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    My Brother-in-Law Gets Free Child Care From His Parents. Why Don’t We?

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    Frustrated that she and her partner live too far away from his parents to reap the benefits of free grandparental supervision, a reader wonders how to broach her feelings of being cheated.My partner’s parents have been financially dependent on him and his brother for 10 years. They are unable to work. Still, they have provided free child care for my brother-in-law’s two children for the past five years. Meanwhile, my partner has been paying half of his parents’ living expenses. I’ve stayed out of these arrangements; my partner and I keep our finances separate. But now that we have a baby of our own — and his parents live too far away to provide child care — I am resentful that my partner has been effectively subsidizing his brother’s child care rather than saving money for ours. I think his brother is taking advantage of us. My partner is very sensitive about this; he doesn’t think grandparents should be compensated for child care. How can I approach this subject without creating tension?SISTER-IN-LAWI would drop the issue. You are looking at it too narrowly. Your partner and his brother are probably paying their parents’ living expenses out of gratitude, or maybe a sense of duty, after a lifetime of love and support from them. Your desire for a ledger adjustment based solely on child care — an accounting that your partner doesn’t want, for money that isn’t yours — seems off base to me.You are absolutely entitled to your feelings, of course. But isn’t the point of separate finances with your partner to insulate you and him from objections like this? As long as he pays his agreed share of joint expenses, he has done his part. And you haven’t said that money is tight.In my experience, parents often provide different kinds of support to their children. My parents helped me pay for expensive schools, for instance, while they helped my brother buy a home. Other than this child care issue, we have no window on your partner’s family, and I see no upside in pressing your case. (On a related note: If you had offered to pay my mother to take care of her beloved grandchildren, she would have laughed in your face.)Miguel PorlanHopefully the Relaxation Lingers as Long as the Scent?My husband loves to have massages at home. He’s done it for years — long before I moved in. The problem: His massage therapist wears a heavy scent that bothers me and lingers in the house. When we asked her about it, she said, “I don’t wear perfume.” But something she uses has a strong scent. (It’s not massage oil.) More troubling, though, is my husband’s lack of concern. He has a less sensitive nose than I do and just keeps saying it’s “so weird” that the smell bothers me. Can you help?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      This Economy Has Bigger Problems Than ‘Bad Vibes’

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      The economy is growing. Wages are up. Unemployment is low. Income inequality is narrowing. The fearmongering about inflation proved to be, well, wrong. According to many economy-watchers, Americans should be sending the Biden administration a gift basket full of positive vibes — and votes.Instead, consumer confidence polling paints a different picture. A recent Times/Siena poll found that only 2 percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” and only a further 16 percent said they were “good.” While economic indicators suggest that the economy is healthy and growing, the American public doesn’t feel that way. Why the perception gap?One popular theory is that media narratives have duped Americans into believing that they’re having a rough time, when, in fact, they’re doing fine. Kyla Scanlon coined “vibe-cession” last year to describe this gap between perception and economic indicators. Since then, a story has emerged about consumer confidence: that poor perception and political polarization are mostly to blame. Brian Beutler, who writes the newsletter “Off Message,” calls out social media and misinformation for reinforcing the “bad economy” belief. Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, wrote that a “toxic brew” of human bias for negative information and the attention economy leads to consumer pessimism.The Biden administration’s messaging about the strength of the economy will shape President Biden’s presidential campaign. If Americans’ negative vibes about the economy persist, Donald Trump will surely bludgeon Biden with a line of attack that he relishes delivering. One of Trump’s favorite claims is that he is a successful businessman who ran a strong economy as president. Too few people believe that Trump, the G.O.P.’s favored candidate, will go to jail between now and the 2024 election. And so it should worry Biden that, according to that Times/Siena poll, a majority of likely voters trust Trump more than Biden on the economy.Why aren’t more voters giving President Biden credit for his strong economy?The bad vibes explanation is sound on the indicators, but that story doesn’t think too highly of Americans. It does not acknowledge voters’ dissatisfaction. It also does not offer a way forward. What do you do about bad vibes, exactly? Hire an exorcist?Looking at the economy through more than macroeconomic indicators could tell us a more compelling, empowering story. What if people are not being manipulated by the media, confused about the fundamentals or biased against Democrats? What we know about historical changes to how the economy works and for whom it works might tell a different story with more potential for the future.One such story considers what we consume and how much harder (and expensive) it is to procure it. A lot of our consumption is about meeting our basic needs. Housing, food, and energy come to mind. The economic fundamentals on these may be trending positively, but the bad vibes narrative undersells how miserable that part of the economy can feel.People are struggling with mortgage interest rates, housing shortages and pricey grocery bills. They’re also consuming to make their lives work: on expensive, hard-to-manage child care, health care and convenience spending — things like restaurants, travel, delivery services, and on-demand help — which are necessary for balancing work and life demands. Even when those services are affordable, they are full of friction. That is a nice way of saying the consumer experience sucks. It is hard to schedule things, hard to get customer service, hard to judge the quality of what you are buying, and hard to get amends when an experience goes bad. There is a reason industry analysts have reported that customer brand loyalty is low and customer rage is high.In 2021, the American Rescue Plan created a temporary social safety net for millions of Americans that may have changed how they feel about their spending. For younger Americans, massive stimulus was a taste of the Great Society investment that benefited their grandparents and great-grandparents. Child care subsidies, direct cash transfers, food supplements, eviction moratoriums, and flexible work from home arrangements temporarily lifted many low-income people out of poverty. Those provisions also exposed many working and middle class workers to the difference that economic policy could make — for the better — in their lives.Then, fearing inflationary pressures on the economy, Congress let the American Rescue Plan’s most powerful investments, and therefore the most substantial government support for social reproduction in a generation, end. But social reproduction — the caretaking of people, relationships and systems that make our society work — still had to be done. Reallocating your spending from child care to student loan payments, for example, might be feasible, but it is not particularly enjoyable. That assumes one can find accessible child care or an in-network doctor or apartment. When stimulus funding ended, a lot of services people rely on became harder to find and afford.When people talk about the work that makes the economy possible, they often think first and most about child care. There is a good reason for that. Child care is necessary work. It is often unpaid work (when done by mothers) or underpaid work (when done by child care workers). The American Rescue Plan sent $39 billion to states, with the aim of stabilizing child care centers. After some of that funding expired in September, the problems typical of our country’s child care shortage re-emerged. Depending on where one lives, child care centers’ capacity may not have returned to prepandemic levels, producing a lot of anxiety and wait-lists for families. As one of my colleagues recently put it, anyone who thinks he just has bad vibes hasn’t tried to find summer day care for young children.Then there is the rest of the hidden labor that has to happen so people can go to work, that is so often invisible and has historically been the domain of women: caring for a household and aging relatives, receiving the plumber or delivery truck and, of course, having the time (and money) to make meals, manage doctors appointments, chauffeur kids to after-school activities and clean the house.For the most part, the industries that support that kind of invisible labor are more difficult to find, harder to obtain and more expensive to buy than they were four years ago. Those industries also gained a lot of not-so-enjoyable friction. Industry surveys suggest that customer service has gotten worse and consumers are angry about it. That coarsening of consumerism affects millions, but women, in particular, pay a price due to the outsize role they play in managing hidden labor.Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, calls the way our society relies on families to independently support social reproduction a “D.I.Y. society.” Research demonstrates repeatedly that women, especially, are sacrificing to balance paid work with all that D.I.Y. labor. Healthy economic indicators, like low unemployment, also put the squeeze on women by raising the price and increasing the difficulty of hiring a little help.The bad vibes story emphasizes that lower-income workers have benefited the most from the growing economy. It is true. Over the past four years, at the macro level, workers at the bottom of the income distribution made greater gains than those at the top. That wage compression means some good things, for example: People without college degrees are benefiting from a strong labor market. The female-dominated child care field is a good example. Acknowledging that child care is skilled labor empowers the workers to demand better working conditions.However, those positives also present a challenge. Using child care workers as an example again, as their wages stagnated and their skills upgraded, many of them left for better paying jobs. That is the case for a lot of the jobs that do the vital social reproduction work in our economy. There are now fewer people to do the low-paid, low status work than there was before the Covid-19 pandemic. Illness pushed some workers out. Others left for better economic opportunities. The social reproduction work needs to be done but there are fewer workers able or willing to do it.Low unemployment means more Americans are working. It also means more people are experiencing our social reproduction crisis firsthand. This has long been a reality for female workers. Our crisis of who is supposed to do all the undervalued labor that underpins economic life has pushed many women out of the work force, reduced their participation, and generally made work more stressful. Men now take on moderately more responsibility for household tasks. With that shift, the problem of balancing care work and paid work has become urgent for both men and women. Even as millions of Americans are earning more, they face stiff competition from high-income earners for a smaller pool of services — including schools, health care, home maintenance and retail services — to make it all work.In short, people may have more money. But it has become harder to buy the services they need and more expensive to buy the goods that they want. The very wealthy can spend their way out of that bind, simply by paying more for housekeeping and grocery delivery and nannies. But everyone else needs some sort of partnership with the government to make the act of working not just affordable, but accessible. The Biden administration has not solved that bigger crisis (neither did the Trump administration). Whether Americans are blaming the right administration for their woes, their economic lives legitimately feel tougher even as they work more and earn more money.Bad economic storytelling tells millions of Americans in an election year that they only think that they are struggling financially. Good economic storytelling would figure out how to account for their experiences and imagine a better future. People need child care, and dentists, and affordable housing, and safe transportation, and accessible education. Telling them that to instead enjoy the fact that they can buy a Tesla is a fundamental misunderstanding of what economic policy is supposed to do, which is to make people’s lives better.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.Source images by Ivan Bajic and kutaytanir/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      In Post-Roe World, These Conservatives Embrace New Benefits for Parents

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      Some conservative thinkers are pushing Republicans to move on from Reagan-era family policy and send cash to families. A few lawmakers are listening.Sending cash to parents, with few strings attached. Expanding Medicaid. Providing child care subsidies to families earning six figures.The ideas may sound like part of a progressive platform. But they are from an influential group of conservative intellectuals with a direct line to elected politicians. They hope to represent the future of a post-Trump Republican Party — if only, they say, their fellow travelers would abandon Reaganomics once and for all.These conservatives generally oppose abortion rights. They’re eager to promote marriage, worried about the nation’s declining fertility rate and often resist the trans rights movement.But they also acknowledge that with abortion now illegal or tightly restricted in half the states, more babies will be born to parents struggling to pay for the basics — rent, health care, groceries and child care — when prices are high and child care slots scarce.“A full-spectrum family policy has to be about encouraging and supporting people in getting married and starting families,” said Oren Cass, executive director of the American Compass think tank. “It has to be pro-life, but also supportive of those families as they are trying to raise kids in an economic environment where that has become a lot harder to do.”The idea of spending heavily on family benefits remains an outlier within the Republican Party, which only recently rejected Democrats’ attempts to extend pandemic-era child tax credits.But a number of conservative members of Congress have embraced new benefits for parents, including Mr. Cass’s former boss, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, as well as the senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio.And in President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he called on Republicans to join him in providing families with child care, paid leave, child tax credits and affordable housing.Some conservative thinkers believe that many young children are better off at home and are skeptical of policies that would place more in center-based care.Jason Henry for The New York TimesNow, Mr. Cass and conservative allies are hoping to shape ideas for the 2024 Republican presidential primary and beyond, targeting ambitious governors who have emphasized making their states family-friendly, such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.A key priority for this new network of conservative thinkers is for the federal government to send parents cash monthly for each child, a sea change from decades of Republican thinking on family policy. They hope the cash could encourage people to have more children, and allow more parents to stay home full- or part-time when their children are young.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.Education Issues: Donald J. Trump and possible Republican rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are seizing on race and gender issues in schools, but such messages had a mixed record in the midterms.No Invite for Trump: The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has invited a half-dozen potential G.O.P. presidential candidates to its annual donor retreat — but not Mr. Trump.Falling in Line: With the vulnerabilities of Mr. Trump’s campaign becoming evident, the bickering among Democrats about President Biden’s potential bid for re-election has subsided.Harris’s Struggles: With Mr. Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.She and others debate to what extent benefits should be tied to work requirements, but even the more stringent proposals do not require full-time work. These conservatives believe that many young children are better off at home and are skeptical of policies that would place more in child care centers. And they point to polls that show many parents would prefer to cut their work hours and take care of their babies and toddlers themselves.In a Republican Party hoping to become the party of parents, these conservative intellectuals do not share the outraged tone of right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo, the “parental rights” crusader battling what he sees as leftist ideology in school curriculums.While they may agree with much of that cultural critique, supporting families financially, they say, is a pragmatic way to prop up conservative values alongside new restrictions on abortion..Oren Cass said that his ideas on policy had been shaped by his own family life.