Renée Schafer Horton's Opinion: Pro-life? Support Biden’s American Families Plan

When my daughter gave birth nearly six years ago, top on her priority list was finding quality, affordable child care. As I helped her sort through offerings, I quickly discovered that “quality” and “affordable” rarely come together.

There was plenty of average, affordable care and lots of horrible, affordable care and a just a tiny bit of high-quality, unaffordable care.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of full-time infant care in Arizona for one child is more than $10,000. Full-time preschool (ages 3-5) is about $8,500. For comparison, the current annual cost of in-state tuition and fees at the University of Arizona is $12,600.

Should a couple be bold enough to have two children, the annual cost would be more than $19,000. When pondering this number, realize that someone working for the $12.15 current Arizona minimum wage would make just more than $25,000 annually before taxes.

We can do better than this in a country that claims to be pro-life and pro-family, and President Joe Biden’s audacious American Families Plan puts us on that path.

The entire plan is so hopeful, but let’s just focus on the $200 billion in new funding for universal, high-quality preschool for children in low-income and working-class families and the $225 billion earmarked for federally subsidized child care. (Low-income is defined as a family making up to 150 percent of a particular state’s median income.)

Biden proposes paying for his plan — which will help up to 5 million children — by reinstating a 39.6% tax rate on the top 1% of wealthiest households. President Trump cut that rate to 37% in 2017. Biden will also end tax loopholes and give the Internal Revenue Service more funding to go after tax swindlers.

I can hear the hand-wringers already: Why should people have kids they can’t afford and then expect the government to pay for child care and preschool? And, also, why should rich people and businesses pay for poor people?

Well, two answers for you: It’s no longer the 1950s (or even the 1980s) and many working-class couples can’t afford to live on one income, especially if they hope to do the one thing that creates wealth and a safety net here in the non-socialist U.S., which is buying a home.

And, two: It wasn’t always considered awful that the wealthy paid more taxes. Indeed, in the booming decades immediately following World War II, the top 1% of households paid 42% of their income in taxes (compared to 36.4% in 2014, and corporations regularly paid nearly half their profits in taxes. This data is from an analysis of tax rates since the 1940s by Gabriel Zucman, an associate professor of economics at University of California-Berkeley.

Yes, we need bridges and roads, but unless you want the engineers who design them and the construction crews who build them to come from other countries, we must invest in U.S. human capital right here, right now, especially our youngest citizens.

The American Families Plan is expensive. But the question when we spend money as a country shouldn’t be “Can we afford it?” but rather, “Is it worth it?”

According to research — and please set aside your “I don’t know who to trust” excuse to ignore experts — education for the poorest children is nearly always worth it. Every dollar invested in high-quality, early childhood education for low-income children results in up to $7.30 in future benefit to society. These benefits include higher wages, better health outcomes and reduced involvement in crime, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

You believe in law and order? The best crime prevention isn’t prisons, it’s education. You think people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps? The boot on which to hook those straps is made of working mothers with access to quality, reliable child care, and early childhood education for children in poverty.

For 200 years, this country has shown it can find money when it deems something important. We dropped more than $2 trillion in the war in Afghanistan and I doubt there are even four people who think that was a good use of tax dollars.

Biden’s American Families Plan, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of tax-funded big thinking we need right now. Let’s embrace this opportunity to put our money where our pro-life mouth is and invest in our youngest citizens so our country is on more solid, competitive, compassionate footing.