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Care Policies Take Center Stage in Harris’s Economic Message

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The Democratic nominee says she wants to make raising a family more affordable. But she has provided few details on her proposals.The “care economy” — a broad set of policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers — was the great unfinished work of President Biden’s domestic agenda. Vice President Kamala Harris has made it a central aspect of her campaign to succeed him.Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, has spoken frequently on the campaign trail about making it more affordable to raise children. She chose a running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whose signature policy accomplishments include the creation of a paid family leave program.In the first major economic speech of her campaign, she proposed restoring an expanded child tax credit and called for a new $6,000 benefit for parents of newborns. She also laid out policies that aim to reduce housing costs, such as providing up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers.In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday, Ms. Harris said she would not let conservatives end programs like Head Start that “provide preschool and child care for our children.”But Ms. Harris has not yet offered specific proposals on child care, paid family leave or early childhood education. That has surprised some progressive policy experts, and brought flashbacks of the Biden administration’s inability to enact more sweeping policies.Mr. Biden also initially made the care economy a central piece of his domestic policy agenda, putting it alongside proposed investments in roads and bridges, domestic manufacturing and green energy. His aides often argued that care was a form of infrastructure — that affordable child care, like highways, was essential to a well-functioning economy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Child Care Costs Challenge Women’s Gains in Work Force

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    Participation in the labor force has surged among women in their prime working years. But for those with children under 5, the gains may have peaked.Jessica Cuevas loved her job as a college counselor at a high school. But after giving birth to a son in January 2021, she switched to a remote corporate job at a grocery store chain because it gave her more flexibility and saved her commuting time. After her second son was born two years later, she quit that job, too.She had been relying on her mother for help, but her parents have been spending more time in Mexico, leaving her without an affordable and reliable child care option.Ms. Cuevas, who is 35 and lives in Chicago, works part time from home for an education nonprofit, though the work is sporadic and the pay is inconsistent. She wants a full-time job — in part so she and her husband can buy a bigger house — but she is concerned that the expense of child care would wipe out any financial upside.“I feel like right now, considering the economy, considering just the cost of living, we feel stuck,” she said.The share of women in their prime working years who are in the labor force has reached new highs coming out of the pandemic, hitting a record 78.1 percent in May.But there are signs that the labor force participation gains among women with children under 5 has plateaued since September, according to an analysis from the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Inflation Is Still High. What’s Driving It Has Changed.

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    Two years ago, high inflation was about supply shortages and pricier goods. Then it was about war in Ukraine and energy. These days, services are key.America is now two years into abnormally high inflation — and while the nation appears to be past the worst phase of the biggest spike in price increases in half a century, the road back to normal is a long and uncertain one.The pop in prices over the 24 months that ended in March eroded wage gains, burdened consumers and spurred a Federal Reserve response that has the potential to cause a recession.What generated the painful inflation, and what comes next? A look through the data reveals a situation that arose from pandemic disruptions and the government’s response, was worsened by the war in Ukraine and is now cooling as supply problems clear up and the economy slows. But it also illustrates that U.S. inflation today is drastically different from the price increases that first appeared in 2021, driven by stubborn price increases for services like airfare and child care instead of by the cost of goods.Fresh wage and price data set for release on Friday are expected to show continued evidence of slow and steady moderation in March. Now Fed officials must judge whether the cool-down is happening fast enough to assure them that inflation will promptly return to normal — a focus when the central bank releases its next interest rate decision on Wednesday.Inflation Is Slowly Coming DownYear-over-year percentage change in the Consumer Price Index

    Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure IndexBy The New York TimesThe Fed aims for 2 percent inflation on average over time using the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which will be released on Friday. That figure pulls some of its data from the Consumer Price Index report, which was released two weeks ago and offered a clear picture of the recent inflation trajectory.Before the pandemic, inflation hovered around 2 percent as measured by the overall Consumer Price Index and by a “core” measure that strips out food and fuel prices to get a clearer sense of the underlying trend. It dropped sharply at the pandemic’s start in early 2020 as people stayed home and stopped spending money, then rebounded starting in March 2021.Some of that initial pop was due to a “base effect.” Fresh inflation data were being measured against pandemic-depressed numbers from the year before, which made the new figures look elevated. But by the end of summer 2021, it was clear that something more fundamental was happening with prices.Demand for goods was unusually high: Families had more money than usual after months at home and repeated stimulus checks, and they were spending it on cars, couches and deck furniture. At the same time, the pandemic had shut down many factories, limiting how much supply the world’s companies could churn out. Shipping costs surged, goods shortages mounted, and the prices of physical purchases from appliances to cars jumped.Higher Prices for Services Are Now Driving InflationBreakdown of the inflation rate, by category

    Note: The services category excludes energy services, and the goods category excludes food and energy goods.Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; New York Times analysisBy The New York TimesBy late 2021, a second trend was also getting started. Services costs, which include nonphysical purchases like tutoring and tax preparation, had begun to climb quickly.As with goods prices, that tied back to the strong demand. Because households were in good spending shape, landlords, child care providers and restaurants could charge more without losing customers.Across the economy, firms seized the moment to pad their bottom lines; profit margins soared in late 2021 before moderating late last year.Businesses were also covering their growing costs. Wages had started to climb more quickly than usual, which meant that corporate labor bills were swelling.Pay Has Climbed Quickly, but Not as Fast as PricesYear-over-year percentage change in the Employment Cost Index, a measure of labor costs, and the Consumer Price Index, a measure of living costs

