Consider two neighboring towns, Potato and Potahto. Both have collected $1,000 in taxes and their goal is to ensure that all residents end the harvest season with at least 10 of the tubers. Potato spends its money on fertilizing everyone’s soil and making sure they have good seeds and good tools, as well as hiring monitors to ensure the farmers are treating their farmhands well. When the harvest comes, everyone’s plot produces at least 10 spuds. Potahto, on the other hand, holds back the tax money and lets the potato chips (sorry) fall where they may. Some residents do great, but others end up with few or no potatoes, so the town gives out enough money for those who have fewer than 10 to go buy enough potatoes to make up the gap.
I promise this has to do with child care. What I’m describing is a silly and highly stylized version of concepts political scientists call predistribution versus redistribution. Predistribution is the idea that social interventions happen on the front end: They are investments in infrastructure (in this case, related to education) and conditions (for example labor laws and minimum wages) that help level the playing field prior to outcomes becoming clear. Redistribution is when the intervention comes on the back end, after income has been earned, leveling the playing field through “taxes and transfers” — basically, subsidies or other direct payments such as SNAP benefits or tax credits.
Note that one is not inherently better or worse than the other: In both towns, the public purse was used so that every resident ended up with at least 10 potatoes. Moreover, no amount of predistribution, in real life, obviates the need for some amount of redistribution; the field can never be truly level.
However, one is clearly more popular than the other, and here’s where this becomes a child care story: In America, child care assistance has long existed as a form of redistribution, which I believe limits its political strength.
A quick historical refresher: In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The legislation would have started creating a nationally funded, locally run network of child care programs, and the benefits were set up to be widespread; one version even asserted that child care services should be available “as a matter of right to all children regardless of economic, social, and family background.”
After President Nixon vetoed the bill with strong language about how the government would be overtaking the family, opposition became an article of culture-war faith among conservatives, and liberals quickly backed off universal approaches. As political scientist Kimberly J. Morgan has written, the American system “is a product of the controversies, debates, and decisions of the early 1970s. The door was closed on the notion of universally-available public child care services.” Both parties embraced a welfare mentality alongside modest tax breaks for middle-class families.
Thus, if you get child care assistance in the United States today in all but a very few states, you are either low- or moderate-income, and the assistance comes in the form of a subsidy voucher that offsets the use of your own income. It is, in other words, a classically redistributive approach. Contrast this with the predistributive public spending on K-12 education – more than $800 billion — that creates a universal system accessible to the poorest or richest American.
Historian Sonya Michel has explained that child care subsidies’ redistributive nature make them part of “what scholars call a ‘residual welfare state,’ one that offers public support only as a last resort, when applicants implicitly concede that they are incapable of supporting themselves. A residual welfare state contrasts with a proactive or affirmative state that regards public provisions such as child care as a form of collective social good designed to achieve a consensual goal.”
Important for this discussion, American public opinion has turned increasingly against redistribution in recent decades. As a trio of economists summarized in a 2023 paper, “less-educated voters have long favored more pre-tax-and-transfer interventions (‘predistribution’) in the economy and labor market.”
Scholars posit various explanations for why, ranging from a sense that one’s income prior to receiving public aid is more “respectable,” to the idea that redistributive systems are “more opaque, corrupt, or inefficient than more transparent policy interventions.” With the American electorate realigning more along lines of education and class rather than race or other identities, redistributive proposals face an ever-steeper road to popularity.
Child care stakeholders, then, seemingly have two choices: make redistributive policies feel more like a universal entitlement, or reposition child care as predistributive. The former option is feasible: After all, certain tax credits, like the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, are widely popular despite being redistributive. In states like New Mexico and Vermont that have massively increased eligibility for their child care subsidy programs up into the middle and upper middle class, the advances appear to be popular and durable.
That said, a more promising route may be explicitly casting child care as part of the expected level-playing-field conditions of American life, much as Americans of all stripes expect to be able to send their child to the local public school for free and to have certain protections when they arrive at their jobs. Indeed, for better or for worse, an intentional shift to such an approach is part of what enabled widespread adoption of universal pre-K policies.
The power of predistribution in child care can be seen in other nations. For instance, in Germany, all parents have since 2013 enjoyed a legal right to a slot in a child care program from the time their children turn 1; in Berlin, services are essentially free. Similarly, in Canada, many parents are seeing their child care bills slashed by hundreds of dollars a month as the country pours money into its child care system; it’s not a means-tested subsidy with a burdensome application, just the sticker price going down. Neither country’s system is perfect by any means, but these examples demonstrate an inverted way of thinking about child care: as pre-hoc social and economic infrastructure rather than post-hoc welfare.
Either way, child care needs to be moved out of its redistributive welfare framing. That likely requires a combination of creating more truly universal policy proposals and encouraging elected leaders and other influencers to talk about child care as part of the American social fabric rather than a mere parental work support, along with other intentional, well-funded efforts toward cultural and narrative change.
Until the construct shifts in the public’s mind, it will be exceedingly difficult to build the public will necessary for transformational changes. Particularly as working-class voters continue to assert themselves as a dominant electoral force, child care stakeholders would do well to flip the script and make it clear that there is no fair deal without universal child care.
