How do you get more Americans to make semiconductor chips?
Providing them with subsidized child care is the stupid answer that is Biden The administration has proposed this week.
Last year, a bipartisan group in Congress voted to give nearly $40 billion in subsidies to American companies to make more chips here so we can be less dependent on foreign manufacturers (mostly in Taiwan).
No one mentioned childcare back then. But now the Commerce Department has announced that any company that wants access to these funds is required to provide affordable, high-quality child care to its employees.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters: It’s “a simple question of math.” She explained: “You’re not going to be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, hire and retain women, and you’re not going to do that without childcare.”
Of course if it were a simple question of math, many companies would have already provided childcare and many women would have taken advantage of it. In fact, many already are.
But the truth is that not all women want to put their young children in institutional day care, and the Biden administration is using sweeping, bipartisan legislation to ram a progressive agenda down the throats of American families.
If companies want to encourage more women (or men) to take these jobs, they will offer more money to parents — and flexibility for families to spend that money.
They may use the extra cash to allow a spouse to stay home with the child or to subsidize an aunt or grandmother to care for the child.
“There is an important and reasonable debate about the effects of young children spending long periods of time in childcare rather than parents,” says Kathryn Stevens, founder and CEO of Center on Child and Family Policy.
She notes that if this new rule means that a parent who used to be at home with a child is now employed. . . This can be an unintended consequence of negative effects on the development of that person’s child.
This may outweigh the benefit of the parent’s contribution to chip manufacturing. ” 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 parents who provide care during this period.
Needless to say, such considerations are not ones the Commerce Department is willing to weigh.
But if the goal was to increase affordable child care in a particular area, the influx of federal subsidies could have the opposite effect.
If a company uses federal dollars to choose a local provider, it could actually drive other providers out of the surrounding market, creating a shortage of places for children whose parents chip manufacture. (aka everyone) are not engaged.
In fact this has already happened in similar sectors of the economy.
For example, by subsidizing unorganized juvenile care in states like California, the federal government has increased wages and made it harder for residential care providers for local foster youth to provide qualified staff.
With this a deficiency Beds for foster children.
The federal government has a huge footprint and when bureaucrats come into local communities – even with good intentions – their policies can do more harm than good.
If the Biden administration were interested in making child care more affordable, it could discourage its state and local allies from creating unnecessary and costly regulations for child care centers.
For example, Washington, DC is required Many childcare workers will earn two-year associate degrees 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 daycare providers to operate stop School-aged children tend to avoid socializing with younger children.
Not to mention that younger children benefit from seeing what older children do – and older children benefit from helping younger children – daycare has separate spaces and times for smaller groups as well. have to find
Ultimately, however, it is important to recognize, as Catherine Stevens does, that “the reality of the development of new humans is that it is time intensive. For many centuries, an entire human was devoted to this work.”
For most of us, that man was called the parent, whose job often outweighed the White House’s current obsession with homegrown computer chips.