    Note: The Consumer Price Index is reported monthly. The Employment Cost Index is reported quarterly and is as of Q4 2022. Early 2023 data is a Goldman Sachs forecast.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesFed officials had expected goods shortages to fade, but the combination of faster inflation for services and accelerating wage growth captured their attention.Even if pay gains had not been the original cause of inflation, policymakers were concerned that it would be difficult for price increases to return to a normal pace with pay rates rising briskly. Companies, they thought, would keep raising prices to pass on those labor expenses.Worried central bankers started raising interest rates in March 2022 to hit the brakes on growth by making it more expensive to borrow to buy a car or house or expand a business. The goal was to slow the labor market and make it harder for firms to raise prices. In just over a year, they lifted rates to nearly 5 percent — the fastest adjustment since the 1980s.Yet in early 2022, Fed policy started fighting yet another force stoking inflation. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that February caused food and fuel prices to surge. Between that and the cost increases in goods and services, overall inflation reached its highest peak since the 1980s: about 9 percent in July.In the months since, inflation has slowed as cost increases for energy and goods have cooled. But food prices are still climbing swiftly, and — crucially — cost increases in services remain rapid.In fact, services prices are now the very center of the inflation story.They could soon start to fade in one key area. Housing costs have been picking up quickly for months, but rent increases have recently slowed in real-time private sector data. That is expected to feed into official inflation numbers by later this year.That has left policymakers focused on other services, which span an array of purchases including medical care, car repairs and many vacation expenses. How quickly those prices — often called “core services ex-housing” — can retreat will determine whether and when inflation can return to normal.Excluding Housing Costs, Prices of Core Services Are RisingYear-over-year percentage change in the Consumer Price Index for services, stripping out housing and energy costs

    Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; New York Times analysisBy The New York TimesNow, Fed officials will have to assess whether the economy is poised to slow enough to bring down the cost of those critical services.Between the central bank’s rate moves and recent banking turmoil, some officials think that it may be. Policymakers projected in March that they would raise interest rates just once more in 2023, a move that is widely expected at their meeting next week.But market watchers will listen intently when Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, gives his postmeeting news conference. He could offer hints at whether officials think the inflation saga is heading for a speedy conclusion — or another chapter.Ben Casselman More

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    Biden Signs Executive Order That Aims to Make Child Care Cheaper

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    As President Biden prepares to announce his re-election campaign, he is seeking to make progress on a promise that has stalled in his first two years in office.President Biden said the executive order will make child and elder care more accessible for families.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — President Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday directing federal agencies to find ways to make child care cheaper and more accessible, seeking to make progress on a promise he made that stalled in his first two years in office.In a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Biden described the order as one of the most sweeping efforts by any president to streamline the delivery of child care.“Almost every federal agency will collectively take over 50 actions to provide more peace of mind for families and dignity for care workers,” the president said to applause from an audience of families, administration officials, members of Congress and others.“The cost of care is too high for seniors in nursing homes, for working families with young children,” Mr. Biden added, wearing his aviator sunglasses on the brisk Washington afternoon. At the same time, he said, “pay for care workers is too low.”White House officials said the executive order was designed to address both sides of that problem by enacting new regulations and tweaking policies without needing vast new amounts of public funding.“The child care and long-term care systems in this country just don’t work well,” said Susan E. Rice, the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. “The order includes more than 50 directives to nearly every agency to take action on fixing our child care and long-term care system.”Ms. Rice said the order would direct some agencies to lower co-pays for services. Other provisions will seek to make Medicare and Medicaid dollars go further. Still others will examine new ways to improve care for veterans and Native American tribes.She said the order “marshals the full resources of the federal government” to improve access to high-quality, affordable care.But the order does not deliver on the goal Mr. Biden himself identified at the beginning of his presidency, when he proposed $225 billion to fully cover child care for low-income Americans and an additional $200 billion for universal preschool.Those proposals failed to win support in Congress, and Mr. Biden abandoned them in favor of plans to bolster infrastructure and environmental spending.Now, as the president prepares to announce his re-election campaign, he is seeking to make progress on some big promises that have so far gone unfulfilled.In his remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Biden stressed that the executive order will help make it easier for families to afford to care for their children and their elderly parents, even without the kind of large investment he once envisioned.“If you live in a major American city, you can pay more than $17,000 a year, as all of you know, per child for child care in order to be able to go to work,” he said. “For a lot of families, that’s more than you pay for your rent.”He also used his remarks as an opportunity to contrast his policies with those of Republicans in Congress. He noted that on Monday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed severe cuts in spending on domestic programs, excluding defense.Mr. Biden accused Mr. McCarthy and “MAGA Republicans” of supporting the wealthy by advocating cuts that will affect lower-income Americans, while they continue to support tax cuts for wealthy people put in place under President Donald J. Trump several years ago.“Critical programs for hardworking Americans that they count on will be slashed starting next year if he has his way,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. McCarthy.On Monday, Ms. Rice said Mr. Biden had not given up on winning approval for far greater government spending on child care.“We need to make serious investments,” she said, noting that Mr. Biden’s current budget would add billions of dollars of child care spending. “But in the meantime, we’re going to do everything we can to increase access to care and support care workers and family caregivers.”Some of the directives in Mr. Biden’s new order will not immediately produce results. One, for example, directs the Department of Health and Human Services “to consider issuing several regulations and guidance documents to improve the quality of home care jobs.” Officials said it would take time for those regulations to be developed, drafted and enacted.Other provisions might come more quickly. The Department of Veterans Affairs is “directed to consider expanding its veteran directed care program” to all of its medical centers. That program helps veterans hire personal care assistance. More

