The Case Against Universal Day Care

...For the deepest gratifications of life do not derive from the kind of mercenary prizes and multiple freedoms they now possess but somehow cannot fully enjoy...

...But regardless of restrictions on the immediate cost of the program and on eligibility for its benefits, the long-term goal of universal and intensive services has not been abandoned...

...Since sharply increased taxes for public-sector projects tends to constrict private-sector investment and job creation, most of the work has to be provided through rapid national growth...

...A broader and less cosmetic alternative, one that would truly change the environment of the poor, is the Family Assistance Plan (FAP...

...The real beneficiary would be the low-wage employer, who could exploit an artificially enlarged labor force and the resultingly depressed pay rates, perhaps with the help of government welfare work rules ("workfare...

...By reducing relative male earning power, the day-care subsidies may well extend to the lower and middle classes the kind of psychic damage and familial breakdown endemic to the ghetto...

...To be sure, this work requirement for indigent mothers with small children serves no beneficial social purpose and is morally inexcusable...

...AFDC exerts continuous pressure on men to leave their work and depend on a combination of welfare and unreported part-time or criminal earnings...

...To begin with, FAP is progressively distributive: It gives money exclusively to the poor????all the poor, regardless of sex...

...Clearly, the structure of incentives created by AFDC has contributed to this sad statistic...

...Its advocates emphasize the need to mix economic classes in the centers to avoid "ghettoizing" poor children...

...Yet men share in the money only to the extent they can beg, borrow or steal it from their women...

...over 70 per cent of poor black children lack fathers in the home...

...New social programs, as the President has correctly insisted, should be "consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful place as the keystone of our civilization...

...Furthermore, when we persistently direct our energies and subsidies toward diminishing the dependence of poor women on male providers, we needlessly intensify an already powerful trend: We exacerbate the social, economic and psychological crisis of young males, extend it to new classes and generations, and undermine familial constraints...

...Indeed, if the effects of U.S...

...Lest anyone oppose the program on the grounds that institutional care may be unsuitable for the very young, the centers would be legislatively committed to provide a stimulating environment (full of mobiles and bright colors), with valuable intellectual experiences, social contacts, and even health and psychiatric care where needed: a commodious haven from damaging home conditions and a release for women seeking gainful employment...

...True, the program's "man in the house" disqualification has essentially been eliminated by the Supreme Court...

...Such realities cannot be swept aside with a few reveal-ingly blithe recitations of divorce statistics and a few Utopian incantations about "liberating everyone" from this "oppressive" system????the system, that is, which uniquely in history has made possible woman's liberation...

...We must recognize that when we allocate money to one plan we may well deprive another, and that when we subsidize work-force entry for one group (middle-class wives, for example), we directly or indirectly reduce jobs, wages and vertical mobility for others (black middle-class men, for example...

...The answer, I venture, lies in the ambivalence of many upper-income women toward the options of liberation...

...For instance, its Work Incentive or win program, a foolishly conceived effort to train welfare recipients for work, has failed to find jobs for 80 per cent of its trainees, thus reinforcing their self-image as losers...

...Yet a Democratic amendment to the tax bill signed by the President permits families making up to $18,000 to take full exemptions for day- and home-care expenses for children under age 15, at a rate of $2,400 for one child, $3,600 for two, and $4,800 for three or more...

...Senators Jacob Javits (R.-N.Y...

...Still, the overall Administration strategy is sound and represents a major breakthrough in social policy that contrasts with the regressive and uncoordinated efforts of recent decades?which would have been perpetuated if the President had not vetoed the original day-care legislation...

...Like yachts, horses, country homes, and private schools, a "meaningful" and uninterrupted career is generally the privilege of mothers with money and education, who can hire others to care for their house and children and who have the credentials and connections to prevail in the job market...

...At the Administration's insistence, families of four making more than $4,320 will be charged in accord with their ability to pay, as determined by the Secretary of HEW (an estimated $15 a month for families making up to $7,000...

...In that event, a greater proportion of the cost to the treasury will come in the form of tax deductions, but the total amount may not prove appreciably less...

...Moreover, the program will require taxpaying families with one income to doubly subsidize (through Federal day-care centers and tax exemptions) those with two????even though the families with two incomes will be diminishing the job market and, on the whole, earning more than the average family with one...

