The above chart, from the Economic Policy Institute, shows how poorly America rates compared to other developed countries when it comes to public spending on child care for children under 3. Only New Zealand does worse, and the Scandinavian countries, where people already have generous maternity and paternity leaves and vacation benefits, spend an order of magnitude higher on child care than we do.
I wish I knew the answer to the question in the headline, but I have my suspicions as to what it is: It's that conversations about child care tend to revolve around welfare policy discussions: that is, discussions that mostly involve the children of lower-income single mothers. Those aren't the only group of parents who would benefit from better public child care, but they would benefit most, which makes free public child care seem like a handout to those Americans less inclined to develop policies like the Scandinavian have than most progressives are. And while plenty of middle-class mothers drop out of the labor force to take care of young children and suffer a wage penalty for the rest of their lives because of it, conservatives have tried, with some success, to frame that as the result of an individual choice rather than a necessity born of gender discrimination in the workplace and expensive child-care costs. We likely don't have a ton of spending because of the racist and sexist assumptions we make about who needs child-care help, and the false notion that the choices available to women are constrained by societal forces.
-- Monica Potts