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn arguing this, Ms. Bachiochi, Mr. Cass and others in this network are making a big ask: for Republicans to reject what they call the outdated, rigid agenda of the Reagan era, which not only cut working parents from welfare programs, but also vilified mothers receiving public benefits, often in starkly racist terms. If Republicans are to grow support among working-class, multiethnic voters, they say, the party must match pro-family rhetoric with pro-family investments.The group has founded think tanks, published statements of principle and organized discussions with policymakers to push its cause. Mr. Cass, 39, said his ideas on policy had been shaped by his own family life. His wife has her own career, and they both work from home in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.Mr. Cass served as the domestic policy director for Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign; in 2020, he founded American Compass, a think tank that has tried to build conservative momentum for more generous government support to working families. Its priorities include child cash benefits, wage subsidies and even reviving the labor movement.That some conservatives have landed on what amounts to a new entitlement program seems to speak to the economic plight of many families. The pressures of wage stagnation, low marriage rates and the opioid epidemic have helped erode Republican anti-government orthodoxy, said Seth Dowland, a historian of the family values movement and professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University. “There are some Republicans looking at this and saying, ‘We need to invest in rebuilding families and rebuilding communities, because it’s dire in some places — and it’s our voters,’” he said.Ms. Bachiochi, the mother of seven children, 4 to 21, is a fellow at two think tanks, the Abigail Adams Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her husband is a tech executive and, she said, much more of a baby person than she is. In an interview, she recalled struggling to get reading and writing done while her babies were napping.Left to right, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introducing their paid family leave legislation in 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesShe celebrates mothers finding paid work that adds meaning to their lives, but believes government should help parents of both sexes spend more time on child-rearing.The job of parents, in her view, is to create “adults with virtue who can go out and be good friends, spouses, good employees, good citizens.”The primary problem, she said, is that “the family is so overtaxed economically that they don’t have time with one another to do that work” of raising children, which is, by nature, time intensive.Her own ideas have shifted radically over time. In the mid-1990s, as a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, she volunteered for Bernie Sanders, then a congressman. But she also interned for a Washington bipartisan group hoping to shape President Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms, which curtailed cash payments to single mothers, while tying remaining benefits to strict work requirements. Through that experience, she said, she came to appreciate that some members of both parties shared a sincere commitment to alleviating poverty.Since then, Ms. Bachiochi has embraced her Catholic roots, in part through Alcoholics Anonymous. She now considers herself “center right,” she said, but more often argues with Republicans than with Democrats.“The libertarian right is a little bit blind” to the economic conditions families live under, Ms. Bachiochi said, noting that many parents struggle with the low pay and irregular hours of service jobs, working long days while leaving their children with less-than-ideal care.Patrick T. Brown, 33, a former congressional staffer and current fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, previously cared for his children full-time. Now, he works part-time from home in Columbia, S.C., and takes charge of his four children after school while his wife works as a college professor. He supports child cash benefits, expanding Medicaid to more mothers and increasing the supply of affordable housing.“There are definitely some conservatives who still point to the 1950s as a normative vision for family life,” Mr. Brown said, referencing the “Leave It to Beaver” white, suburban family with a stay-at-home wife.“That debate is stale,” he added. “We shouldn’t expect we can turn back the clock — and we shouldn’t really want to.”Mr. Brown, Mr. Cass and Ms. Bachiochi are well known on Capitol Hill.Their influence can been seen in Mr. Romney’s bill to expand the child tax credit, which would provide families earning up to $400,000 with $350 in cash per month for each child under 6, and $250 per month for children 6 to 17.Mr. Romney and Mr. Rubio, Republican of Florida, have a separate proposal to allow workers to draw from future Social Security payments to fund parental leave.And last year, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, introduced a bill that would subsidize child care for families earning up to 150 percent of their state’s median income, which in some states approaches $200,000 for a family of four.These proposals have attracted criticism from both conservatives and liberals.Scott Winship, director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, applauded any attempt to move away from conservative social policy based in “cultural grievance.” But he argued that many of the proposals were overly generous to middle-class and upper middle-class parents.“I’d focus much more strongly on low-income families,” he said. “We have this huge deficit, and we need to start husbanding our resources in a more serious way.”A cost-conscious approach has also been embraced by many Republican governors, who over the past year have tried to address child care shortages primarily through deregulation — increasing class sizes in child care programs, for example.Both parties are still deeply divided over whether benefits should be tied to work requirements — a core belief of centrists like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, and conservatives like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican.When Senator Romney first introduced his Family Security Act in 2021, it offered cash to parents no matter their work history. After an outcry from Republicans and Mr. Cass, he revised the proposal in 2022 to require $10,000 in family income to receive the full benefit.Senator Hawley of Missouri, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, has also proposed monthly cash payments to parents of children younger than 13 who meet a modest work requirement.Progressives have criticized these plans for favoring married couples and leaving out caregivers without earnings, such as college students, parents with disabilities or retired grandparents.The family policy ideas in the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill were more sweeping. But none became law.Now, some Republicans and Democrats say that a bipartisan deal on family policy would likely require Republicans to rally around proposals like Senator Romney’s — a difficult goal.Senator Romney is committed to building support for “federal policies to be more pro-family,” he said in a written statement. “This includes earning support from Republican colleagues.” More

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      Biden Weighs State of the Union Focus on His Unfinished Agenda

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      As the president prepares for his national address, his aides debate an emphasis on his still-unrealized plans for child care, prekindergarten and more.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top economic aides have battled for weeks over a key decision for his State of the Union address on Tuesday: how much to talk about child care, prekindergarten, paid leave and other new spending proposals that the president failed to secure in the flurry of economic legislation he signed in his first two years in office.Some advisers have pushed for Mr. Biden to spend relatively little time on those efforts, even though he is set to again propose them in detail in the budget blueprint he will release in March. They want the president to continue championing the spending he did sign into law, like investments in infrastructure like roads and water pipes, and advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors, while positioning him as a bipartisan bridge-builder on critical issues for the middle class.Other aides want Mr. Biden to spend significant time in the speech on an issue set that could form the core of his likely re-election pitch to key swing voters, particularly women. Polls by liberal groups suggest such a focus, on helping working families afford care for their children and aging parents, could prove a winning campaign message.The debate is one of many taking place inside the administration as Mr. Biden tries to determine which issues to focus on in a speech that carries extra importance this year. It will be Mr. Biden’s first address to the new Republican majority in the House, which has effectively slammed the brakes on his legislative agenda for the next two years. And it could be a preview for the themes Mr. Biden would stress on the 2024 campaign trail should he run for a second term.Administration officials caution that Mr. Biden has not finalized his strategy. A White House official said Friday