...One of the chief problems has been the general failure of our antipoverty strategy to redistribute income progressively, from the affluent to the poor...

...No job can confer meaning on a life, and freedom????if devoid of vision, purpose and an idea of organic fulfillment????can itself produce emotional bondage...

...The central fact to understand is that this course of social policy, if undertaken, will create a constituency far more powerful than that for programs of direct aid to the poor...

...Then came the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC...

...AFDC's family-damaging impact has not been substantially affected...

...To accommodate them at current ratios of male-female employment, we will have to create 40 per cent more jobs each year than we created annually during the last 10...

...Some years ago, Edward White Bakke appraised the impact of welfare on unemployed whites: "Consider the fact that relief investigators and caseworkers are normally women and deal with the housewife...

...By limiting its assistance to families without fathers, it often dictated that a man could best provide for his children by abandoning them...

...FAP would grant each member of the family an allotment, regardless of the behavior of other members...

...that for most women caring for one's own child is more "meaningful" than attending to an assembly line...

...Yet the final irony is that in a peculiar way affluent women are correct in considering themselves oppressed...

...Shortening the work week is not the answer, for in a highly competitive world economy this is tied to productivity gains...

...To find meaning in his dreary daily tasks, he must feel that he is needed...

...Did he think the President had said "Communist...

...An underfinanced and merely custodial government program will excel only the performance of absent mothers, and few of the more affluent day-care supporters will submit their children to it...

...And only some of the necessary jobs can be generated in the public sector (perhaps eventually a million positions in day care itself...

...Where can one find meaning and a sense of a future, of human transcendence...

...An income maintenance program like FAP would give them a margin of assistance that allows a satisfactory performance as provider...

...but there would be less incentive for them to flee their families, since their presence would mean an extra $600 in payments...

...But a poor man without a woman and children dependent on him?usually as a provider????is deprived of crucial foundations for his identity and ambitions...

...Of FAP's initial $5 billion, $750 million would go toward day-care facilities...

...As appropriations for child development mount, therefore, so will the proportion spent on the relative'y well-to-do...

...The possibilities of "emancipated" women, they properly sense, are not available to most of the population????and may conflict at times with the interests of their own children and the instinctive attitudes, even if unexpressed, of their husbands...

...Since the President's veto, more modest initial programs have been introduced, ostensibly meeting some Administration objections...

...labeled Nixon's view "irresponsible, cruel, hysterical, and false...

...What is more, FAP would alter the structure of incentives for the poor, one half of whom are employed...

...on our present public education facilities we expend around $12 billion annually for the first five grades alone...

...Nor are her wages likely to be much larger than the real cost of the day care itself (about $2,000 for each child) plus transportation...

...Without this inspiration, he becomes an exile from the continuing natural order...

...Nonetheless, a man who feels superfluous, whose presence in no way contributes to his family's material well-being, will soon leave even if the woman does not ease or throw him out...

...But 35 years of experience with other social initiatives should give us pause, since our present crisis is virtually defined by the gap between the intentions of previous policy and its achievements...

...This broad coalition reflects the almost unanimous support of politicized women, from the middle-class maenads of NOW (National Organization for Women) to the Weatherwomen...

...Its enactment would eliminate the worst poverty in the country...

...Thus the President and Georgetown University economist Selma Mushkin seem accurate in estimating that setting up the program and fulfilling its developmental goals would cost over $20 billion a year...

...that day care would be used by the government in part to facilitate compulsory labor...

...For example, when the liberal Republican Ripon Society backed the President's action, its women threatened to form a separate caucus...

...In the Congressional Republican Policy Committee, not a notably progressive group on other issues, support for the concept of comprehensive child care is being shaped by staff aide Martha Phillips????wife of Kevin, John Mitchell's former political adviser and author of The Southern Strategy...

...As important in its potential impact as any of our earlier social milestones, the plan is designed to be as expensive as AFDC and as pervasive as public education...

...His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office...

...He loses motivation to enter the onerous competition for regular employment and career, and frequently turns to the transitory gratifications and identity props of drugs, promiscuity and violence, the culture of the street...

...If they lose their jobs the psychological damage could nevertheless be serious...

...The comprehensive day-care programs and subsidies respond to the immediate needs of the poor by perpetuating an essentially sociopathic culture...

...Of course, the more likely prospect than an annual allotment of $20 billion is lesser appropriations and inferior performance: day care rather than child development...

