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In my last newsletter I wrote about how Massachusetts became the most expensive state in the country to grow old, and how Medicare for All would let our older neighbors stay in the communities they built. That plan cuts what we spend on health care by 23 percent, with savings that come from eliminating insurance company administration, the billing bureaucracy hospitals currently use to fight with insurers, and the monopoly prices hospital systems and drug companies charge us because they can. Today, I want to talk about our youngest constituents, because the affordability crisis in Massachusetts starts the moment a child is born, and just like housing, utility bills, and health care, the prohibitive cost of child care is a problem the State House can solve directly and has spent decades declining to.
Massachusetts is the most expensive state in the nation for child care, with only the District of Columbia costing families more. Infant care here averages more than $20,000 a year statewide, more than in-state tuition at UMass Amherst, and in our part of Greater Boston families routinely pay $26,000 to $30,000 for a single infant. A family with an infant and a toddler can face a child care bill of more than $4,000 a month, larger than most families' rent or mortgage. Parents, overwhelmingly mothers, cut their hours or leave the workforce entirely because working stops making financial sense, costing Massachusetts families an estimated $1.7 billion a year in lost wages, while the educators doing some of the most important work in our economy, disproportionately women of color, earn poverty wages and leave the field, closing classrooms and lengthening waitlists. Parents pay too much, educators earn too little, and providers barely break even, because child care, exactly like housing, is a market that cannot deliver what families need without serious public investment.
There is already a model for how to tackle this problem, at the national level which Massachusetts could implement at the state level. Leaders from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Patty Murray have put forward universal child care proposals that all share the same core design: high-quality care and early education guaranteed for every child from birth to school age, free for lower-income families and capped at 7 percent of income for everyone else, no matter the size of your family. That 7 percent cap is the federal government's own definition of affordable, and a fraction of the 20 percent or more of income that Massachusetts families currently pay. For a family earning $130,000 with an infant and a toddler, that cap works out to about $750 a month for both kids combined, in place of the $4,000 or more they pay right now. Every version pays care workers like the educators they are, comparable to public school teachers, which solves the workforce shortage that leads to long waitlists.
This model has been working across the country. In New York, the Mamdani administration is rolling out universal child care with the first 2,000 free 2-year-old spots opening up this fall, and another 12,000 more coming next year. New York State has committed $11.8 billion to take universal child care statewide and guarantee pre-K for every four year old by 2028, all on a phased path to covering every child from six weeks to five years old. New Mexico, a state with a fraction of our wealth, made child care universal last year. When I hear colleagues say Massachusetts cannot afford this, I ask how New Mexico–a far more conservative and less wealthy state–can.
The national proposal funds universal child care by taxing extreme wealth and income, a principle already proven to work at the state scale. The Fair Share Amendment, which corporate lobbies swore would wreck our economy, brought in nearly $3 billion last year from incomes above $1 million, and it is already funding child care: Massachusetts kept its pandemic-era operational grants for providers going after the federal money ran out, $475 million a year that now supports over 8,000 programs and 42,000 educators. And that program survived because early educators and family child care providers, organized through their union, fought for it when Washington walked away. That proves both that we can raise revenue at scale when we tax those most able to pay and that public investment in child care works.
The full plan for high-quality universal child care in Massachusetts requires roughly $5 billion a year in public funding according to the leading independent analysis. The bills to raise that money are already filed. Multinational corporations like Apple and Amazon hide their Massachusetts profits in offshore tax havens, and right now our tax code lets them get away with not paying taxes on 95% of their income. The bill before the legislature changes that, and would tax half of those profits, matching states like Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island, and would raise over $400 million a year. And I will fight to go further and end the exemption entirely, because there is no principled reason corporations should get to dodge paying their taxes just because they shifted their profits offshore; ending this loophole would bring in nearly $1 billion a year.
The Digital Advertising Tax I filed with Senator Pat Jehlen is another potential source of funding for universal, free childcare, by making Google, Meta, and Amazon pay for the ad revenue they extract from Massachusetts and raises $200 to $500 million a year. Lastly, I propose taxing companies who pay their CEO more than 50 times their median worker, which would raise close to $1 billion a year while giving corporations a direct incentive to raise wages at the bottom. Together these three reforms raise over $2 billion every year from the corporations most able to pay, rivaling what the Fair Share Amendment brings in, and paired with a portion of that Fair Share revenue and the phased five-year rollout the Common Start coalition has already designed, universal child care in Massachusetts moves from aspiration to arithmetic. And if we need to go further, Vermont showed the way, funding its own child care transformation with a modest payroll contribution paid mostly by employers, a tool that at Massachusetts scale would raise roughly $1.5 billion a year, because employers know better than anyone that the child care shortage is costing them workers.
Where does this fight go next? States across the country, from Washington to Minnesota to California, are now moving to tax extreme wealth, not just income. Massachusetts has already proved with Fair Share that when corporate lobbies say something cannot be done, we can organize and prove them wrong. In a Commonwealth where a child's education can depend on whether her parents can find $26,000 a year, the existence of billion-dollar fortunes is a policy choice that we are free to unmake. The path to taxing that wealth directly runs through the same ballot amendment process we have already walked once. I will have much more to say on that soon.
I am running for State Senate to make different choices. The way we win universal child care is the same way we banned broker fees, made committee votes public, and stopped the utility blank check: by organizing inside and outside the building until voting with the lobbyists becomes politically impossible. I will keep pushing my own party to do the right thing the first time, not after it is already safe.
The primary is September 1, and in these final weeks the most powerful thing you can do is talk to your neighbors about the Massachusetts we deserve. Please join my team for a canvass shift or phone bank at electerika.com/volunteer, bring a friend, and let's finish this the way we started it, together.
And most importantly, make your plan to vote. Early voting is underway right now until Friday 8/28 at city or town hall or you can drop off your mail in ballot. On Tuesday, September 1, polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and you can look up your polling place here: Where Do I Vote?
In solidarity,
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