Sixty percent of families with young children require childcare so that one or both parents can work. That care costs on average $10,000 per year – per child – or more. Grover Whitehurst joins us to talk about the idea of federally subsidized childcare, the subject of a recent paper he wrote for The Brookings Institution.
Grover Whitehurst on …
… the potential benefits of federally subsidized childcare:
“Childcare disruptions have real costs for businesses. Employees who don’t show up at work need to be replaced. You’d need to have redundant employees. There’s a lot of turnover because of childcare problems. So this really is a workforce issue. When you talk to business leaders about it they get it, because if they’re in a business that involves a lot of employees they understand how important child care is and how its absence affects their bottom line. … But intuitively, it seems to be obvious that this will have a positive effect on productivity and a positive effect on the economy because lower income people will have more money to spend.”
