President Joe Biden waves to the guests during a CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper Monday, Feb. 16, 2021, at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Joe Biden’s American Families Plan proposes four significant new federal entitlements to the tune of $1.8 trillion:
- two years of free, universal prekindergarten
- virtually free child care for all
- a paid family and medical leave program
- two years of community college.
In a recent “Today” show interview, Mr. Biden said that “after 400 years,” black Americans remain “far behind the eight ball in terms of education, health, in terms of opportunity.”
Daniel Henninger in the WSJ argues that the reality is, all Americans will be behind the federal dependency eight ball if Biden’s entitlement plan passes.
(C)osts will be contained, even nominally, only by defaulting over time to Medicaid-quality child care and universal pre-K.
Generations of similar welfare compensation eroded the American dream for many black Americans by disincentivizing upward mobility. Hundreds of thousand still live in public-housing units built for them in the mid-1960s. The unions whose teachers refuse to return to inner-city schools will run child care.
The Biden Democrats not only don’t apologize for this malgovernance, they want to spread it to the nonpoor.
If Republicans let the Biden entitlements become law this year, they will indeed become tax collectors for the permanent welfare state, with payroll-tax increases or a national value-added tax becoming inevitable. The current Biden entitlement pay-fors—higher taxes on corporations and the 1%—are obviously preposterous as long-term support.
And permanently unanswered will be whether American parents ever actually concluded that traditional paths upward are out of reach for them, their children and grandchildren.
Kelsey Bolar in The Hill suggests a far better solution to helping working families: give them tax credits that allow them to keep more of their own money so they have greater capacity and the flexibility to make choices that work for their unique situations.
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