President Joe Biden is really upset that you might be spending too much time with your mother or your children.
Nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home.
My Build Back Better Act will make caregiving accessible and affordable and help them get back to work.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 23, 2021
It’s not entirely clear what Biden is talking about here. The “nearly 2 million” number resembles the 1.8 million-woman reduction in the labor force over the course of the pandemic.
First, it’s totally unfounded and obviously false to suggest that this reduction is entirely due to women who had to give up work in order to care for a family member. There are a thousand reasons why the pandemic might have reduced the female workforce.
How many millions of people moved further away from a big, expensive city thanks to the pandemic’s closures of the things that made cities attractive and the constant drumbeat that being near people was deadly? If you move, you often give up your job, and maybe it will take a while to start looking for a new one. Maybe you moved to a cheaper place in the country and don’t need a second income, especially if you sold your expensive close-in house during this boom.
Maybe your husband has shifted to running a small business out of the home, and so you support that business in some informal way. I know many couples who have adopted a similar arrangement, with either the husband or the wife in the supporting, technically unpaid role.
Notably, there are also many thousands of men who, on net, have left the labor force since the beginning of the pandemic. Check out this chart from the Department of Labor.
Department of Labor
More importantly, regarding those women and men who have stayed home in order to care for their children or parents, why does Biden say they have all been “locked out of the labor force?” Isn’t it just as likely that many of them have learned from the pandemic and the lockdowns that they would rather be with family than with colleagues?
Yes, many of the parents who gave up work to care for their children would rather be back at work. But the Biden administration never acknowledges the possibility that many of the parents are freely choosing to stay at home. Even less so does Biden entertain the opposite of his “locked out of the workplace” idea: that many mothers and fathers are locked out of time with their children by their need to work.
And here’s the irony: It’s very likely that the expanded child tax credit, championed by Biden, made it possible for tens of thousands of mothers and fathers to choose home life over work life.
Biden, for ideological reasons, cannot admit that some of the female labor force dropouts are people who have chosen to be stay-at-home moms (just as some of the male labor force dropouts chose to be stay-at-home dads). There’s a massive force within the Democratic Party and the ideological Left that has decided mothers staying at home is “ retrograde ” and a horrible blow to equality.
About 28% of mothers said in 2019 that their preference is “not working for pay at all.” The Biden administration clearly considers these people a problem.
Also, Biden’s answer is to subsidize daycare centers . That is not what most parents want. In fact, two-thirds of parents want parents to provide all the childcare, either through one parent staying home or both parents working flexible hours.
The Biden administration talks as if it’s trying to give parents what they want by liberating them from caring for children. It’s instead giving parents what the Biden administration thinks is best.
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November 24, 2021 at 12:26AM
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Joe Biden wants to liberate people from caring for their family - Washington Examiner
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