that the president was preparing to tout his economic record and his full vision for the economy.The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden named Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients replaces Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office.Economic Aide Steps Down: Brian Deese, who played a pivotal role in negotiating economic legislation Mr. Biden signed in his first two years in office, is leaving his position as the president’s top economic adviser.Eyeing 2024: Mr. Biden has been assailing House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to Social Security and Medicare, as he ramps up for what is likely to be a run for re-election.Few of Mr. Biden’s advisers expect Congress to act in the next two years on paid leave, an enhanced tax credit for parents, expanded support for caregivers for disabled and older Americans or expanded access to affordable child care. All were centerpieces of the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan Mr. Biden announced in the first months of his administration. Mr. Biden proposes to offset those and other proposals with tax increases on high earners and corporations.Earlier this week, Mr. Biden hinted that he may be preparing to pour more attention on those so-called “care economy” proposals, which he and his economic team say would help alleviate problems that crimp family budgets and block would-be workers from looking for jobs.At a White House event celebrating the 30th anniversary of a law that mandated certain workers be allowed to take unpaid medical leave, Mr. Biden ticked through his administration’s efforts to invest in a variety of care programs in the last two years, while acknowledging failure to pass federally mandated paid leave and other larger programs.Mr. Biden said he remained committed to “passing a national program of paid leave and medical leave.”“And, by the way, American workers deserve paid sick days as well,” he said. “Paid sick days. Look, I’ve called on Congress to act, and I’ll continue fighting.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.For Mr. Biden, continuing to call for new spending initiatives aimed at lower- and middle-income workers would draw a clear contrast with the still-nascent field of Republicans seeking the White House in 2024. It would cheer some outside advocacy groups that have pushed him to renew his focus on programs that would particularly aid women and children.The State of the Union speech “presents the president with a rare opportunity to take a victory lap and, simultaneously, advance his agenda,” the advocacy group First Focus on Children said in a news release this week. “All to the benefit of children.”The efforts could also address what Mr. Biden’s advisers have identified as a lingering source of weakness in the recovery from the pandemic recession: high costs of caregiving, which are blocking Americans from looking for work. The nonprofit group ReadyNation estimates in a new report that child care challenges cost American families $78 billion a year and employers another $23 billion.“Among prime-age people not working in the United States, roughly half of them list care responsibilities as the main reason for not participating in the labor force,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters this week. She noted that the jobs rebound has lagged in care industries like nursing homes and day care centers.“These remain economic challenges and addressing them could go a long ways towards supporting our nation’s labor supply,” she said.But focusing on that unfinished economic work could conflict with Mr. Biden’s repeated efforts this year to portray the economy as strong and position him as a president who reached across the aisle to secure big new investments that are lifting growth and job creation. On Friday, the president celebrated news that the economy created 517,000 jobs in January, in a brief speech that did not mention the challenges facing caregivers.Calling for vast new spending programs also risks further antagonizing House conservatives, who have made government spending their first large fight with the president. Republicans have threatened to allow the United States to fall into an economically catastrophic default on government debt by not raising the federal borrowing limit, unless Mr. Biden agrees to sharp cuts in existing spending.“Revenue into the government has never been higher,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Thursday, a day after he met with Mr. Biden at the White House to discuss fiscal issues and the debt limit. “It’s the highest revenue we’ve ever seen in. So it’s not a revenue problem. It’s a spending problem.”Catie Edmondson More

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      Should Iowa or South Carolina Go First?

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      More from our inbox:Humans and Wildlife: The Messages Are MixedThe Decades-Long Struggle for Affordable Child Care Antonio Giovanni PinnaTo the Editor:Re “Democrats to Iowa: Get Lost!,” by Art Cullen (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 12):Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Cullen is revealing more about the problem with Iowa than anything about the Democratic Party when he complains that the Democrats’ proposed new primary schedule is set up to “dump the Iowa caucuses into the ditch.”It does no such thing, of course; it merely deprives the Hawkeye State of its guaranteed gatekeeper status at the head of the line. Mr. Cullen’s self-righteous huffing that “discarding Iowa is not a great way to mend fences in rural America” seems to suggest that he feels that somehow his state is read out of the Union if it isn’t allowed to speak first when presidential primary season rolls around.New Hampshire, which holds the first actual primaries, has a similar attitude. Neither state’s position on the electoral calendar was inscribed in stone, but you’d never know it from their champions’ zealotry on this issue.Personally, I’d prefer to see the order of the primaries and caucuses reshuffled before every presidential election. That way, at least Iowa would be at or near the front at least some of the time, but one of the smaller, whitest states in the nation wouldn’t get to fire the race’s starting gun every time. Surely Iowans can find something else about their state to be proud of.Eric B. LippsStaten IslandTo the Editor:Art Cullen’s critique of the Democratic National Committee’s proposal to put South Carolina ahead of Iowa on the nominating calendar is misguided. Democrats haven’t dumped “the Iowa caucuses into a ditch.” Rather, they’re considering leading with a state with voter rolls that better represent Democratic voters and the country as a whole.Mr. Cullen argues that diversity has a chance in Iowa, citing Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton at the caucus. But an overwhelmingly white electorate choosing a diverse candidate is not the same as a diverse electorate having its say in the process.Rural states like Iowa have challenges, but they don’t need symbolic support like keeping the Iowa caucus first. Instead, they need real solutions, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides subsidies for renewable energy projects that will bring economic vitality to rural areas.John HorschOakland, Calif.To the Editor:Art Cullen’s essay was remarkably self-serving. Iowa goes first by tradition, which gives a rural, largely white state outsized importance.I get that Iowans want to hold onto their position, but why should the rest of the nation take cues from this one state? It is time to hold national primaries, all on the same day. Let everyone in the nation vote, at the same time. This has the side benefit of shortening the ridiculously long primary season.Katherine Jo GlavesSeattleHumans and Wildlife: The Messages Are Mixed Tom KrawczykTo the Editor:Re “My Mother Has Two Sons: Me and a Squirrel” (Op-Doc, nytimes.com, Dec. 5):What a joy to wake up to such a tender video of a woman responding to an abandoned newborn creature in her yard. Her son, Tom Krawczyk, is a gifted videographer whose obvious professionalism captured both his mother’s humanity and her concern for a wild animal’s future.At this time of year, especially this year, it is a balm to witness such a poignant gem as this, reminding me of all that is fresh and good in the world and that this sort of intimate connection, wherever we find it, is the ultimate healing.Marjorie HermanHamilton, N.J.To the Editor:I was frustrated by the mixed messaging in The Times about how to best care for wildlife. The Dec. 5 Op-Doc about a woman raising a newborn squirrel as a family member is heartwarming, but unfortunately has the potential to seriously mislead viewers.It counters the excellent advice found in a piece by Margaret Renkl (“Wildlife Rescue Heals the Human Heart,” Opinion guest essay, Dec. 7) about the importance of wildlife rehabilitation centers.The responsible — and legal — thing to do when encountering orphaned or injured wildlife is to place the animal with a certified wildlife rehabilitator.Home-raised animals can suffer from nutritional deficiencies or simply may not survive a well-meaning amateur’s aid. Animals