Where Is Our Care Economy? Families are America’s Strength

Where Is Our Care Economy?  Families are America’s Strength
By Anne Marion
New York Times
April 16, 2021
I have spent the past two weeks reading about the infrastructure debate with mounting rage. Why?  The answer is simple. Insisting that there is actually a fixed definition of what infrastructure is — bridges, but not baby care—perfectly encapsulates the ways in which the world is still shaped by men. We need to include caring for humans as essential infrastructure.
But that idea is foreign to Republicans who are framing their fight against the Biden infrastructure plan in terms of what some call “real infrastructure” — roads, bridges, ports, and airports — versus what has been dubbed “liberal social programs,” including supporting home-based and community care.
Infrastructure, according to the Collins Dictionary, “consists of the basic facilities which enable it to function.”  Infrastructure are those facilities that are essential for everyone to do their jobs. It makes sense that men with wives at home to take on the 16-hour-a-day care responsibilities involved in raising children, supporting aged parents or otherwise tending to the sick, those with disabilities and the vulnerable, would need roads and bridges to grease the wheels of commerce and allow them to rack up capitalist profits.
But let’s imagine—it’s not that hard—a scenario in which those same men didn’t have wives at home and yet still wanted to have a family, or ensure that their own parents received love and support in their final years. In that case, they too might just find that care facilities were themselves just as “essential” to their ability to do paid work.
That’s even what the Trump administration concluded last year, although today’s Republicans are too hypocritical to admit the truth.  In 2020 the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued guidance on who should be considered “essential critical infrastructure workers.” It included child care workers of many kinds and “human services providers” bringing things like food and personal care to “older adults, people with disabilities, and others with chronic health conditions.” Sounds like care to me. But Republicans just want bridges, and to hell with supporting families.
And then there’s this: If child support policies aren’t infrastructure, what about fostering American industry’s competitive advantage?  Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable (and pay social security to us when we retire!).
However, during the pandemic American fertility plunged. According to an Associated Press study published this month, the number of babies born in the U.S. was dropping by 1% a year over the past decade, but data from 25 states indicates births for all of 2020 were down 4.3% from 2019.  And even deeper forces than the pandemic may hold American fertility rates down. Immigrants’ birthrates will gradually recov...