Group Focused on Child Care Sets $40 Million Effort to Help Democrats

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: New York Times

Feb. 12, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET


A liberal political organization that promotes economic policies for working families, the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, will spend $40 million backing President Biden’s re-election bid and other Democratic candidates for the House and Senate.

Announced on Monday morning, the program is the largest political investment by the Democratic-allied organization, which aims to assist Mr. Biden and to raise the profile of economic issues like the cost of child care and elder care in the 2024 campaign. While those remain top concerns for voters, they have yet to emerge as a central focus of Mr. Biden’s re-election efforts.

The group’s plans, shared first with The New York Times, call for mobilizing a broad swath of Democratic and independent voters in states that will be important to the presidential election and control of Congress: Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Besides the president, the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy is planning to support Democratic candidates who back policies including paid family medical leave, lower-cost prescription drugs and affordable child care and elder care.

“You’re going to be hard pressed to find a kitchen table where people aren’t discussing the high cost of caregiving and especially, especially child care,” said Sondra Goldschein, executive director of the group’s political action committee. “People don’t know what Biden and the Democrats have done to help with things like child care, and so that’s where we come in.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/politics/biden-democrats-child-care.html

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[PatrickforB]

1. I'm really, really glad to see this.

We did a study about the cost of childcare as a percent of the median wage for each occupation group, and if you work in food service, or are a janitor or retail person, you're looking at 50%. And then you add in another 30% of your gross (if you are lucky, that is) for rent and you have a whole 20% of your gross income to cover taxes, groceries, entertainment, utilities, gas, car insurance - people cannot afford to live like this.

We noticed that in KY, anyone who is a childcare worker gets free childcare for their own kids, and that is good incentive, but the neoliberals are always driveling on about how we need to privatize, deregulate and gut social programs - OK, fine. Then let's get some major corporate skin in the game in terms of helping their workers with on-site or near-work-site childcare for their staff on days they have to be onsite in their jobs.

And what about the childcare needs for people who do shift or weekend work?

I'll tell you, I was doing a presentation a couple years ago to an economic developer group and mentioned childcare - everything stopped because it is such as huge issue and that discussion went nearly a half hour out of a two-hour session.

Childcare is one of the MAJOR issues facing today's labor force. The others are healthcare costs, expensive housing and ridiculous student debt.