that become acclimated to humans have been known to attack their caregivers or strangers who don’t understand their natural behaviors.Their instinctual response to potential predators might also be compromised. (In this video, the squirrel was friends with a cat.) The most compassionate response is to put an animal’s care into the hands of someone who has the educational training to best support their survival.Kim BaileyNashvilleThe writer is a retired metro parks naturalist.To the Editor:Re “Wildlife Rescue Heals the Human Heart”:Although it was heartwarming to read about the often heroic efforts of wildlife rehabilitators in helping injured and orphaned animals, I can’t help thinking about all the ways that other, less compassionate humans deliberately inflict harm and torture on our wildlife.The indiscriminate trapping and snaring of wolves, the barbaric wildlife-killing contests that still take place in many states and all forms of recreational trophy hunting reflect an indifference to the suffering of our nonhuman kinfolk, who like us value their lives, strive to take care of their families and have every right to share this earth with us.Mary Anne EricsonPortland, Ore.The Decades-Long Struggle for Affordable Child Care Eleanor DavisTo the Editor:Re “The Child Care Crisis Has Been ‘Urgent’ Since ’86. Just Ask Cosmo,” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, nytimes.com, Dec. 7):I read Ms. Grose’s excellent article with a sense of déjà vu — the more things change, the more they stay the same.In 1982, a group of friends and I started a day care center on the Upper West Side because there were few options for full-time working parents.We managed to receive support from a private foundation to help us set up the little center, secured space in a rundown synagogue, and founded one of the first Jewish all-day child care centers in New York City. We named it Yaldaynu, Hebrew for “our children.” (I am pleased to say it is still operating.)It is sad that 40 years later, my daughter, one of those first children, and now a mother, still does not have quality, affordable day care options for her daughter.When will the U.S. do what most of the rest of the West does and provide quality affordable child care for their citizens? Why is this not even on the agenda of urgent our country is facing?Now is the time for Cosmo, which ran a cover story on this issue in 1986, to put it back on the cover, and for politicians, corporations and nonprofits to take action.Jeanne B. KesAlbuquerque More

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      The Sandwich Generation Is Getting Squished

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      In early 2020, I wrote about the struggles of the “sandwich generation,” demographers’ label for those who are caring for children and aging relatives at the same time. The sandwich generation parents I spoke to in that prepandemic moment talked about the emotional and financial toll of that level of caregiving responsibility. Some had to leave full-time employment or change jobs because caring for a parent with failing health and children with their own abundant needs took too much time and required too much flexibility.More than two years later, I wanted to check back in on this group (which, according to Pew Research Center, includes more than half of 40-somethings). As I’ve written regularly, the difficulties facing both parents and child care workers can be interconnected: The child care industry doesn’t pay workers enough to prevent a lot of turnover, many centers are short-staffed, parents are already paying more for child care than they are for housing in many states and inflation is making everything worse.Elder care has similar challenges. The AARP Public Policy Institute, which tracks nursing home staffing shortages by state, reports that an average of 25.1 percent of nursing homes don’t have enough direct care workers. In some states, it’s dire — over 60 percent of nursing homes in Maine, Minnesota and Wyoming are short on staff. Nursing home work became a particularly dangerous job during the pandemic: As Scientific American reported last year, “Workers in skilled nursing facilities had at least 80 deaths per 100,000 full-time employees” in 2020.Wages in the direct care field, which includes caregivers at private residences, assisted living centers and nursing homes, are “are persistently and notoriously low,” according to PHI, an advocacy group that researches elder care and disability issues. PHI noted, in a report last year, that these workers “are predominantly women, people of color and immigrants,” and that “median annual earnings are just $20,200,” due in part to “high rates of part-time employment” — and how do you support a family on that?Considering the toll Covid took on residents of nursing homes, there’s additional incentive for adult children to keep their parents living with them at home as long as possible, and that can require emotional and financial compromises. Women are more likely to be doing this care — according to the Family Caregiver Alliance, as of 2015, “The average caregiver is a 49-year-old woman who works outside the home and provides 20 hours per week of unpaid care to her mother.”Rebecca Jones’s experience is emblematic of the sandwich generation pandemic crunch. Her mother was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2014, which she called “a cruel and relentless illness.” Still, “we really dedicated ourselves to trying to keep her home as long as possible,” she told me. Her family relied on day programs in New England, where they live, to keep her mother occupied. One of her mother’s programs shut down because of a lack of funding before Covid hit. Jones scrambled to find another program, only for it to shut down along with everything else in March 2020.Jones was working as a paralegal at that time, and her husband is a mechanical insulator. In 2020, one of her children was a toddler and the other was an infant, and they were enrolled in a home day care. Jones, her father and her sister worked to get her mother a home health aide through Medicaid, she said. The family was able to manage, with difficulty, until March 2021, when all their arrangements collapsed at once: The woman who ran the home day care took another job, so Jones’s child care disappeared. Her mother’s condition became so bad that she could no longer remain at home, even with a health aide five hours a day.It was all too much. “I gave up a career that I love,” Jones said, because the cheapest child care she could find was $2,500 a month for her two kids, and that was financially out of her reach. Her mother, a school secretary, worked up until the day she was diagnosed with dementia, but “there’s no safety net for the elder working class. That was really so devastating,” Jones said. Her mother died that spring.According to an AARP survey from 2021, caring for older family members is a financial strain for many: “The typical annual total is significant: $7,242. On average, family caregivers are spending 26 percent of their income on caregiving activities.” That’s just the out-of-pocket cost, which doesn’t account for the sweat equity that loved ones are putting in. PHI has estimated that 43 million people provide unpaid caregiving to friends and family members, and that their “economic contribution is valued at $470 billion.”The elder care crunch is only going to become more dire as the population ages. According to a 2022 report on the imperative to improve nursing home quality from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine:The United States, like much of the world, has an aging population. Half of today’s 65-year-olds will need some paid long-term care services before they die. By 2030, one in four Americans will be age 65 or older. The fastest growing group will be those over age 85; this group is expected to grow from 6.5 million to 11.8 million by 2035 and 19 million by 2060. Marriage and fertility rates have declined, while life expectancy has increased, meaning fewer family caregivers will be available.The report has recommendations for improving nursing home care including increasing federal Medicaid payments to states, requiring that states use funding to raise workers’ pay and expand staffing, and requiring a full-time infection control specialist. There’s also need to form some kind of infrastructure for home care, like the kind Rebecca Jones was doing, said Amy York, the executive director of the Eldercare Workforce Alliance.But many ailing loved ones need care now, and help isn’t necessarily on the horizon. I asked York what sandwich generation parents can do in this moment, and she said, “One of the things that needs to be happening is that caregivers need to speak out.” She added, “Older adults tend not to, because we don’t want to think about getting older.” But lawmakers in particular need to hear from their constituents how difficult this work is, and the strain it is putting on families.If you’re not in the sandwich yet, you need to anticipate being in it someday, and get your older relatives to plan for their future. According to AARP, only 29 percent of older Americans have planned with their families how they want to be cared for as they age, and only 12 percent have purchased private long-term care insurance. Jelana Canfield, who lives in Hillsboro, Ore., and owns a bakery, told me via email that her mother, who has Parkinson’s, got long-term-care insurance after caring for her own mother, seeing how stressful it was and how financially out of reach good memory care was.But even though her own mother is in a good assisted-living situation funded by that insurance, Canfield told me she wishes she could afford to keep her mother in her own home. She said her mom calls her four or five times a day, adding, “I’ll call back while pushing my guilt down deep so I don’t cry that I’m not the one who is taking care of her anymore after three years of my husband and I doing everything for her.”Though it isn’t possible for all families, rotating family members in to help care for elders can help lighten the load. Terryn Hall, who lives in Durham, N.C. and wrote about caring for her grandmother in The Washington Post, told me about helping her mother, who is her grandmother’s primary caretaker. When Covid hit, “I jumped in and started helping out more. My mom is the primary caregiver, I was always the pinch-hitter,” she said. She took her grandma to medical appointments, made sure she had food and helped organize other family members who wanted to help.