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    To Tap Federal Funds, Chip Makers Will Need to Provide Child Care

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    The move seeks to help more women join the work force as industry leaders complain of labor shortages.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration plans to leverage the federal government’s expansive investment in the semiconductor industry to make progress on another goal: affordable child care.On Tuesday, the Commerce Department will announce that any semiconductor manufacturer seeking a slice of nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies will need to essentially guarantee affordable, high-quality child care for workers who build or operate a plant.Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed the CHIPS Act, which devoted $39 billion to directly boost U.S. semiconductor factories as part of $52 billion in subsidies for the industry, in hopes of making the nation less reliant on foreign suppliers for critical chips that power computers, video games, cars and more.Companies that receive the subsidies to build new plants will be able to use some of the government money to meet the new child care requirement. They could do that in a number of ways, in consultation with Commerce officials, who will set basic guidelines but not dictate how companies ensure workers have access to care they can afford.That could include building company child-care centers near construction sites or new plants, paying local child-care providers to add capacity at an affordable cost for workers, directly subsidizing workers’ care costs or other, similar steps that would ensure workers have access to care for their children.American employers, including manufacturers, are increasingly raising concerns that a lack of access to affordable child care is blocking millions of Americans from looking for work, particularly women. President Biden pushed Congress to address those concerns over the last two years, proposing hundreds of billions of dollars for new child care programs, but he was unable to corral support from even a majority of Senate Democrats.But Mr. Biden did convince lawmakers to approve a range of new spending programs seeking to boost American manufacturing. Now, Commerce is trying to utilize a centerpiece of those efforts, which aims to expand American semiconductor manufacturing, to make at least a small dent in his large goals for the so-called care economy.The Global Race for Computer ChipsA Ramp-Up in Spending: Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments have limits.Crackdown on China: The United States has been aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, issuing sweeping restrictions on the country’s access to advanced technology.Arizona Factory: Internal doubts are mounting at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest maker of advanced chips, over its investment in a new factory in Phoenix.CHIPS Act: Semiconductor companies, which united to get the sprawling $280 billion bill approved last year, have set off a lobbying frenzy as they argue for more cash than their competitors.It joins a growing list of administration efforts to expand the reach of Mr. Biden’s economic policies beyond their primary intent. For instance, administration officials have attached stringent labor standards and “Buy America” provisions to money from a bipartisan infrastructure law. The child care requirement will be flexible for chip makers, but it will almost certainly divert some subsidy dollars that are meant to expand factory capacity and create jobs.The Commerce Department is expected to release its application on Tuesday, allowing companies to begin making a case for federal subsidies that the industry lobbied hard to secure from Congress.The prospect of accessing those funds has already enticed domestic and foreign-owned chip makers to announce billions of dollars in plans for new investments in Arizona, central New York and elsewhere.But even as they ramp up investments, companies are complaining of difficulties in finding workers to build and operate manufacturing facilities.America’s child care industry has not fully rebounded from the pandemic recession. It is still about 58,000 workers, or 5 percentage points, short of its prepandemic peak, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Center for the Study of Childcare Employment at the University of California-Berkeley.Shortly before the pandemic, the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington surveyed 35 states and found more than 11 million children had a potential need for child care — yet fewer than 8 million slots were available.That shortage is particularly acute in some of the areas where manufacturers are set to begin building new chip plants spurred by the new legislation. Commerce Department officials calculate that in the Syracuse area, where Micron announced a $100 billion chip making investment last year after Mr. Biden signed the new law, the need for slots in child care facilities is nearly three times the size of the actual care capacity in the region.In Phoenix, where semiconductor manufacturing is booming, child care costs consume about 18 percent of a typical construction or manufacturing worker’s salary. That share is higher than the national average.Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, center, with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, said that the child care requirements should help companies hire mothers, easing a labor shortage.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesGina Raimondo, the Commerce secretary, said in an interview that the child-care requirements should help companies cope with a tight labor market by making it easier for them to attract and retain caregivers who have been kept from working by difficulties finding care for their children.In a speech last week, Ms. Raimondo called efforts to attract more women to the work force “a simple question of math” for industries complaining of labor shortages. “We need chip manufacturers, construction companies and unions to work with us toward the national goal of hiring and training another million women in construction over the next decade to meet the demand not just in chips, but other industries and infrastructure projects as well,” she said.Only about 3 in 10 U.S. manufacturing workers are women. Ms. Raimondo said the CHIPS Act would fail if the administration did not help companies change those numbers, by bringing in women who have children.“You will not be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, put to work and retain women, and you won’t do that without child care,” Ms. Raimondo said in an interview.The Commerce requirement would represent a relatively small step toward Mr. Biden’s much larger, and as-yet unfulfilled, child care ambitions.Mr. Biden unveiled a $4 trillion economic agenda in the months after he took office. It was split into two parts. One focused on physical investments: repairing bridges and water pipes, laying broadband cable, spurring a shift to low-emission sources of energy and catalyzing new manufacturing capacity to compete on a global stage. It was a source of repeated legislative success for the president, who signed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS bill and a climate, health and tax bill that passed with only Democratic votes.But Mr. Biden failed to persuade centrist holdouts in his party, like Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to back most of the provisions in the second half of his agenda. Those were largely the president’s plans to invest in people: federally guaranteed paid leave; subsidized care for children, the disabled and older Americans; universal prekindergarten; free community college for all, and more.The lopsided nature of Mr. Biden’s success threatens to exacerbate existing gender disparities in the economy. Some economists warn they could hinder future economic growth. Many of Mr. Biden’s people-focused programs were deliberately aimed at boosting female participation in the work force.It could be years before Democrats have another opportunity to pass those programs. Republicans won control of the House of Representatives last fall and roundly oppose Mr. Biden on new spending proposals and the tax increases on corporations and high earners that he has called for to cover that spending. Progressive groups and liberal lawmakers largely concede there is little chance of a child care bill making its way to Mr. Biden’s desk before the 2024 election.When it became clear last year that sweeping plans to expand and subsidize child care would not make it into the climate, health and tax bill that marked the culmination of Mr. Biden’s economic efforts in Congress, Ms. Raimondo gathered aides around a conference table. She told them, she said, that “if Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation” of the bills that did pass.Some American manufacturers have already turned to on-site care facilities to help meet workers needs. The automaker Toyota has provided 24-hour care at a factory in Kentucky since 1993 and one in Indiana since 2004.Chad Moutray, director of the Center for Manufacturing Research at the Manufacturing Institute, which is affiliated with the National Association of Manufacturers, wrote in a report late last year that child care availability is part of the reason women do not seek more jobs in manufacturing.“Women represent a sizable talent pool that manufacturers cannot ignore,” he wrote. More

