Biden Economic Adviser Says To Encourage People to Choose Work over Welfare, D.C. Should Offer Child Care

Watch as a top economic advisor to Joe Biden basically says that unless the government offers child care to workers, it’s unreasonable to expect they go back to work:

This is insane as people worked pre-pandemic without government sponsored child care and it’s not the government or the taxpayers job to provide it.

Read the full transcript it is very enlightening:

HOST: “South Carolina, Arkansas, and now North Dakota pushing back against the additional unemployment insurance. Have you spoken to the governors of those states?”

BERNSTEIN: “I have not personally spoken to the governors.”

HOST: “Has the President?”

BERNSTEIN: “There are people within the administration, I don’t know or have a readout of precisely who. But I do know that yes, the President talks to governors all the time.”

HOST: “Do you think that is the wrong decision?”

BERNSTEIN: “Yeah, I do think it’s the wrong decision. I think the right decision is what the President talked about yesterday, which is twofold. To make sure we take down any barriers that stand between people and getting back to work, with childcare being the most prominent; to make sure that the rules of the UI system are followed. If people are offered a suitable job, the rules say they need to take it. And suitable, by the way, means a job that enables them to go back to work safely and recognizes that people have childcare obligations they can’t always meet. So helping to take down those barriers, getting folks back to work, and recognizing that the UI system is classic insurance for people who don’t have income from work and it’s been a huge boon to unemployed Americans throughout this period.”

HOST: “If it’s the wrong decision, let’s stress-test that. What will the consequences be this month and next month when these policies are introduced?”

BERNSTEIN: “Yeah, that’s a great question. I think they’re twofold. One is that you will see people really experience a level of economic hardship that would not have occurred if they maintained their enhanced benefits. And the other is that you’re not going to see much difference between the labor market outcomes in these areas versus others. So if we dig into the data thus far — I should say ‘thus far’ because these things change month-to-month — we don’t see a negative correlation between places where unemployment insurance replacement rates, meaning the extent to which it is replacing the wage, we don’t see a negative correlation between replacement rates and labor market outcomes, so that would suggest that UI is not the problem. And we know that people are facing barriers to childcare, to school. We know there’s concern about the virus out there. If you actually look at the vaccination rates among working age people, they are obviously a lot lower than the broader adult population.”

HOST 2: “Dr. Bernstein, you are eminently qualified to speak to those on the right and the left with your PhD in social welfare from Columbia. Folks, that is the history and heritage that speaks of a long century. Dr. Bernstein, frame right now on childcare the debate of a federal solution versus states’ rights to decide what they childcare would be. Where does that stand now, and where does President Biden want it to go?”

BERNSTEIN: “Probably the best way to answer that question is to look at every other advanced economy and recognize that they have stood up an accessible and affordable childcare sector, and in the vast majority of those economies, the labor force participation rate among caretakers, particularly women, is many percentage points higher than ours. This is not a classical sort of federal state rights thing. This is a classical missing markets problem. Even the most mainstream economics recognizes that when a market is missing, there’s a role for the federal government to come in and fix that externality. Here, the negative externality is a barrier to work for people who want to get into the labor market, so this is just a very simple solution to a market failure.”

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