How do you get more Americans to manufacture semiconductor chips?
Providing them with subsidized child care is the silly answer that the Biden administration proposed this week.
Last year, a bipartisan group in Congress voted to give almost $40 billion in subsidies for American companies to make more chips here so that we would be less reliant on foreign manufacturers (mostly in Taiwan).
At that time, no one mentioned child care. But now the Commerce Department has announced that any company that wants access to those funds needs to provide affordable, high quality child care to its workers.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters: This is “a simple question of math.” She explained: “You will not be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, put to work and retain women, and you won’t do that without child care.”
Of course if it were a simple question of math, many companies would have already provided child care and many women would have taken advantage of it. In fact, many already have.
But the truth is that not all women want to put their young children into institutional day care and the Biden administration is simply using a law with broad, bipartisan support to shove a progressive agenda down the throats of American families.
If companies wanted to encourage more women (or men) to take these jobs they would offer parents both more money — and the flexibility for families to spend that money.
Maybe they would use the extra cash to allow a spouse to stay home with a child or to subsidize an aunt or a grandmother to care for a child.
“There is an important and reasonable debate about the effects of young children spending long hours in child care instead of with parents,” says Katharine Stevens, founder and CEO of the Center on Child and Family Policy.
She notes that if this new regulation “means that a parent who would otherwise have been home with an infant is now employed . . . it might have the unintended consequence of adverse effects on the development of that person’s child.
That could outweigh the benefit of the parent’s contribution to chip manufacturing.” Indeed, on the one hand, we repeatedly stress the importance of the early years in children’s development, while at the same time diminishing the role of parents providing care during that time.
Such considerations are not ones which the Commerce Department is equipped to weigh, needless to say.
But even if the goal were to increase affordable child care in a particular area, the arrival of federal subsidies could have the opposite effect.
If a company uses federal dollars to choose a local provider this could actually drive other providers out of the surrounding market, thereby creating a shortage of spots for children whose parents are not engaged in chip manufacturing (aka everyone else).
Indeed this has already happened in similar sectors of the economy.
By subsidizing the care of unaccompanied minors in states like California, for instance, the federal government has raised wages and made it harder for providers of residential care for local foster youth to afford qualified staff.
That has helped lead to a shortage of beds for foster kids.
The federal government has a huge footprint and when bureaucrats come into local communities — even with good intentions—their policies can end up doing more harm than good.
If the Biden administration were interested in making child care more affordable they might discourage their state and local allies from creating unnecessary and expensive regulations for child care centers.
Washington, DC, for instance, is requiring many child care workers to obtain two-year associate degrees by the end of 2023.
Caring for young children is a difficult job but there is no evidence that it requires a college degree.
New York makes it difficult for small-scale day-care providers to operate by preventing school aged children from mixing with younger children.
Never mind that younger children benefit from seeing what older children do — and older children benefit from helping younger ones — the daycare will have to find separate spaces and times for even small groups.
Ultimately, though, it is important to recognize, as Katharine Stevens does, that “the reality of developing new humans is that it is time intensive. For many centuries, there was an entire human dedicated to this job.”
For most of us, that human was called a parent, whose job often even outweighed the White House’s current obsession with domestically produced computer chips.