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    Biden Weighs State of the Union Focus on His Unfinished Agenda

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    As the president prepares for his national address, his aides debate an emphasis on his still-unrealized plans for child care, prekindergarten and more.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top economic aides have battled for weeks over a key decision for his State of the Union address on Tuesday: how much to talk about child care, prekindergarten, paid leave and other new spending proposals that the president failed to secure in the flurry of economic legislation he signed in his first two years in office.Some advisers have pushed for Mr. Biden to spend relatively little time on those efforts, even though he is set to again propose them in detail in the budget blueprint he will release in March. They want the president to continue championing the spending he did sign into law, like investments in infrastructure like roads and water pipes, and advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors, while positioning him as a bipartisan bridge-builder on critical issues for the middle class.Other aides want Mr. Biden to spend significant time in the speech on an issue set that could form the core of his likely re-election pitch to key swing voters, particularly women. Polls by liberal groups suggest such a focus, on helping working families afford care for their children and aging parents, could prove a winning campaign message.The debate is one of many taking place inside the administration as Mr. Biden tries to determine which issues to focus on in a speech that carries extra importance this year. It will be Mr. Biden’s first address to the new Republican majority in the House, which has effectively slammed the brakes on his legislative agenda for the next two years. And it could be a preview for the themes Mr. Biden would stress on the 2024 campaign trail should he run for a second term.Administration officials caution that Mr. Biden has not finalized his strategy. A White House official said Friday that the president was preparing to tout his economic record and his full vision for the economy.The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden named Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients replaces Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office.Economic Aide Steps Down: Brian Deese, who played a pivotal role in negotiating economic legislation Mr. Biden signed in his first two years in office, is leaving his position as the president’s top economic adviser.Eyeing 2024: Mr. Biden has been assailing House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to Social Security and Medicare, as he ramps up for what is likely to be a run for re-election.Few of Mr. Biden’s advisers expect Congress to act in the next two years on paid leave, an enhanced tax credit for parents, expanded support for caregivers for disabled and older Americans or expanded access to affordable child care. All were centerpieces of the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan Mr. Biden announced in the first months of his administration. Mr. Biden proposes to offset those and other proposals with tax increases on high earners and corporations.Earlier this week, Mr. Biden hinted that he may be preparing to pour more attention on those so-called “care economy” proposals, which he and his economic team say would help alleviate problems that crimp family budgets and block would-be workers from looking for jobs.At a White House event celebrating the 30th anniversary of a law that mandated certain workers be allowed to take unpaid medical leave, Mr. Biden ticked through his administration’s efforts to invest in a variety of care programs in the last two years, while acknowledging failure to pass federally mandated paid leave and other larger programs.Mr. Biden said he remained committed to “passing a national program of paid leave and medical leave.”“And, by the way, American workers deserve paid sick days as well,” he said. “Paid sick days. Look, I’ve called on Congress to act, and I’ll continue fighting.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.For Mr. Biden, continuing to call for new spending initiatives aimed at lower- and middle-income workers would draw a clear contrast with the still-nascent field of Republicans seeking the White House in 2024. It would cheer some outside advocacy groups that have pushed him to renew his focus on programs that would particularly aid women and children.The State of the Union speech “presents the president with a rare opportunity to take a victory lap and, simultaneously, advance his agenda,” the advocacy group First Focus on Children said in a news release this week. “All to the benefit of children.”The efforts could also address what Mr. Biden’s advisers have identified as a lingering source of weakness in the recovery from the pandemic recession: high costs of caregiving, which are blocking Americans from looking for work. The nonprofit group ReadyNation estimates in a new report that child care challenges cost American families $78 billion a year and employers another $23 billion.“Among prime-age people not working in the United States, roughly half of them list care responsibilities as the main reason for not participating in the labor force,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters this week. She noted that the jobs rebound has lagged in care industries like nursing homes and day care centers.“These remain economic challenges and addressing them could go a long ways towards supporting our nation’s labor supply,” she said.But focusing on that unfinished economic work could conflict with Mr. Biden’s repeated efforts this year to portray the economy as strong and position him as a president who reached across the aisle to secure big new investments that are lifting growth and job creation. On Friday, the president celebrated news that the economy created 517,000 jobs in January, in a brief speech that did not mention the challenges facing caregivers.Calling for vast new spending programs also risks further antagonizing House conservatives, who have made government spending their first large fight with the president. Republicans have threatened to allow the United States to fall into an economically catastrophic default on government debt by not raising the federal borrowing limit, unless Mr. Biden agrees to sharp cuts in existing spending.“Revenue into the government has never been higher,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Thursday, a day after he met with Mr. Biden at the White House to discuss fiscal issues and the debt limit. “It’s the highest revenue we’ve ever seen in. So it’s not a revenue problem. It’s a spending problem.”Catie Edmondson More