...Middle- and upper-class women, who benefit from the day-care scheme's comprehensive aspects, would be assured of victory over the inarticulate poor in the competition for scarce social funds...

...migrant farmworkers, Southern sharecroppers, and destitute Indians would find their incomes as much as quadrupled overnight...

...The men whose wages and upward mobility will be contracted by the program have yet to understand?and lack wives who accept????that the masculine image and psyche are no longer dependent on success as a provider...

...In particular, many programs have subverted the stability of families by radically changing the structure of economic supports and incentives within which they were created, held together and psychologically balanced...

...If they have adequate funds, or more money than the available men can give them, women can manage without men or jobs...

...Because of its enormous cost and the strong constituencies it will create for itself, child development will deeply influence the future directions of our social strategy...

...social policy were determined by its intentions, the fervor, compassion and generosity invested in the effort to enact a child development bill could insure a healthful, stimulating, loving environment for every American child and a meaningful emancipation for every harried mother...

...in a comprehensive system that ultimately will be made available to all children of working mothers...

...These women's guilts and anxieties are akin to those felt by many wealthy people about all their advantages...

...and other reactionaries are the women's groups who would see to it that day care is everywhere accessible...

...The family is especially crucial for men whose jobs are perfunctory or unrewarding, for whom work is "meaningful" to the extent that it confirms their place in the home and exempts their wives and children from the bondage of the marketplace...

...To regard the work as "meaningful" and the family as secondary is to confuse means and ends and to subordinate the central experiences of life to the functional provisions for it...

...When these havens for humane values are vitiated, where does one go to find love and individual affirmation, to be accepted for who one is rather than for what one does or how much money one makes...

...Our most important poverty program, costing some $9 billion, AFDC is also our only heavily funded instrument of progressive income distribution...

...They can fantasize that in the exercise of their privileges they are in fact the vanguard of some egalitarian social revolution...

...Yet despite the fervent and ecumenical backing, nowhere in the thousands of pages of congressional testimony on child development????or in the literature of its advocates????is there an incisive statement of the social and economic arguments for implementing this large and costly program...

...As long as day care is scarce, however????and under FAP it would be????the more draconian provisions could not effectively be imposed...

...As is conclusively demonstrated in Harris and Gallup polls on the subject, lower- and middle-class Americans of both sexes firmly believe that in our society making money is essential for men, but not so much for women...

...It would consolidate existing Federal child-care efforts????like Head Start and the rapidly expanding Social Security Title IV program (neglected children, etc...

...with limited funds to invest in social programs, we have to be quite certain of our priorities...

...This economic plight leads in turn to psychological stress within the family...

...Because of current economic and fiscal uncertainty, FAP's proposed income maintenance levels are necessarily low, and there remain serious flaws in the Administration's general approach to social initiatives...

...So, of course, has the general lack of job opportunities for poor males????a product of technology's blurring of the line between "male" and "female" employment, the decrease in labor with a premium on physical strength, and the control of such remaining jobs by racially exclusive unions, especially in the construction trades...

...Indeed, in a great many instances the day-care subsidy for the poor will be of questionable benefit to the woman freed to take employment: Her probable wages ($3,960 annual minimum), minus work-related expenses like transportation, will barely exceed the actual value of her presence at home plus welfare...

...A persistent and cumulative, if understandable, bias has arisen in our public charity, favoring women and children over their "shiftless" men...

...It is an ironic fact that on this issue the best allies of Senator Russell Long (D.-La...

...Although 65 per cent of this amount will be devoted to underwriting free services for the indigent (families of four making less than $4,320), the program is comprehensive in principle and should eventually be accessible to everyone...

...For as grueling as the lives of poor women are, they can find value and purpose????a sense of a future?in raising their children...

...They want universal day care for, in Lee Auspitz's phrase, "symbolic ratification of their lifestyles," of their "right" to work after the birth of their children...

...After the President observed in his veto message that the plan would tend to favor "communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach," so temperate a man as Senator Walter Mondale (D.-Minn...

...Like them it seems superficially unexceptionable, a plan to help poor women and children...

...The regressive financial effect of current child-development proposals is compounded by a destructive social effect...

...And a close examination shows that it will fully fit the pattern of our previous failures...

...and that many men, themselves slaves of the marketplace, desperately need their wives at home to provide a refuge from the mercenary and technocratic values of society...

...Among the more affluent mothers not now in the labor force employment obviously represents a much larger benefit, for their work outside is of greater monetary value than their work at home...

...If day care is universal, they can imagine that their liberation is not a perquisite of affluence but a democratic "human right...

...Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief breadwinner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family's well-being to two women, one of them an outsider...

...The Javits proposal, for instance, stipulates parental involvement in the day-care centers and authorizes only $100 million for planning and training in fiscal 1973...

...Consequently, where day care will release the poor for unremunerative drudgery, it will permit the advantaged????including millions of families already headed by an adequate breadwinner ????to take the better jobs to which the poor and lower middle class might otherwise aspire...

...In the next decade, the postwar generation flooding our schools will be entering the job market...

...The compromise plan that will finally reach the President's desk is expected to cost in the vicinity of $1.2-2 billion in the first year of actual operations...

...Though they may protest that they do not support compulsory work schemes, a child development act along the lines they propose would remove the one major obstacle to their enforcement: the expense of making day care available to welfare recipients who are so scattered across the country that only a comprehensive program could economically reach them...

...Not only is such a program passionately advocated by all the usual liberal groups and much of labor, but it also has the overwhelming endorsement of moderate Republicans????and support in concept even among Republicans who did not protest the President's December 9 veto of the OEO bill that would have created a national child-development system...

...The work requirement could be strengthened by statute...

...Thinking Aloud TH E CASE AGAINST UNIVERSAL DAY CARE BY GEORGE F. GILDER Liberals seeking what Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called "unities"????issues that can extend the Democratic coalition????have struck a bonanza with comprehensive child development and day care...

...With the scope and price tag of comprehensive day care likely to exceed those of AFDC, it is reasonable to ask whether its social side effects are likely to be similar...

...These upper-class women prefer not to acknowledge that their less fortunate sisters would be manumitted to mops and switchboards...

...Peter Drucker has estimated that approximately 5 per cent annually will suffice, but clearly there are severe limits on the amount of new work that will be available...

...Because these exemptions will bring significant expansion of private care arrangements, the public centers will have to be heavily subsidized to compete and attract an economically varied clientele...

...Skeptics of its primacy among our national priorities are simply dismissed as male chauvinist pigs in need of sensitivity training...

...A second major problem of past social legislation has been its tendency to hurt the poor even in the rare cases when it gives them money...

...In this respect it more closely resembles other misconceived social efforts, such as the payroll tax...

...In fact, many child-development proponents envisage ultimate establishment of systems as universal as the public schools but more fully subsidized by the Federal government, more varied and sophisticated in the services provided, higher in "teacher"-children ratios, and more extensively available throughout the year and around the clock (for the off-hours employment often held by the poor...

...In large measure, the debate over child development generates more heat than light because proponents of the plan expend their energies in defense of their intentions, which no one questions, and sidestep the real point of contention????whether the plan is feasible...

...Though the program is analogous to AFDC in its orientation toward women and children, there is one evident difference: While AFDC's impact on income distribution is progressive, comprehensive day care's will be regressive...

...With considerably less than half of all women in the labor force, we already have 6 per cent unemployment...

...Yet considering the fetishism of politicians_Democrat and Republican????on this point, it seems almost mild...

...Not in a day-care center, I trust...

...Now, powerful forces have mobilized behind a comprehensive child care program, their spirits only slightly dampened by the veto of their original proposal...

...Accordingly, our social policies must face the disciplines of scarcity...

...and Mondale each have new and less expensive alternatives...

...And the bipartisan Women's Political Caucus has made the program a nonnegotiable condition for its approval of any candidate for office in 1972...

...Much of the time, in fact, it has had the opposite effect, using scarce Federal funds to employ or subsidize the well-to-do?builders of "low-cost" housing that ends up too expensive for the poor, "poverty program" officials who lack sufficient funds for anything but bureaucratic self-subsistence and sloganeering...

...Thus for many women????and men????the most oppressive aspect of the American social system may be the psychological strains created by material liberations that subvert but in no way replace the rewards of the family and the home...

...FAP's day-care facilities, concentrated in a few impoverished areas, will be bad enough in their draft-labor effect...

...Where these centers existed and work was available, a welfare mother who refused to take proffered employment would forfeit her own but not her family's benefits...

...Why, then, is comprehensive day care so urgently demanded by the women's movement...