American exceptionalism in family policy

A 2021 UNICEF analysis ranked the United States last among 41 high and middle income countries on a composite measure of family-friendly policies. The ranking is not close. The United States sits below countries with a fraction of its GDP per capita. The exceptionalism is not a matter of affordability. The United States can afford whatever it chooses to afford. The exceptionalism is a matter of choice, and the choice has been consistent across Democratic and Republican administrations for half a century. The 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act would have created a national childcare system. It passed both houses of Congress. Nixon vetoed it. Nothing comparable has reached a president's desk since.

The Nixon veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act is one of the most consequential moments in American family policy, precisely because it foreclosed a path that was open and that was being taken by most peer countries in the same period. The veto message framed universal childcare as a threat to the family and as a step toward Soviet-style collectivism. The framing took hold. For the next fifty years, universal childcare in American politics has been freighted with cultural meanings that have no parallel in countries that built such systems without controversy. The veto was not the cause of American exceptionalism in family policy. It was the moment at which the exceptionalism was consolidated.

The federalist structure does create real obstacles to national family policy. States with different fiscal capacities, different political cultures, and different demographic profiles have resisted the imposition of national standards. But federalism is also an excuse. The Affordable Care Act passed despite federalist resistance. Social Security passed despite federalist resistance. Federalism is a constraint that can be overcome when the political will exists. The absence of national family policy reflects an absence of will more than a presence of constitutional impediment.

The original Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who in 1935 were disproportionately Black. This exclusion was not incidental. It was the price of Southern Democratic support for the law. The pattern established in 1935, in which national social programs were designed to work around the workforce that most needed them, persisted into the 1996 welfare reform that effectively dismantled cash assistance for poor families with children. American family policy has always carried the imprint of racial exclusion, and the current debate cannot be understood without that history.

The American system bundles health insurance, retirement security, and what minimal leave exists into the employment relationship. This bundle was a contingent outcome of World War II wage controls, which led employers to offer benefits as a substitute for wage increases. The bundle was never the only possible design. It is, however, the design that took hold, and it has shaped every subsequent debate. Once benefits are bundled with employment, separating them is politically costly, because the existing arrangements have created interests that defend the bundle even when the bundle harms the workers whose interests are nominally being defended.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that tax expenditures benefiting families, including the exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance, the child tax credit, the dependent care credit, and the mortgage interest deduction, total several hundred billion dollars per year. This is comparable to, in some measures larger than, the direct spending on family programs in the entire Nordic region. The American state spends on families. It just spends invisibly, and the invisibility is what makes the spending politically inert.

The American programs that are visible, including TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid, are means tested. This generates two problems. It stigmatizes the recipients, who must demonstrate poverty to qualify. And it creates political constituencies that exclude the middle class, which receives nothing from these programs and therefore has no incentive to defend or expand them. Universal programs build broad constituencies. Means tested programs build narrow ones. The American preference for means testing has been a strategic loss for family policy, even when individual programs have done real good for the families they reach.

For six months in 2021, the United States operated something close to a universal child allowance through the expanded child tax credit. The expansion lifted roughly three million children out of poverty in real time. When it was allowed to expire at the end of the year, child poverty rose immediately back to its prior level. The experiment proved that the policy works. It also proved that the political coalition to sustain such a policy at scale does not currently exist. The expiration was not the failure of the policy. It was the failure of the coalition.

Federal regulation of childcare quality is minimal. Standards are set by states, with enormous variation in licensing requirements, staff-child ratios, and quality monitoring. The result is a market in which price and quality are weakly correlated, in which parents have limited information, and in which providers operate on razor-thin margins that constrain what they can pay their workers. The regulatory void is not the absence of policy. It is a policy choice, one that prioritizes provider flexibility over child outcomes and that has produced exactly the dysfunctional market that critics from across the political spectrum have identified.

The Center for American Progress and other groups have estimated the economic cost of inadequate American family policy in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, in the form of lost wages from maternal labor force exit, reduced productivity from caregiving stress, and downstream public costs in education, health care, and child welfare. These estimates are inherently imprecise. The order of magnitude, however, is robust across methodologies. The United States is not saving money by not building family infrastructure. It is spending more money to absorb the consequences of not building it.

COVID-19 functioned as a stress test of the American family policy system, and the system failed in ways that were visible to households that had previously been insulated from the failures. Schools closed. Childcare collapsed. Mothers exited the labor force in numbers not seen in decades. The American Rescue Plan included substantial family supports, including the expanded child tax credit and emergency childcare funding, that briefly demonstrated what a more European approach might look like. When the emergency funding expired, the prior system reasserted itself. The lessons of the pandemic have been, so far, unlearned.

Younger American adults express more support for family policy expansion than older cohorts, by margins that have been growing for two decades. Whether this translates into political change depends on whether the political system aggregates generational preferences with sufficient fidelity, which the structural features of American politics, including the Senate and the Electoral College, currently do not. The exceptionalism may eventually erode under demographic pressure. It has not eroded yet. The question is whether it will erode in time to matter for the families currently bearing its costs, or whether another generation will pass before the country joins the rest of the wealthy world in treating children as a public concern.

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