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    Jobs Aplenty, but a Shortage of Care Keeps Many Women From Benefiting

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    A lack of child care and elder care options has forced some women to limit their hours or sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.A dearth of child care and elder care choices is causing many women to reorganize their working lives and prompting some to forgo jobs altogether, hurting the economy at a moment when companies are desperate to hire, and forcing trade-offs that could impair careers.Care workers have left the industry in large numbers amid the pandemic, shrinking the number of nursery and nursing home employees by hundreds of thousands. At the same time, coronavirus outbreaks have led to intermittent school shutdowns, which, in turn, have made care demands less predictable and increased the need for reliable backup options.Although plenty of men have also taken on increased care duties since the pandemic began, women perform most caregiving in America, according to the Labor Department. They have made a surprising return to the labor market in spite of that challenge.Federal data shows that the share of women participating in the labor market by working, or by looking for jobs, remains depressed relative to 2019, but it has recovered roughly as much as the share for men has. Mothers still work less than other women, but the gap between the two has narrowed to about the level that prevailed before the pandemic, an analysis by the Federal Reserve found.Yet those signs of a comeback hide strains beneath the surface. A deeper dive into the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households shows that unmarried women without college degrees who have young children have returned to work more slowly than others, a sign that the shortage of care is making them particularly vulnerable.Self-employment has also surged among mothers, suggesting that many women are finding ways to make work more flexible as they scramble to balance care responsibilities with their need to earn money. Other women talk about putting in fewer hours and juggling increased workloads.In February, about 39 percent of women with children younger than 5 told Stanford’s RAPID Survey that they had quit their jobs or reduced their hours since the pandemic began, up from 33 percent at the same time last year. More than 90 percent of those women said they did so of their own accord, not because they were laid off or had their hours cut. Last year, that number was 65 percent.Change in women’s employment rate since Jan. 2020