“I wish there were more frameworks or social narratives around staying home and building a community,” for younger people, Hall said. It should be just as aspirational, she said, as moving away from your family of origin to start a big career. Though she doesn’t have children, Hall said she would like to, and would want to live near family that could help her care for them.One of the things that stood out to me in the many conversations I had with parents of the sandwich generation was how isolated they felt, because the work of caring for parents with chronic illnesses at the end of their lives was so hard and so sad. Talking about how common this is, and how difficult, won’t create an elder care system where none exists, but acknowledging this as a collective experience is one way to ease the burden.Want More?In The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz reviews new books by Elizabeth McCracken and Lynne Tillman in which “daughters try to transcribe the discordant emotions provoked by a mother’s decline and death.” As Shulevitz puts it: “Doing battle with monsters is an inescapable part of elder care. Ministering to mothers, to bodies that were once all-powerful and the source of everything good but are now reduced to helplessness, is particularly scary, or at least very eerie.”In September, writing for The Times, Paula Span looked at the quiet cost of family caregiving. “The pandemic amplified the conflict between employment and caregiving, Dr. [Yulya] Truskinovsky [an economist at Wayne State University] and colleagues found in another study. ‘Caregiving arrangements are very fragile,’ she noted. While families often patch together paid and unpaid care, ‘it’s unstable, and if one thing falls through, your whole arrangement falls apart.’”In July, The Times’s Lydia DePillis, Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman reported that “a lack of child care and elder care options has forced some women to limit their hours or sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.”The Times’s resident ethicist ponders the question: “Am I Obligated to Look After My Insufferable Mother?”Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.My 4-year-old’s resistance to preschool was very high this morning and we were about to miss drop-off time. While she was in her room I turned on the “Frozen” soundtrack as loud as I could, knocked on her door like Anna does in the movie, then started dancing and singing around the house. By the second song she was laughing so much that I got her clothes on and teeth brushed and in the car seat, just in time to leave — and I felt like I got a workout in as well!— Samantha Campbell, MauiIf you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More

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      Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back

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      Some fear that the hard-right politician, whose party is expected to be the big winner in the election on Sunday, will continue policies that have kept women back.ROME — Being a woman, and mother, has been central to the political pitch of Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right politician who is likely to become Italy’s prime minister after elections on Sunday.She once ran for mayor seven months pregnant because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t. Her most famous speech includes the refrain “I am a woman. I am a mother.” She often talks with pride about how she started a party, Brothers of Italy, and rose to the top of national politics without any special treatment.But as happy as women’s rights activists are about that fact that a woman could finally run Italy, many wish it was essentially any other woman in Italy. They fear that Ms. Meloni’s hard-right agenda, her talk about preventing abortions, opposing quotas and other measures will set back the cause of women.“It’s not a gain at all and, indeed, a possible setback from the point of view of women’s rights,” said Giorgia Serughetti, who writes about women’s issues and teaches political philosophy at Bicocca University in Milan.More than in neighboring European Union countries, women in Italy have struggled to emerge in the country’s traditionally patriarchal society. Four out of 10 Italian women don’t work. Unemployment rates are even higher for young women starting careers. Female chief executive officers lead only a tiny percentage of companies listed on Milan’s stock exchange, and there are fewer than 10 female rectors at Italy’s more than 80 universities.And for many Italian women, finding a suitable work-life balance becomes nearly impossible once children enter the equation. Affordable, all-day, public child care is nonexistent in many areas, and women paid the highest price during the pandemic, staying home even after periods of lockdown when schools were shut.All national and international indicators suggest that if women in Italy worked more, gross domestic product would largely benefit and increase.“Half of Italian women do not have economic independence,” said Linda Laura Sabbadini, a statistician and director of new technologies at Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. “That can’t just be cultural; politics clearly hasn’t done enough for women so far.”Ms. Meloni has presented herself as someone who will help, but on key issues to women, the coalition has been vague and short on details. And a coalition partner, Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigrant League party, has admired Victor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, and his family policies. The League’s leader recently said that Mr. Orban had drafted the “most advanced family policy” giving “the best results at the European level.”Matteo Salvini, right, then the Italian interior minister, next to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at a news conference in Milan in 2018.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Orban has encouraged Hungarian mothers to procreate prolifically to counter the dropping birthrate. This month, the Hungarian government passed a decree that would require women seeking an abortion to observe fetal vital signs before moving forward with the procedure.Concerns have emerged in Italy that Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition could make it harder for women to have abortions in a country where the procedure has been legal since 1978 but is still very difficult to obtain.Asked about the law, Ms. Meloni, who has said her mother nearly aborted her, vowed in an interview that she “wouldn’t change it” as prime minister, and that abortion would remain “accessible and safe and legal.” But she added that she wanted to more fully apply a part of the law “about prevention,” which, she said, had been effectively ignored until now.Critics fear that approach would allow anti-abortion organizations to play a more prominent role in family-planning clinics and encourage even more doctors to avoid the procedure. Only about 33 percent of doctors perform legal abortions in Italy, and even less, 10 percent, in some regions.Laura Lattuada, an actress in Rome, said she was concerned that the abortion law could be chipped away with Ms. Meloni in power.“She’s constantly saying she wants to improve it, but I am not sure that her conception of protecting women and the family corresponds to the improvement of women’s rights,” she said.Abortion is hardly the only issue that has given activists pause. Italy introduced and has progressively extended the so-called pink quotas, a mandated percentage of female representation in politics and boardrooms. Many women say quotas in politics better reflect the population, while quotas in companies help overcome “old boys” networks, giving women equal access to higher paying jobs. They also give women greater visibility, they said.A mural in Rome painted by a street artist known as Harry Greb showing Ms. Meloni and other Italian politicians.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Meloni is against the quotas. She argues that as a woman, she climbed the political ladder on her own and is now poised to run the country. She says that she is proof that women don’t need government interference to enforce diversity.Her supporters agreed.“They never gave her anything, she took it. She won on her own,” said Lucia Loddo, 54, who was waving a banner supporting Ms. Meloni at a rally in Cagliari. She said that for women, Ms. Meloni’s ascent “is the most beautiful thing. All of the men have been disasters. She is prepared.”About 25 percent of Italian woman voting on Sunday are expected to cast their ballots for Ms. Meloni, though pollsters failed to ask women whether her gender was a factor in their vote, which is itself telling of the attention given to women voters here. Ms. Meloni is polling at least 25 percent nationally, the highest of any candidate.Ms. Meloni has won voters over with her down-to-earth and straight-talking manner (she often speaks in Roman dialect). But the secret to her popularity has less to do with her personality or policy proposals than that she was essentially the lone leader of a major party to stay in the opposition during the national unity government of Mario Draghi.That allowed her to campaign in a country that is perennially looking for someone new as a fresh face, even though she has been in Parliament for nearly two decades and was a minister in a past government.In that time, Italy has had a lackluster track record in empowering women in the work force, and experts say something else needs to be done.“We have to create the conditions for employment because we are at the bottom of the list in Europe,” said Ida Maggi of Stati Generali delle Donne, an association working to get women’s issues on the electoral agenda. It makes Italy “look bad,” she said.One area where Ms. Meloni and even her most committed critics agree is the need for more nursery schools. The government of Mr. Draghi last year allocated billions of euros to build nurseries and extend child care services. But the problem is by no means solved.In many Italian regions, a shortage of free nursery schools, along with short school days and three-month vacations, make sit difficult for working mothers to juggle their schedules. Even though many women are staying at home, the country has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, something Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition has pledged to redress.Speaking to supporters in Milan this month, Ms. Meloni said that she and her allies would work toward getting free child-care services, part of “a huge plan to boost the birthrate, to support motherhood.” With only 400,000 births last year, Italy was going through more than a demographic winter, she said: “It’s an ice age.”Ms. Meloni addressing supporters in Piazza Duomo in Milan in September.Piero Cruciatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I don’t want this nation to disappear,” she said, adding that the problem should not be solved through immigration. “I want our families to have children,” she added to a roar of applause.But critics are not convinced her party, or likely coalition, is entirely committed to the cause of women.Polls carried out last year show that while the majority of Italians said more should be done to reach gender equality, those numbers were considerably lower among supporters of Brothers of Italy and the League.One campaign video for a candidate from the Forza Italia party, another coalition ally, was roundly mocked for promising a salary to women who don’t work outside the home. The party is led by Silvio Berlusconi, who, Ms. Meloni said in the interview, put her “in difficulty as a woman” with his sex scandals when she was a young minister in his government.After decades of unfulfilled campaign promises, there is skepticism writ large that any of the parties will really champion women’s causes.Promises about “the needs and priorities of women” — including free day care and subsidies for families — tend to vanish once it’s time to actually put measures in place, said Laura Moschini, whose organization, the Gender Interuniversity Observatory, has drafted a “handbook for good government” highlighting women’s concerns.Those issues have discouraged women from voting, and the possibility of electing Ms. Meloni as the first female prime minister is not motivating women. Heading into the election on Sunday, polls suggest that more than a third of Italian women probably won’t vote.Ms. Meloni with Mr. Salvini, left, and Silvio Berlusconi at the center-right coalition’s closing rally in Rome on Thursday.Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press“I’m disgusted by the entire political system,” said Laura Porrega, who described herself as a “desperate housewife” because she wasn’t able to find a job. “When they want your taxes, they remember your name, but I’ve gotten nothing from the country at all.” she said.Ms. Serughetti, the Bicocca professor, said that women “don’t see their interests being represented,” so they’d rather abstain.“The decision of women not to vote is a sort of protest to this order of things,” she said.Jason Horowitz More

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      America Needs More Caregiving Support

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      On Tuesday President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains parts of his Build Back Better agenda, including major climate investments and authorization for Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. The law will reduce the cost of health care, slash carbon emissions to roughly 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, invest in clean energy vehicles and raise taxes on corporations, among other things.Make no mistake, President Biden and the Democrats in Congress have achieved a transformative investment in our future.But investments in Medicaid home and community-based services for older adults and people with disabilities, raising wages for the work force that provides caregiving, four weeks of paid family and medical leave, and subsidies for families in need of child care did not make it into law.Infrastructure isn’t only sustainable modes of transportation. As Senator Bob Casey recently said: “The bridge to work for many is someone who can come into their home and care for aging parents. For others, it’s quality, affordable child care for their kids.” Fair pay for caregiving would free up more Americans to take part in the economy.For too long we have underinvested in and undervalued caregivers. After the coronavirus pandemic hit, a breakthrough seemed possible when policies intended to help families became the focus of a national conversation.A 2020 report by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving found that more than one in five Americans were caregivers and almost one in four of these was caring for more than one person. A more recent study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that a vast majority of Americans want to age at home and want the government to act to help them do so.But we can hardly sustain the existing home care work force with workers’ current median annual income just over $18,000 per year. What will we do when the aging baby boomer generation — roughly 73 million people — needs more support and services?There are more than 12 million working parents with children younger than 6 years old. Without access to paid leave, these parents must find affordable child care in order to work and provide for their families. The American Rescue Plan Act included funding to stabilize child care programs for low-income families and expanded the child tax credit for 2021, but what will happen when that funding runs out?Lawmakers must now decide how to support the care economy — including administrative and regulatory reforms as well as legislation. We should see investments in care reflected in appropriations and at the heart of the next budget reconciliation. Many voters want representatives who refuse to devalue women and families and who want caregivers to have the freedom to choose whether they leave the work force rather than be forced out of it.The Biden administration’s economic agenda has often been compared to Roosevelt’s New Deal in scope and significance, but the New Deal explicitly excluded two groups of workers — farm workers and domestic workers. Over time, these domestic workers became the backbone of the care economy, but the government never advanced comprehensive solutions to support them.Mr. Biden’s original agenda not only included these workers, but it highlighted the importance of investing holistically in the care that families need and the jobs that support it. Today, we understand that the economy doesn’t grow or work without care, including for the work force entrusted with the people who matter most in our lives. Let’s not wait another 80 years to act on that vision.Ai-jen Poo is the executive director of Caring Across Generations and the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What’s the Next Mayor of New York’s One Big Idea?

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      We asked 10 candidates what they viewed as their central proposals. They named plans to offer cash relief to poor New Yorkers, child care grants and more.When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor of New York City in 2013, he was able to successfully distill his campaign into one big idea: creating universal prekindergarten. It reflected his larger theme of reducing inequality, and it was a promise he was able to deliver on not long after taking office.The large field of candidates running for mayor this year have plenty of ideas, from cash relief to property tax reform. But there is not, as of yet, one bold proposal that stands out in a similar way.“You’ve seen a stunning lack of original, big thinking from the candidates,” said Eric Phillips, a former press secretary for Mr. de Blasio.The mayor’s race is widely viewed as the most critical New York City election in a generation as voters choose a leader to guide the pandemic recovery. But weakened tax revenues could make it difficult to start ambitious new programs.Ahead of the June 22 primary, The New York Times asked eight leading Democrats and two Republicans to describe their one big idea for the city.Andrew Yang wants to offer some poor New Yorkers $2,000 per yearAndrew Yang, the former presidential hopeful, has perhaps the most memorable proposal: A pared-down version of the universal basic income plan that he championed during the 2020 presidential campaign.But instead of offering every American $1,000 a month, he proposes giving less than one-tenth of New Yorkers $2,000 on average per year.Still, Mr. Yang says his plan would be the “largest local cash relief effort in the country,” though he is still trying to figure out how exactly to pay for it.“We need to get cash in the hands of New Yorkers who need it most if we want our city to come back stronger than ever,” he said.The program would cost $1 billion per year, and Mr. Yang suggested that the city could offset some of that by closing tax loopholes for large institutions like Madison Square Garden and Columbia University.Eric Adams wants to create the ‘People’s Plan’Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is proposing a “People’s Plan” with three components: tax credits for poor New Yorkers, free and low-cost child care for children under 3, and an app called MyCity to apply for benefits like food stamps.Under Mr. Adams’ tax credit plan, which he is calling NYC AID, poor families would receive about $3,000 per year.He also wants to give child care providers space in buildings owned by the city and offer developers incentives for charging them low rents.“Nothing holds back a woman’s opportunity to move up in business or to be employed than the lack of child care in this city,” Mr. Adams said. “That is devastating families.”The tax credit plan would cost about $1 billion a year. He said he would pay for it by cutting 3 to 5 percent of costs across city agencies, reducing the city work force, and increasing taxes on “ultramillionaires.”Scott Stringer wants to expand affordable housingScott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, has a plan to offer what he’s calling “universal affordable housing.”He wants to require new apartment buildings with more than 10 units to make 25 percent of them affordable to low- and middle-income families. And he wants to convert nearly 3,000 vacant lots owned by the city into affordable housing run by nonprofit groups.“The big real estate developers hate this plan — and for me, that’s a badge of honor,” Mr. Stringer said.His housing plan would cost about $1.6 billion per year. He would pay for it with a so-called pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes and by reducing the need for homeless services, among other measures.Multiple candidates cited plans to strengthen child care and make it more affordable.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesMaya Wiley wants to make child and elder care more affordableMaya Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio, has a universal community care plan to offer 100,000 families a $5,000 annual grant to care for children and older people.The plan includes building “Community Care Centers” that would provide free child care, job training and activities for seniors, with a goal of reaching 300,000 New Yorkers in the first year.“As mayor, I will help us create a caring economy, where we invest in families through child care grants, so families can take care of themselves,” she said.Ms. Wiley wants to pay for the program, which would cost about $500 million, through local and federal funding, including by freezing the hiring of police and correction officers for two years.Dianne Morales wants to create a ‘community first responders department’Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, has excited left-leaning voters with her plan to defund the police.Ms. Morales wants to cut the $6 billion annual police budget in half and spend some of that money to create a “Community First Responders Department” to address homelessness and mental health crises.Ms. Morales said that the police could not continue to “profile, criminalize, and kill Black people with abandon.”“We need to keep the police out of interactions where their presence is likely to do more harm than good,” she said.Kathryn Garcia wants to cut down on bureaucracyKathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, says her overarching priority is to “make government work.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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#121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}She wants to cut homelessness in half and make repairs to public housing, and she would reform the city’s permitting system for small businesses.Ms. Garcia said she thought some candidates were promising programs the city could not afford, and that others knew very little about procurement.“The truth is, the radical big idea that New Yorkers desperately want is simple: Cut the bureaucratic nonsense and actually make city government work equally for everyone,” she said.Ray McGuire wants to use a ‘comeback plan’ to create jobsRaymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, has proposed a “comeback plan” that includes subsidies, tax relief and a jobs program.His “job accelerator” would cover half the salary for workers for one year at small businesses that suffered during the pandemic. He also wants to work with state leaders to let small businesses keep a portion of the sales tax they collect for one year.“We have one shot to get this right,” Mr. McGuire said. “If we don’t succeed in putting New Yorkers back to work then no amount of subsidy or spending on social programs is going to make a dent on the catastrophic consequences of mass unemployment.”His plan would cost about $1.8 billion over two years. He would pay for it through federal stimulus funds and by possibly reversing some of Mr. de Blasio’s budget commitments and making other budget cuts.Shaun Donovan wants to create ‘15-minute neighborhoods’Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary, has offered so many plans — roughly 200 pages of them — that he jokes that choosing a favorite is like choosing between his sons.His top priorities are “equity bonds” — giving $1,000 to every child, and up to $2,000 per year, to help close the wealth gap for poor families — and “15-minute neighborhoods,” where every New Yorker would have access to good schools, transit and parks within 15 minutes of their home.“Not all New York City neighborhoods are created equal, and many New Yorkers lack adequate access to basic necessities like fresh food, quality health care, and reliable transportation,” Mr. Donovan said.Mr. Donovan said the neighborhood plan would require zoning changes and tax incentives to support private investment. Transit upgrades would be paid for by so-called value capture on real estate development and a tax on marijuana sales. Curtis Sliwa wants to reform property taxesCurtis Sliwa, a founder of the Guardian Angels who is running as a Republican, wants to reform property taxes and use the money to hire more than 3,000 additional police officers.Like Mr. Yang, he wants to make institutions like Madison Square Garden pay more taxes. He also wants to cap property tax rates and assess properties at their actual fair market value, among other measures.The city’s method of calculating property taxes has long allowed owners of multimillion-dollar brownstones in Brooklyn and high-rise co-ops by Central Park to pay less in taxes than working-class homeowners in the South Bronx, relative to the value of their properties.“My comprehensive property tax reform plan will finally deliver a fair, transparent property tax system to New York City and will generate enough new revenue to fully re-fund our police,” he said.Fernando Mateo wants to achieve ‘universal teen employment’Fernando Mateo, a restaurant operator who is also running as a Republican, said his big idea was a voluntary year-round jobs program for teenagers, ages 14 to 18, called “Alpha Track.”Mr. Mateo said he dropped out of school at 14, and that he wanted to improve the drop-out rate and prevent teenagers from getting into trouble.“This is about getting them out of their community and exposing them to what New York is all about — exposing them to corporate America, city agencies and small businesses,” he said. 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