How do you get more Americans to make semiconductor chips?
Providing them with subsidized childcare is the Biden’s silly answer administration this week.
Last year, a bipartisan group in Congress voted to give nearly $40 billion in grants to US companies to make more chips here, so we would be less dependent on foreign manufacturers (mostly in Taiwan).
At that time, no one was talking about childcare. But now the Department of Commerce has announced that any company seeking access to those funds must provide high-quality, affordable childcare for its employees.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters: This is “a simple matter of math.” She explained, “You won’t be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, employ and retain women, and you can’t do that without childcare.”
Of course, if it were a simple matter of math, many companies would already have provided childcare and many women would have taken advantage of it. In fact, many have already done so.
But the truth is that not all women want to put their young children in institutional nurseries, and the Biden administration is simply using a law with broad, bipartisan support to force a progressive agenda down American families’ throats.
If companies wanted to encourage more women (or men) to take on these jobs, they would offer parents both more money – and the flexibility for families to spend that money.
Perhaps they would use the extra money to allow a spouse to stay home with a child or subsidize an aunt or grandmother to care for a child.
“There is an important and reasonable debate going on about the effects of young children spending long hours in day care rather than with their parents,” said Katharine Stevens, founder and CEO of the Center for Child and Family Policy.
She notes that if this new arrangement “means that a parent who would otherwise have been home with a baby is now employed . . . it may 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 production.” Indeed, on the one hand, we repeatedly emphasize the importance of the early years in children’s development, while at the same time diminishing the role of the parents who provide care during that time.
Such considerations, of course, are not the considerations for the Department of Commerce to weigh.
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, it could drive other providers out of the surrounding market, creating a shortage of spots for kids whose parents aren’t involved in making chips (aka everyone else). ).
Indeed, this has already happened in similar sectors of the economy.
For example, by subsidizing care for unaccompanied minors in states like California, the federal government has increased wages and made it more difficult for providers of residential care for local foster youth to pay qualified staff.
That has led to one shortage beds for foster children.
The federal government has a huge footprint, and when bureaucrats get 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 childcare more affordable, they could discourage their state and local allies from creating unnecessary and costly childcare regulation.
Washington, D.C. for example required many childcare workers to earn a two-year associate degree 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 childcare providers to operate prevent school-aged children from interacting with younger children.
It doesn’t matter that younger children benefit from seeing what older children do – and older children benefit from helping younger children – child care will need to find separate areas and times for even small groups.
Ultimately, though, it’s important to recognize, as Katharine Stevens does, that “the reality of developing new people is that it’s time consuming. For centuries, a whole human being was devoted to this work.”
To most of us, that human being was referred to as a parent, whose job often outweighed even the current White House obsession with domestically produced computer chips.