    Notes: Three-month rolling average of seasonally adjusted data for women ages 20-44. “Young children” are under age 5. Women with older children not shown. College graduates have bachelor’s degrees.Source: Current Population Survey via IPUMSBy The New York TimesThose forced to cut back on work could face lasting disadvantages. They are missing out on an unusual moment of worker power, in which many employees are bargaining for higher wages or switching to more lucrative jobs. Right now, the fields where women are most concentrated — including service sector jobs in hospitality and health care — have some of the most openings and the most rapid pay growth.“I think it will be really interesting to see what the long-term consequences are on mothers’ career opportunities,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the program director in employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Women have continued to work, but they clearly had to cut back.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, even as government policymakers took steps to cool the economy and ease inflation.May Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the fifth month of 2022.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.Opportunities for Teenagers: Jobs for high school and college students are expected to be plentiful this summer, and a large market means better pay.America’s long-running caregiving shortage, for both children and older adults, was compounded by the pandemic.The professional caregiving work force — also disproportionately female — hasn’t recovered. More than one child care worker in 10 hasn’t returned, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (although that data may not capture all the single-employee, home-based operators that make up a huge part of the sector). The number of nursing home workers remains 11.5 percent below its level in February 2020. Together, the two categories represent a loss of 500,000 jobs.“For women, that’s the double whammy — most of those workers are women, and most of the people who need those supports to enter the work force themselves are women,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow with the National Partnership for Women and Families.At the same time, there is new demand for care. After a decrease in the number of births early in the pandemic, nearly 3.7 million people were born last year, up 1 percent from 2020 and the first such increase since 2014.Christy Charny, a college administrative assistant in Fort Collins, Colo., recently talked to her manager about dialing back her hours from full time to part time. She likes her job and needs it for the health insurance it provides, but her 12-week-old daughter was having trouble nursing, and paying for full-time infant care was a nonstarter for her and her husband.“There is no way that we can afford $1,500 a month for child care on our full-time salaries,” said Ms. Charny, 32. “We would go into debt just so that I could work full time.”For a while, she was struggling to find any child care at all. She couldn’t afford full-time help, and the day care center where she had put down a deposit wouldn’t give her a discount if she used it only part time. She was frantically looking for other options when good news arrived: The most affordable nursery in her area, where she had been on the waiting list since October 2021, had a part-time opening.The days — Tuesday, Thursday and Friday — were not exactly right for her professional schedule, but the place was just $246 per week, so she was going to try it.“I know we can make it work if we’re careful and we cut back on other expenses,” she said. Ms. Charny’s husband sells shoes at REI, and together they make about $60,000 before taxes.Economists have long identified a lack of available and affordable child care as a reason that American women do not work more, sometimes by comparing the United States with Canada — which is economically similar in many ways but has more generous child care and parental leave policies and a higher rate of female employment. The same is true for parts of Europe.“Until 1995, the U.S. was the world’s leader in terms of female labor force participation,” said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. “Now, this host of countries that we used to think were backward in terms of gender norms have exceeded the U.S.”And it is no surprise that the burden of care without professional help falls on workers with less education, who tend to earn less.There is a “financial trade-off between work and child care” that hinges on “what share of your income that child care eats up,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “It’s a much smaller share if you’re a working professional with a six-figure salary than if you are working a restaurant job and barely clearing $30,000.”Stanford’s RAPID Survey also showed that most mothers who cut back on work did so even though they didn’t have adequate income without it. And for those staying on the job, volatility in the child care industry can add considerable stress.“If you were hanging on to an official home-based provider to take your kid so you could go to your work, and that person closed their doors, you probably couldn’t afford to stop working,” said the survey’s director, Philip Fisher. “So you’d have to rely on anything you could pull together.”As some mothers pull back, there are implications for the economy. Employers are missing a key source of labor at a time when they have nearly two job openings for every unemployed person.Washington has tried to offset the problem to allow more parents to return to work. The American Rescue Plan, enacted last year, supplied $39 billion to help child care providers stay open, and probably prevented even larger reductions in care. Some states have supplemented that money, while others have relaxed licensing requirements and allowed a bigger ratio of children to care providers.The White House’s Build Back Better legislation included $400 billion for child care and prekindergarten, and a recent study by a team of economists estimated a similar plan could raise the rate at which mothers are employed by six percentage points. But the legislation floundered as concerns about spending mounted.Finding care for older adults also grew more difficult after Covid-19 ripped through nursing homes and sent nurses fleeing the bedside.Because of its dedicated federal funding stream, the elder care industry is larger and more formalized than the child care sector. But its work force is similarly low paid, and has gone through a harrowing time during the pandemic.Dorinda McDougald has been a clinical nursing assistant at Ellicott Center in Buffalo for 25 years.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesAccording to a recent survey conducted by ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group, wages for nurses have increased by between 28 percent and 34 percent since the pandemic began. But only about 5 percent of the nurses who left have returned to such institutionalized settings, according to federal data. Among the challenges for such centers is the tight labor market.Dorinda McDougald is one of those who have stuck it out. She has been a clinical nursing assistant at Ellicott Center in Buffalo for 25 years and makes about $18 an hour.“I stay there for the residents, because they deserve quality care,” she said. But not everyone makes the same choice: One of Ms. McDougald’s colleagues recently left to work at a Red Lobster. “You’d have to compete with the area,” Ms. McDougald said. “Everybody else is paying $16, $17, $18.”Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that about 31 percent of nursing homes are reporting staffing shortages, which can prevent them from taking in more residents.Part of that reflects a shift toward home-based care, which both workers and patients have found safer and otherwise more appealing. Nursing home workers have also left for staffing agencies and hospitals, which offer better pay and more opportunities for advancement.Among the states reporting the most widespread staffing shortages is Minnesota, where 69 percent of nursing homes say they don’t have enough caregivers. That state has a higher-than-average share of nonprofit facilities that depend on Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, which the industry says have not been adjusted for the increased cost of operations.That’s where Staci Drouillard, 54, has been trying to find a place for her parents.She lives in Grand Marais, on Lake Superior, two hours northeast of Duluth. Her father, who is 87 years old and a lifelong resident of the town, has dementia. Her mother, 83, cared for him until she had a series of strokes.Both parents worked, but they weren’t able to build enough savings to afford home-based care, even if a local aide were available. The county’s only nursing home has 37 beds, but six are empty because of staff vacancies, according to the facility’s chief executive.Now, the task falls to Ms. Drouillard, who goes to her parents’ house most days. After getting a promotion at the radio station where she works, she shifted to a position that is home-based, with fewer hours, lower pay and less authority, as caregiving consumed more and more of her time.“As I watched my parents’ health deteriorate and decline, I realized I needed to pivot to a job that has less responsibility,” Ms. Drouillard said. “Their care is kind of like having another job, except you don’t really know what hours you’re going to work.” More

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    Child-care benefits could help ease the worker crunch, an advocacy campaign says.

