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**FEBRUARY 28, 2024**
On the Prospect website
A Public Option for Credit Card Shopping
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking aim at
pay-to-play credit card comparison websites that collude with big banks
to block competition. BY DAVID DAYEN
Zoomer Hackers Shut Down the Biggest Extortion Ring of All
A ransomware gang cripples UnitedHealthcare. Could a comprehensive
antitrust investigation finish the job? BY MAUREEN TKACIK
[link removed]
[link removed] Iowa Sees
Little Progress on Gun Violence Prevention
After the Perry High School shooting, students demanded gun reform,
but state lawmakers have been slow to respond. BY GERARD EDIC
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Biden's Latest Child Care Order
Capping costs for 100,000 families is the right idea, at too small a
scale.
On Thursday, the Biden Administration issued a rule that will cap child
care costs
at 7 percent of income for more than 100,000 families that get child
care aid under the federal child care block grant. The rule will also
compel states to pay providers on time, addressing a chronic problem in
which most states are late in forwarding payments to both home-based
caregivers and child care centers.
The context for this rule is an escalating child care crisis. In
September, $24 billion in American Rescue Plan emergency pandemic-era
child care funding expired. A report by the Century Foundation found
that this lost subsidy would cause 3.2 million children to lose their
child care.
Biden has requested Congress for a $16 billion child care supplemental
appropriation, which stands no chance of passage in this Congress.
The administration sought a much broader child care program as part of
the Build Back Better agenda. That didn't get through, thanks to
Republicans and a couple Democrats (think Joe Manchin). But this
announcement does settle a fight from that period over whether child
care should cost the same for everyone, or rise based on household
income. The administration is clearly signaling that it should be
universal.
President Biden was not at the announcement of the new rule, which will
help only a small fraction of affected children and families. On behalf
of the Administration, Vice President Kamala Harris said
(in a tweet)
that the Administration's ultimate goal was to cap child care costs at
$10 a day for the average family and to make pre-school for all
four-year-olds universal and free.
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The announcement captured everything that is both hopeful and
exasperating about Joe Biden in this momentous election year. On the one
hand, child care is a big deal, which is financially stressing
middle-income as well as low-income families. This rule sets an
important benchmark. On the other hand, the initiative, reflecting the
limits of what can be done by executive action under existing law, is
token, and the announcement was appropriately low-key.
Nor did Biden did not dramatize the power of this cause by making the
announcement at a child care center; he signaled that this was a
second-tier issue by deputizing Vice President Harris to sit at her desk
and record a tweet.
Not surprisingly, the item, downplayed by its sponsors, got almost no
press coverage. At this writing, the sole media mention of it was a
brief story on Time Magazine's website
.
Yet the call for a universal cap on family childcare costs and the
commitment to universal free pre-k are potentially transformative and
politically powerful. Even better would be to make pre-k part of the
public school system to reinforce public institutions, and to pay pre-k
teachers accordingly.
Next week is Biden's State of the Union Address. Let's see if he is
willing to go big again, as he did during the pandemic, and ask
Americans to vote in a Democratic Congress in a Biden second term, so
that he can turn these aspirations and token initiatives into
large-scale realities.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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