Exciting Things: Childcare and the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal — islands are disappearing and icebergs are melting and coral reefs are dying and all of this has dramatic and dire impact on our ability to continue living on this planet. We are very quickly running out of time as a species, and the urgency of this moment is panic inducing if you think about it too hard. The Green New Deal resolution, imperfect though it may be, is finally bringing this conversation to the forefront of everyone’s mind. While it’s not that fun to watch Dianne Feinstein dismiss a bunch of children and then watch about a million people fight about it all week on Twitter, its utterly mind-bogglingly important that it made everyone think about and talk about the Green New Deal and the appropriate reactions to our climate crisis.
It’s pretty easy to fall into a pit of despair when you think too hard about the climate crisis — especially when you think about how Al Gore has been trying to warn us about this for about 20 years and if he had become president in 2000 we may be 20 years further along in fighting our self-imposed peril. This is an existential crisis for our species, beyond the scope of our tiny brains to get. But, as Rhiana Gunn-Wright (architect of the Green New Deal) argues in a fantastic Pod Save America interview, the urgency of this existential crisis often pales in the face of more immediate existential crisis like feeding yourself and your family. The Green New Deal combines a whole host of systemic American crises and tries to solve them in a way that is both equitable and intersectional. When our problems are linked, our solutions should be too. Or better put, if we’re going to try to make a better society, let’s make a whole better society and stop tiptoeing around it.
Elizabeth Warren’s universal childcare plan — day care costs more than state college. DAYCARE COSTS MORE THAN STATE COLLEGE. That’s completely insane. If our goal as a society is to allow all families to make the best decisions for themselves and to equip them with the resources to do that, than one of those resources has to be childcare. Fixing childcare costs mean that no one has to stay with an abusive partner or in a bad relationship simply because they cannot afford to be on their own or don’t know what will happen to their kids. Making sure that families who need or want two incomes can have them, making sure that women (who often bear the brunt of home responsibilities) have the opportunities to be fully realized human beings, making sure that children are safe and cared for throughout the day — these are vital to a healthy society. The government’s job is not to tell you who should work or who should stay home or how many parents or what genders or what jobs are a part of your family. The government’s job is to make sure that you have the best resources to make the best decisions for yourself and your family and then to largely back off of what those decisions are.
Much like the Green New Deal, Elizabeth Warren’s plan addresses universal childcare as a whole, and raises the wages of childcare workers (disproportionately women and in particular women of color), who are currently paid average wages of $22,290, to the mean of public school teachers in the area.
(Note: public school teachers are also not paid enough. It is worth pointing out that we typically pay the people who take care of our children the worst, and as a society we should think about what that says about our values and us. If we’re going to live in a capitalist society, and we’re going to show value with money, we should commit to that idea. And until we do that, everyone currently leaping to the defense of supposed unfettered capitalism should be quiet.)