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    Almost half of mothers with young children who left the work force cited child care as a reason for the move, according to a survey released Wednesday, and 69 percent of women looking for a job said child-care benefits could sway their decision on where to work.The survey of more than 1,000 workers, by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and Marshall Plan for Moms, a campaign focused on the economic participation of mothers, adds to research exploring how the lack of child care continues to drag on the economy and tighten an already-hot labor market.“Companies are scrambling for talent,” said Reshma Saujani, who founded Marshall Plan for Moms and Girls Who Code, a nonprofit aimed at closing the gender gap in tech. “Our report shows that you can attract, retain and advance women in the work force only through the provision of offering child-care benefits.”Child care has long been too scarce or too expensive for most families. And during the pandemic, the industry more or less collapsed, as day-care centers struggled to stay open and child-care workers quit en masse.Many executives and child-care activists had hoped that President Biden’s sprawling infrastructure plan would provide support for the industry. But the pared-back bill was signed into law without big investments in child care. Ms. Saujani says the onus is now on the private sector.Most salaried and hourly workers do not have access to child-care benefits. Six percent of hourly workers surveyed and 16 percent of salaried workers said they had access to child-care subsidies. The same percentage of hourly workers, and even fewer salaried workers, reported that their employer provided backup child care or offered pretax flexible spending accounts that could be used to pay for care. About 30 percent of respondents said they had flexible working hours.Ms. Saujani’s campaign is forming a business coalition that includes Patagonia and Archewell, the production company founded by Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. To sign on, companies must offer a child-care subsidy or benefit or intend to provide one, Ms. Saujani said. Once they join the coalition, businesses can share and learn best practices from one another.Synchrony, a financial services firm that is part of the coalition, found that offering its employees creative child-care options led to a surge in job satisfaction and an influx of applications for job openings, said Carol Juel, the company’s chief technology and operating officer.In the summer of 2020, the company created a virtual summer camp, putting high school and college children of their employees in charge of keeping 3,700 campers occupied in exchange for mentorship training and college credit. And the company would “send out, every Friday, the next week’s schedule so that workers could plan their meetings around this,” Ms. Juel said.Fast Retailing USA, which operates apparel brands including Uniqlo, Theory and Helmut Lang and is also part of the coalition, has started offering monthly child-care stipends of up to $1,000 for many employees, including store managers. The money can be spent in any way they see fit rather than being tied to specific providers.“A lot of the people who were involved in sponsoring this policy, myself included and some of our heads of human resources, all have kids the same age,” said Serena Peck, Fast Retailing’s chief administrative officer and general counsel. They were seeing firsthand how “the market was shrinking for good child care” and “felt like we had to do something.” More

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    Why Paid Family Leave’s Demise This Time Could Fuel It Later

