When I was in college, I had a buddy who said he never understood why he always got depressed after listening to the Neil Young album “On the Beach.”
Dude! It is depressing!
I feel much the same way after reading Report 579 from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, the General Assembly’s research arm. This may be the most depressing thing I’ve read in a long time and, trust me, I read a lot of government reports.
This one is officially a report on “Virginia’s Self-Sufficiency Programs and the Availability and Affordability of Child Care.” When it came out in mid-October, it generated some news coverage for its findings that most Virginians can’t afford child care — ranging from 85% of those with infants to 74% of those with preschool children.
Furthermore, the report said that 25,000 children will soon lose access to subsidized child care because certain COVID-era funding programs are about to run out. That number may seem large but it’s quite small compared to this: The report says Virginia needs child care “slots” for about 140,000 children who right now don’t have any.
And now for the depressing part: The report also said that there was little the state could do about this.
“Virginia has already implemented nearly all of the approaches most commonly used in other states to improve the availability and affordability of child care,” the report said. “These include: initiatives to incentivize staff and providers to enter and stay in the child care market; training and professional development for child care staff; scholarships for prospective and existing child care staff; retention bonuses; and tax incentives.
“The state could consider implementing some other initiatives, such as providing grants or seed funding to open new child care programs and creating a substitute teacher pool. Other states have used these initiatives to improve child care access. Still, child care largely operates in the private market, which limits the state’s ability to significantly influence the inventory or cost of child care.”
Child care, the report pointed out, faces two economic problems. To be affordable, the staff can’t get paid much. But because child care workers don’t get paid much, it’s hard to find workers, and there’s frequent turnover.
Now, I’ve heard some say the equivalent of “tough — if people can’t afford to have children, they shouldn’t have them.”
Of course, that’s usually said by people who can afford to have children.
Let’s not debate that today, though. Instead, let’s look at something else.
All around us, we see a worker shortage. I’ve written before about how this is mostly demographic in nature, the direct result of falling birth rates. We have a large population of baby boomers retiring and small age cohorts coming along to replace them. This would have happened anyway, but the pandemic accelerated this trend with a wave of early retirements.
Because of this, we see both business and government fretting about filling “the talent pipeline.” Gov. Glenn Youngkin has focused on trying to increase the state’s workforce participation. The new chancellor of the state community college system, David Doré, talks about how schools need to focus on getting adults into workforce training programs so they can increase their skills. Former House Speaker Kirk Cox leads the Virginia Business Higher Education Council, which wants businesses to offer more internships as a way of keeping more college graduates in the state. All these things can be traced back to the same problem: the labor shortage.
What’s one thing keeping workforce participation lower than some might like? Why, lo, it’s lack of child care.
The JLARC report points out that “the cost of child care can lead parents to drop out of the labor force” and that problem is becoming worse because the cost of child care is rising faster than household incomes.
This seems an endless cycle. One reason the cost of child care has gone up, the report says, is because of the labor shortage. “Some providers described having to increase compensation to improve staff recruitment and retention, as well as to comply with the state’s recent minimum wage increases,” the report says. That latter phrase highlights how price-sensitive child care is: “In Virginia, child care workers often earn at or just slightly above the minimum wage; a fall 2022 survey conducted by a University of Virginia research group that studies child care staffing in Virginia found, on average, lead teachers in Virginia earn $16.00 per hour and assistants earn $13.00 per hour,” the report said. “National research has found that many child care workers qualify for public financial assistance, like TANF and SNAP. Some Virginia child care providers reported in interviews that their staff ’s incomes were low enough to qualify for subsidized child care.”
None of this is really new. A report in 2021 about the economy of Southwest Virginia, and how it should adapt to the decline of coal, identified the lack of child care as a big obstacle. “For quite a long time, economic development has really focused on having flat land, broadband, natural gas, an interstate,” Travis Staton, president and CEO of United Way of Southwest Virginia, said then. “Child care also needs to be one of those assets in economic development.” He pointed out that Southwest Virginia sees its population declining; that’s not exactly an incentive for companies to locate there. They want to be assured that they’ll have a big enough labor pool to draw from. “As we’ve had population declines, we need to maintain as many people as we can in our active workforce,” Staton said. “Having more child care would do that.”
This is where philosophical purity runs smack into economic realities. If you’re a conservative, you likely believe that government should spend as little as possible and not muck around too much in the economy — let the free market work its wonderful will. However, many of the communities in the most need of economic development are conservative counties where the lack of child care is an obstacle to developing a bigger labor pool — and therefore an obstacle to economic growth.
The report found the lack of child care options was particularly acute in rural areas. That’s nothing new to those of us who live in rural areas, but it’s useful to see this in the black-and-white print of an official state report.
“Some rural localities, including Alleghany, Craig, and Highland counties, only have one formal child care provider,” the report says. “Having such limited access to providers can cause families to have to drive long distances to access child care. For example, as one child care provider in Southwest Virginia described ‘people drive an hour each way for infant care.’”
It’s easy to understand why some people simply opt out of work rather than add two hours to their day.
Here’s another policy conundrum — again, one that may discomfit conservatives the most: The high cost of child care makes it harder to get people off welfare. We need to remember that many of the people on what we popularly call “welfare” are working — the so-called “working poor.” And, as Shakespeare said, aye, there’s the rub.
“Staff at local departments of social services and other relevant stakeholders reported the high cost of child care has led some parents to stop working to take care of their children because the cost of child care does not leave them with sufficient income to afford their other expenses,” the report said. “The cost of child care has also led some parents who receive subsidized child care to abstain from promotions or higher-paying jobs because their new income would be too high for them to remain eligible for the subsidy, and without the subsidy the cost of child care would be unaffordable.”
All this actually isn’t the most depressing part of that report. I’ll deal with that tomorrow.