Rebooting the care agenda

We don't need "job creation," but we still need child care services

Like any newly elected president, Joe Biden got less sweeping legislation passed during his first couple of years in office than his fervent supporters wanted, but perhaps a bit more than swing voters would have liked.

I would say that personally, I have been surprised and impressed by the range of Biden-era legislative achievements given the narrow congressional majorities he was working with. It goes to show that contrary to the misleading clips on TikTok, he’s actually a very effective leader, even if he’s not a great showman. On the other hand, I think there’s a tendency in many quarters to exaggerate the scale of Biden’s achievements relative to Barack Obama. Biden does less rhetorical left-punching than Obama did, and he listens less to neoclassical economists and more to Elizabeth Warren’s favorite professors. This has (sort of¹) endeared him to leftist intellectuals and nonprofit leaders who never loved Obama, but realistically, with smaller congressional majorities, he just can’t pass laws as consequential as the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank.

In Biden’s case, two major things ended up on the cutting room floor.

One is the path to citizenship for long-settled undocumented immigrations, for which there appears to be no current legislative strategy at all.

The other is the “care agenda,” a set of policy ideas aimed at addressing the issues related to young children, the elderly and disabled, and those charged with taking care of them. This can be addressed through the budget reconciliation process, meaning that to pass care economy legislation, progressives need to find 50 Senate votes rather than 60. The odds of there being 50 Democratic senators in 2025 are low, and the odds of all of them being willing to vote for a sweeping agenda are even lower. But it’s not impossible. And formally, at least, progressives are basically committed to just running back the ideas that were cut from the Build Back Better package.

This doesn’t strike me as a great idea.

While the problems that these policies were designed to address are obviously still important, the overall situation in the country and the world has changed over the past four years and the steps we take to address them need to be adjusted for our current circumstances. What’s more, even when it was first proposed, this agenda suffered from a lack of clear prioritization inside the coalition, and that hasn’t changed in the intervening years. I get that, narrowly, rethinking any aspect of this agenda would necessarily annoy people, and it’s probably moot because Democrats probably won’t sweep the 2024 election. But the odds of a trifecta aren’t so bad — call it 15-20 percent — that it makes sense to completely ignore them.

We don’t need to create jobs

The main problem is that most of Democrats’ ideas about investing in the care economy were formulated in the shadow of the Great Recession and were framed, in part, as ways of putting people back to work. Check out some of the claims proponents have made: