go out and express and create in the larger world – isn’t it just as important that people be freed from around-the-clock care of aging or disabled relatives so that they go out and express and create on a grand scale? However, a subsidy to make universal senior care available doesn’t seem to figure large in any of the candidates’ platforms.)

Getting back to the main point, it’s this unwillingness of most bright, energetic, educated women to limit themselves to traditional childcare roles, whether in the home or in day care centers, that has created the existing shortage of caregivers and that will make such shortages even more widespread and apparent if Warren’s (and the other candidates’) plans for quality universal childcare are enacted. Furthermore, the need for more and more childcare providers will exacerbate the kind of hand-me-down society that we are already generating when it comes to childcare.

The parents who went to Yale and who believe it is their calling to lead busy lives of importance – will avail themselves of the government subsidized daycare centers and will leave their children at the most highly-rated of these centers. These centers will generally be staffed by women (again, it will usually be women) who did not go to Yale and whose backgrounds and circumstances generally seemed to foreclose them from having exalted ambitions. However, these women will in turn be faced with the same problem the Ivy League parents have - where to put their children while they themselves are working at the centers.

These staff members will in turn enroll their children in the subsidized daycare centers. But the daycare facilities left to these workers’ children likely won’t be such topflight centers. The centers that this second tier of children are consigned to will likely suffer from even more acute staffing shortages. Many of those staff members who are available will be a more fluctuating lot. They will be young women who take the job as a stopgap, until they can get jobs in fields that really appeal to them. These centers’ employees will be like the waitstaff of many typical restaurants in Hollywood. These employees are simply marking time until their big break comes, however the “big break” is defined.

Alternatively, the more permanent staff members in this second tier of centers will be one of three kinds of people. They might be simple souls without urgency and without packed schedules in their private lives. Or, they might be rather embittered individuals who are chafing at their low status in life and who could conceivably take this resentment out on any child left alone with them. Or, they might be foreign-born individuals whose green cards haven’t been examined too carefully. In any of these cases, they won’t be the kinds of people whom upper tier parents would invite into their homes or associate with in any meaningful way. They’d constitute a separate class of individuals, existing in a different realm from the privileged parents.

However, the step-down declension will not stop there. This above group of staffers will in turn have their own children. These children will also need to be put somewhere while their mothers are working at the daycare centers. Even under Warren’s idealized plan of providing universal daycare, it’s still likely that the children of this last set of caregivers might not find places at any credentialed center. Again, there simply won’t be enough workers to tend to everyone’s children. But also, this last set of workers might include people from more family-bound cultures and individuals less oriented to leaving their own children in abstracted, business-like settings. They might tend to do what a lot of mothers are currently doing. They might leave their children with neighbors or grandparents or other members of their extended families – with people who might be chosen at random out of exigency rather than because of any real care-giving skills or temperament they might have.

So there will be this passing along of children, with one group of children jostling another set out of place with their parents, and so on and so forth. Like dominoes, as one set of children falls into the hands of strangers’ care, that will push another set of children into stranger’s care, on until the last domino child is pushed off into some very random kind of care.

This resultant situation reminds me of a parable I once read in an economics textbook about a poor Irish village. As one luckier segment of the population garnered a bit of money, these families payed to have their wash done by the women in some less-well-off families. As the women in this second set of families earned a little income from doing washing, they in turn passed along the onerous job of doing their own wash to a set of families still less well-off. And on it went, with everyone passing off their clothes to be washed by women in successively less favored circumstances. Everyone did someone else’s wash. Instead of doing it herself, every housewife paid someone else in turn to do it.

I don’t remember what the author of this economics text was trying to demonstrate with this parable of the poor Irish village and its long relay of dirty laundry. The author might have been suggesting a way that a poor, stagnant village suffering an economic depression could generate income for every household by monetizing the act of doing the weekly laundry. Or the textbook author might have simply been illustrating how an economic folly gets perpetuated. Maybe a little of both. The point might have been to illustrate how an economy could be artificially, but needlessly, stimulated by turning a routine household function into a “job.”

In any case, the parallel with Warren’s proposal is apt. But here’s a revolutionary thought. Why not just return to a state in which everyone does his or her own laundry? Why not return to a State in which every set of parents takes care of their own children – except with the expanded awareness that “it takes a village” to raise a child. This expanded awareness could spur, not a succession of paid employments, but a free-spirited, interactive community of endeavor in which both men and women share equally.

My parents raised me alongside them in a family printing business in which I participated from the time I could toddle. This was the greatest gift that my parents gave me, and I believe the greatest gift that any child could receive. My parents didn’t mete out “quality time” with me. They didn’t ever give the impression that they had more important places to be, more important people to see. We were there for each other’s company and each other’s contribution to the whole. I was never “placed” anywhere, in any pre-school, or daycare center. I was never handed-off to stranger people. We were in it together, heart and soul.

It’s outside the scope of this essay to suggest the many ways in which more children could enjoy such childhoods, while still enabling the work of the world to get done – while seeing that corporate decisions get made and sewer lines get laid and asparagus gets grown. For now, it’s enough to say that Elizabeth Warren’s plan, and the parallel plans of most of the other candidates, is not the way.