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    In failing to secure a benefit with bipartisan appeal, President Biden joins a long line of frustrated politicians. But some Republicans say it could be resurrected on its own.WASHINGTON — In late 2019, with bipartisan backing, including from the iconoclastic Senate Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, President Donald J. Trump’s daughter Ivanka hosted a summit at the White House to promote her vision for paid family and medical leave.As with many domestic initiatives of the Trump years, the effort went nowhere, thanks in part to the former president’s lack of interest in legislating. But it also stalled in part because of opposition from Democrats like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who saw the plan not as a true federal benefit but as a “payday loan” off future Social Security benefits.Ms. Gillibrand believed she could do much better.Last week was the Democrats’ turn to fail. A 12-week paid family and medical leave program, costing $500 billion over 10 years, was supposed to be a centerpiece of President Biden’s social safety net legislation. But it fell out of his compromise framework, a victim of centrists who objected to its ambition and cost.The demise of the effort, even amid bipartisan interest, in part reflected the polarization surrounding Democrats’ marquee domestic legislation, which Republicans are opposing en masse.Some business groups and G.O.P. proponents of a paid leave program believe that if it had been broken out and negotiated with Republicans, the way a $1 trillion infrastructure package was at Mr. Biden’s urging, it could have survived, and some think it still could resurrected as a bipartisan initiative.They said the problem lay with the Democrats’ decision to put paid family leave in the expansive social policy and climate bill — a multitrillion-dollar package financed by large tax increases on businesses and the wealthy — which they knew that Republicans and mainstream business groups would never support.“In any area that is substantive, when members sit down to actually walk through whether or not we can build good legislation, there are possibilities,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said. “We’re not being encouraged to work together to solve problems. What we’re being encouraged to do is line up with the team so that we can have the political messaging point.”At least for now, though, the United States is almost certain to remain one of only six countries with no national paid leave.“Fundamentally, to provide paid leave, you have to value women and value their work,” Ms. Gillibrand lamented, “and valuing women and their work is a hard thing for the United States.”The last-minute removal of the paid leave program underscored longstanding questions about how it can be that while 186 other countries have such a program, the United States does not.A rally for paid leave near the White House. The United States is one of only six countries that do not provide some sort of national paid leave.Valerie Plesch for The New York TimesMs. Gillibrand was highly skeptical that a bipartisan deal to address the issue was possible. She said she had been developing paid family and medical leave legislation for nearly a decade, had sought out numerous Republican and business partners, and had always found the parties too ideologically divided.But the issue driving interest in both parties — bringing more women into the work force and keeping them there — has only grown more acute since the coronavirus pandemic hit.White House officials say 95 percent of the lowest-wage workers lack any paid leave, and they are predominantly women and people of color. Some five million women lost their jobs during the pandemic, and many of them, struggling with access to child care and bedeviled by intermittent school closures and periodic Covid-19 outbreaks, have opted not to return.Mr. Trump campaigned on the issue and included six weeks of federally paid leave in his budgets, which were ignored by Republican leaders. Congressional Republicans had their own ideas. Legislation introduced in 2019 by Senators Sinema and Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Representatives Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, and Colin Allred, Democrat of Texas, would offer new parents $5,000 during the first year of their baby’s life, which they would repay over the decade through cuts to their child tax credit.The Republican senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Mitt Romney of Utah, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah similarly proposed offering workers parental leave benefits that would have to be repaid — with interest — through cuts in their Social Security retirement benefits.Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, championed and secured more modest legislation — tucked into the Republican tax cuts of 2017 — that gave small businesses a tax credit to fund family leave. She argued against broader versions, since many companies already offer employees paid leave.“If you have two or three employees, you cannot afford to do paid family leave because you can’t afford to hire somebody to take their place, which is why I think the tax credit that we have in law now is really beneficial,” Ms. Fischer said.According to the White House, fewer than a third of small businesses with 100 or more employees offer paid leave. Only 14 percent with fewer than 50 employees do. Ms. Fischer conceded that few small businesses have taken advantage of her credit, but she blamed the Treasury Department, under Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, for dragging its feet on issuing detailed regulations and promoting it.To Democrats, those proposals are not true leave. They are either loans off other needed benefits or too limited to make a difference. Ms. Gillibrand said that optimally, a stable, generous family and medical leave plan would be an “earned benefit” like Social Security and Medicare: Workers would pay into the system and claim the benefit when they needed it, regardless of where they worked or how much they earned.But, she said, taxing workers has become politically difficult. Her 2013 bill envisioned family and medical leave insurance, financed by a small contribution from employers with each paycheck.This year, the Biden administration and Democratic leaders opted to fund paid leave out of general revenues, bolstered by tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. They said the program was part of a broader “human infrastructure” effort to help children and young parents, which included child care support, a child tax credit and universal prekindergarten — and therefore didn’t need a dedicated funding source.Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed a plan for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, saying he worried that without a stable revenue source, it would be a drain on the Social Security system.Al Drago for The New York TimesThe House proposal would have guaranteed 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave annually to all workers, in private or government employment, gig work like Uber and Lyft, or self-employment. The benefit would have replaced 85 percent of wages or earnings for the lowest-paid workers, scaling back from there.That generosity was why the plan ran into a roadblock in the Senate. Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, saw an expensive new benefit without a stable revenue source that he worried would end up draining an already stressed Social Security system.Ms. Gillibrand and Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, have pleaded, cajoled and bargained with him. They said a paid leave plan would actually bolster Social Security’s finances by helping women get back to work, where they would pay Social Security taxes, and helping young families have more children, which would bolster the work force of the future. Democrats offered to scale back a 12-week leave plan to four weeks, then to limit it to leave for new babies, not medical emergencies.Mr. Manchin promised to consider the offers, but few are optimistic. Ms. Gillibrand sees societal issues at work. While it is true that virtually every country in the world has a paid leave program, that is somewhat misleading, she said.Most of those countries can afford to offer paid leave because they do not actually expect women to work once they begin having children. Long leave plans help couples get started having children, but most countries then do not help with child care because they assume women will stay home.The U.S. work force relies on women. Mr. Biden’s compromise framework does include generous subsidies for child care starting at birth and for universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds. It now lacks the first step: helping parents through pregnancy and childbirth.“What we’re trying to achieve here is the ability of women to work effectively and to be most productive at work,” Ms. Gillibrand said.Advocates say lawmakers should not give up yet. Marc Freedman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for employment policy, said the business group had been meeting with congressional offices before the pandemic, pressing for a national paid leave plan to replace the patchwork of state and local government plans popping up.The government would create a minimum benefit that businesses would be allowed to exceed for recruitment and retention, financed by a payroll tax paid by employees. Such a plan would help smaller businesses compete for labor with larger corporations, while offloading some of the burden on companies that already offer leave plans.“We very much want to restart those conversations,” he said.Some Republicans, especially Republican women, say they are ready to join those talks.“It’s an issue we need to address as a nation and look at and get creative with,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, who helped secure paid leave for federal workers.But as with the infrastructure deal struck over the summer, Democrats would not be likely to get all they want. Ms. Capito, for instance, said the plan that Mr. Manchin killed was too generous, with leave beyond care for new babies and sick family members.Ms. Gillibrand said she had already begun outreach. She talked to Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, about an interim step of helping small states pool with larger ones to create regional leave programs. She signaled flexibility on funding the kind of insurance mechanism that Mr. Freedman said the Chamber of Commerce favored.But none of those ideas would happen as quickly as the broad program that Mr. Manchin is opposing, she said.“There is work I can do over the next six months to a year, sure, but will take time,” Ms. Gillibrand concluded. “And it won’t be simple.” More