Hillary Clinton Wants to Cap Child Care Spending

Erin Molloy is excited to go back to work. After three years as a stay-at-home mom, she just a got a job in her field. She starts at the end of this month.

There’s just one problem: Molloy’s $39,000 salary won’t cover child care for her two kids. Even working full time, she’ll end up deeper in the hole than she was before. That will put even more pressure on her husband's salary than when she wasn't working outside the home at all.

The average cost of child care in Washington, D.C., where Molloy lives, is $22,631 per year for an infant. As of next month, she’ll be paying about $900 a week for a nanny share for her two kids. Luckily, her 3-year-old will start public pre-K in the fall, but, Molloy says, “This will be the summer when I pay more in child care than I make.”

This scenario replays itself over and over throughout the country, especially in urban areas like Washington, D.C., where child care is astronomically expensive and subsidies can be difficult to access.

That’s why Hillary Clinton’s plan to make child care better and more affordable could be such a game-changer for young families.

A presidential candidate in the Democratic Primary, Clinton announced her plan this week to cap child care expenses at 10 percent of a family’s income.

“I don’t think any family should have to pay more than 10 percent of their income for child care,” Clinton said at a campaign stop in Louisville, Kentucky. “That ought to be just a rule and you ought to get help if you’re getting close to that or going above that.”

It’s unclear what form that help would take. Clinton’s campaign team said there would be some kind of subsidies and tax credits, but the campaign hasn’t clarified the plan beyond that. It’s also unclear whether the 10 percent cap would be per child or per family. An email to Clinton’s staff asking these questions hasn’t yet been answered.

Currently, working families can qualify for a federal child care tax credit that offers up to $1,000 for one child and $2,100 for two or more children when parents can sometimes spend more than 20 times that amount in a year.

In addition to making child care more affordable, Clinton also wants to make it higher quality by raising wages for child care workers under a plan she calls the RAISE initiative: “Respect And Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators.” Several states have had good luck attracting better-qualified staff with similar programs.

Studies show that children who have had the benefit of high-quality child care start Kindergarten with better reading and math skills and greater cognitive development.

“Those first five years are so critical,” said Katie Hamm, who works on early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress. “Researchers can detect the first differences in children’s development by income when they’re 9 months old. So when you have higher income people able to purchase high-quality child care, and then people in the middle and low income brackets not able to buy into that market, it serves to further that inequality.”

Child care costs have risen 24 percent in the U.S. between 2000 and 2012, while wages have stayed stagnant.

You can find the average cost of child care in your state in this interactive report from the Economic Policy Institute.

Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr