The View from Right Field

Child Care: Affordability and Quality – But Who Pays

The cost of child care presents an interesting quandary. We are told that child care is too expensive. People cannot afford to pay for quality child care and still work. All their salary, or way too much of it, has to go for child care. A lot of that is true.

On the other hand, it is also true that child care workers probably do not earn enough money. It is hard to attract well-trained people to be child care providers at the salaries they are paid.

So what does this mean? Unfortunately, what it means is that a lot of people do not earn enough money to be able pay somebody else to take care of their children while they go to work. In fact, in some cases, the amount a person has to pay for good quality child care is more than the person can make.

These two points are entirely logical. Properly caring for a child in a day care setting is not cheap. You have to (or at least you would like to think you should) pay child care workers enough that you get really good people to do the work. But, on the other hand, the work being done by some of the people who put their children in day care may not be valuable enough (in an economic sense) to justify going to work given what they have to pay for child care. In some cases, the value of the work they do may be less than the value of the work being done to care for their child.

This creates an interesting situation, especially for those who are demanding that government subsidize, or even fully provide, child care so that people can go to work. In at least some situations, the child care provider will be paid more than the value of the work being done by the worker whose child is being cared for. In other words, for example, the parent, and/or the government if it is subsidizing or fully providing the child care, might have to pay $100 for child care while the person only earns $80 him- or herself. This does not make sense, unless there is some other reason you want to do it.

It gets even more interesting when you start to think about where the money has to come from if the government is to subsidize/provide child care. Obviously, the money comes from taxpayers. And included within that group are people and families who have decided that one of them will stay home to care for their children. Such a family will be making less money than they could if both parents worked, but they do not care. They have decided to make a financial sacrifice, perhaps lowering their standard of living, so one of them can stay home to take care of their children.

Now, proponents of government subsidizing or providing child care would have at least some of these families make another sacrifice, to pay more in taxes so the government can subsidize child care for people who have decided differently. In some cases, the families who have voluntarily cut back on their income will now be asked to pay more taxes to subsidize the child care costs of families who make more than they do.

If you work, you get subsidies. If you take a cut in pay and try to get by on less so one of you can stay home with your children, you are supposed to pay more taxes to help pay for child care for parents who both want to work, even if they make more than you. That last one is a little difficult to understand.

Why Do We Need A Czar? We Have a President

Wednesday’s Washington Post had an article by Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks about White House efforts to appoint a "czar" to oversee and run not just the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan but also the civilian and other non-military activities in those countries. Apparently, the idea is that this person would have the authority over all U.S. activities for those two countries. This would address concerns about a lack of coordination of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, however, at least three generals have turned the job down.

Fred Kaplan, writing in "Slate" on Thursday, did not think much of the idea. He notes that Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, would seem to be an appropriate person to knock head together to get things done. If Hadley cannot do the job, Kaplan says this:

"Actually, there’s another official who, as Baker and Ricks describe the job, has the ‘authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies.’ He’s called the president of the United States."

A couple of years ago, in some notes I wrote before I started this blog, I noted that one of our problems in Vietnam, under both Johnson and Nixon, was that Vietnam did not have a high enough priority. Both men had other things they considered to be a higher priority. For Johnson it was the Great Society. For Nixon it was larger issues of foreign policy. For both of them, Vietnam was a second-level interest.

I did not think this would be the case in Iraq. Iraq was clearly the main focus of Bush’s presidency, and I hoped Bush would make sure things were done right. So far it looks like I was wrong. It does not appear he has been devoting the time and attention to Iraq that it needs.

At the beginning of the Civil War, when it looked like the Union generals did not know what they were doing, Abraham Lincoln took books on military strategy out of the Library of Congress to try to figure out the right answers himself. And he did as good job of it, staying deeply involved until he was finally able to find generals who could win for him.

It may be too much to expect Bush to do as much as Lincoln did, but it seems like he should have been doing more. Why hasn’t he?

Obviously, Democrats and other Bush-haters will have fun answering that question, but let me suggest a real reason, a reason that is not dependent on a anti-Bush swamp fever that started during the Florida recount and has multiplied like rabbits since then (to mix metaphors).

I think the problem is that presidents today try to do too much. The president and the federal government have taken on so many things that they cannot devote the proper attention to the problems that are really their responsibility.

For example, I agree something needs to be done to improve elementary and secondary education in the United States. Too many children are not getting a good education, and a fair chance in life, because special interest groups are stopping us from doing what we need to do to improve schools. This is a problem, but it is not the President’s problem. As I have said before, at times in the last couple of Presidential elections, it seemed like the candidates were running for the local school board instead of the presidency. That is silly. The federal government has enough things to do without taking on problems that are not its responsibility.

There is a reason why a country the size of the United States needs a federal style of government. Federalism allows us to divide up problems among different levels of government so that they can be solved by the level of government most appropriate to handle them. But it is also means that no level of government will be overloaded with problems that are not its concern and that it cannot solve. As problems are dealt with by the level of government best able to solve them, each level of government will have more time to devote to those problems that are appropriately its responsibility.

When the federal government tries to solve problems that ought to be dealt with by state or even local governments, it does not have enough time to handle problems it should be focusing on. The federal government needs to stay out of areas that are the proper concern of state and local government. If that means that some problems are not handled in the way that people in Washington think are right, that is fine. It’s not their job. They need to handle the problems that are their responsibility. Getting those done right is hard enough without trying to solve other governments’ problems, too.

Maybe if the president were not worrying about math tests for fourth graders, he would have enough time to do a better job on those problems he should be worried about, like Iraq.

Health Care: Single-Payer

I do not understand why, when it has become so obvious in so many places that government is not good at running things, so many people in the United States want the government to run our health care system.

I understand our health care system has many failings, but why do people think that a government-run system would be better? Look at FEMA, at Amtrak, or at the public school systems in many of our big cities. What is it in the operation of these entities that gives one any confidence the government can run a decent health care system?

What seems to be happening is that the people who favor a government-run health system, are comparing the promise of a government-run single-payer system with the reality of our current system. Obviously, any time a real system is compared to a proposed system, the proposed system will look better. The proponents of a government-provided system are saying, "Look at all of the problems and inequities in our current system. A single-payer system will solve these problems, and get rid of the inefficiencies, so it will be better and cheaper." Of course what these people ignore are all of the new problems a single-payer system would cause and all of the new inefficiencies it would have.

Proponents of a single-payer system point to Canada as having a fair and equitable medical system. But in 2005 the Canadian Supreme Court held that Quebec’s law prohibiting people from buying private insurance for health care procedures covered by the public system was unconstitutional under the Quebec Charter of Rights because the public system was not providing adequate health care itself.

In New Zealand, when the Labour government was running for re-election, one of its campaign promises was to increase the number of cataract operations and knee and hip replacements that the health care system would provide. It was not a matter of how many people needed such operations; it was a matter of how many operations the government would pay for – and since an election was coming up, the government was willing to pay for more.

In Illinois the state government is chronically slow in paying its Medicaid bills. The situation has gotten so bad at times that hospitals and doctors have threatened to, and in some cases actually did, stop serving Medicaid patients because they were not getting paid for the services they performed. Do we really want our medical care contingent on politicians like those in the State ofIllinois deciding whether to pay our medical bills or to pass more pork?

The common response to concerns about a single-paper system is that while our health system might work for rich people, or at least middle class people with jobs and health insurance, it does not work for poor people and people without health insurance. When I needed a cataract operation, I did not have to wait in some government queue. I just talked with my doctor and scheduled it. Liberals would say that the only reason I could do this was because I had health insurance and that poor people would not be able to do that. Even if this is true, the solution is not to follow the Canadian or New Zealand model and make me wait for my operation. The solution is to figure out a way to make medical care more available for poor people, not import the problems of systems in other countries.

Look at Medicare Part D. When it was originally passed, people said it would be a failure: it was too complicated; it would be too expensive; it would reduce coverage. But the actual results have been quite different. It was complicated at the beginning, but people are happy with it now. And it is costing less than was predicted.

What we need is some real down-to-earth analysis and research into how other systems operate, what their good points are and what their problems are. We need to look at how other health care systems operate in practice, not what they promise in theory. Then we might be able to figure out some ways to make our system better, without making it worse, something a single-payer system will not do.

The Role of Government in the Economy and Society: A View from New Zealand

Two of the things I enjoy about the Internet are finding older things and finding things from other countries. A paper I recently found fits both categories. It was presented by Dr. Michael Bassett at a regional conference for New Zealand’s ACT Party in November 2001.

A little background: By the early 1980s New Zealand had probably the most state-controlled economy in the western world. In 1984, a newly-elected Labour government introduced a series of radical free-market reforms, freeing the economy from its controls, and turning New Zealand into one of the freest economies.

Dr. Bassett was a minister in that Labour government from 1984 to 1990. The ACT Party is liberal party (in the traditional European sense of the word liberal) that grew out of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, a group founded by Sir Roger Douglas, Finance Minister during much of the Labour Government.

Basset's paper, "The Conflict of Visions about New Zealand," is quite interesting for what it says about the role of government in the economy and in society. A knowledge of New Zealand history is not necessary.

To encourage you to read the whole paper, here are a few excerpts from it:

By 1984 many realised that governments had been better at bestowing privileges such as import licensing on a few, than at creating opportunities for the many. ... [N]othing was more certain than that civil servants lacked the skills and incentives to run state trading enterprises profitably.

In the 1980s and 1990s others were prepared to re-assess their thinking. The reality is that while many state interventions such as funding children to stay at school longer have been hugely beneficial, others developed nasty side effects.

Perhaps the greatest lesson that we have been forced to learn from decades of collectivism is that our self-anointed do-gooders, as Hayek warned, and Isaiah Berlin always suspected, will usually be defeated by the baser sides to human nature.

Well, what to do about all this? Are we condemned to suffer still more generations of politicians whose principal goal seems to be a triumph of faith over experience? Some thoughts: No answer to this can be adequate if it doesn’t first acknowledge the depth of faith in collectivism. ... The battle for reality won’t be easily won.

For too long the politically correct have preached the value of their nostrums while flatly refusing cost-benefit analyses.

The challenge to all people of goodwill is to educate. It is to describe reality as it is, and not to be scared of being tagged a racist or any of the other terms that the anointed sanctimoniously dish out against their critics. NOT to deal in facts produces worse, rather than better social outcomes.

As has so often been said, a rising tide lifts all boats; without it the poor have no chance. Freedom, healthy debate and the buzz of individual success are so much more liberating than political correctness ... .