February 21, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Massachusetts senator and Democrat presidential contender Elizabeth Warren introduced a sweeping proposal to establish universal, government-run child care on Tuesday, with the pro-abortion lawmaker claiming to speak for “every one of our children.”
The so-called Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act calls for a nationwide, federally-funded network of child care centers, The New York Times reported. These would be free for families making 200 percent below the federal poverty level, with those making more charged on a sliding scale up to seven percent of their income.
All this would be paid for by a new wealth tax on households with more than $50 million in assets, taxing two percent on assets plus another one percent surtax on households with more than $1 billion in net worth.
“The guarantee is about what each of our children is entitled to,” Ms. Warren declared at a campaign event in Los Angeles.. “Not just the children of the wealthy, not just the children of the well-connected, but every one of our children is entitled to good child care.”
Warren’s plan was met with soaring approval by liberal groups, but conservatives argue the costs won’t deliver the promised benefits.
Investors Business Daily argued that the plan’s price tag of $700 billion over 10 years is “highly deceptive,” because it factors in the assumed economic benefits of families who use the program but ignores the lost investment by those taxed to finance it.
At CNS News, Lindsey Burke noted the plan calls for child care providers to “meet standards similar to those that now apply to Head Start,” when Head Start has been found to provide “little to no impact on the parenting practices or the cognitive, social-emotional, and health outcomes of participants” after $200 billion of government spending since 1965.
Not every concern about the plan is about cost-benefit analysis, however.
“Warren has it exactly backward: children are not entitled to government daycare; what children are entitled to is love from their own parents,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said. “Now, Warren herself used to know this very well. Fifteen years ago, she wrote an entire book making that case. The book was called ‘The Two-Income Trap,’ and honestly it's excellent.
“In that book, Warren argues that American families have been decimated by the mass exodus of mothers into the workforce,” he continued. “As a result, children are less cared for, mothers are far less happy, and thanks to wage stagnation, rising prices, families are not actually better off economically.”
But “that was the old Elizabeth Warren. Now Warren wants to be president so she's gone corporate,” Carlson accused. “The new Elizabeth Warren argues that the American Dream is not raising your own children; the American Dream is outsourcing their upbringing to government caretakers while their parents scurried back to work as good little servants of globalized market capitalism.”
Warren claiming to speak for what children are “entitled to” is particularly ironic in light of her belief that children aren’t entitled to be born. Warren is an ally of Planned Parenthood with a 100 percent pro-abortion voting record, who has called abortion safer than tonsillectomies and suggested that late-term abortions can be “act(s) of mercy” for disabled children.