Our country’s childcare system is a mess — high-quality care is good for children, and key to bringing parents back into the workforce, but it’s also hideously expensive despite the fact that the people who provide the care are typically paid quite poorly. The answer seems obvious: universal free pre-K is the norm in many other countries (just as K-12 education is in the US) and has been shown to have excellent results. Recent data even shows it leads to substantially higher earnings by parents during preschool and for six years afterward.

So why haven’t we stepped up to expand our nation’s public school system to cover the younger set? One key reason is that the budgetary costs of such a move would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But that big, daunting figure doesn’t account for the positive economic benefits: parents are able to work more and earn more when their children have affordable access to quality childcare, which means they’re able to put more money back into the economy. So basically, we’re failing to provide universal pre-K and therefore collectively deciding to reduce opportunity for children and their parents… because we haven’t figured out how to make our government budgeting process account for the long-term economic benefits of public investments. 

Make it make sense.

An incredible 7,000 federal lobbyists helped shape the 2017 Trump trickle-down tax cuts, and by and large, they got what they were paid for. Corporate tax rates were cut, special benefits were handed to a wide variety of interest groups, and — spoiler alert — the rich got richer.

If you’re an individual taxpayer rather than a corporate tax professional, you already know that you didn't see big bucks from Trump’s tax package. But the chart below from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities puts in stark terms just how skewed it was towards providing benefits for the wealthy few. And not just slanted to the top 5%, but even higher — the top 1%. 

If you’re looking for a palate-cleanser after digesting too many polling hot takes, the most recent piece by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker is perfect: it’s a serious, sober look at the impact of President Biden’s economic policies, and makes the case that “Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century.”

In other words: Biden’s economic legacy is that he discarded the longstanding neoliberal approach to economic governance, instead deploying government power to do big things like manage markets, fight monopolies, and make massive investments in infrastructure and clean energy. Much of it represents important lessons learned from the Great Recession and the Trump administration, but, as Lemann details, we won’t see the full results of this big paradigm shift for some time still  — at least 5 to 10 years, maybe more. The challenge is that electoral politics happens on much shorter timelines.

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