Do you have children? Can you not be a stay-at-home parent to raise them because you, like so many other Americans, have to work 17 hours a day at your one to three jobs just to keep a roof over their heads? (Yay, capitalism!) Do you therefore need to send your children to daycare, which can be so expensive you might need to take on a fourth job to pay for it?
Well, what vice presidential candidate and awkward try-hard JD Vance proposes is this: You should get your children’s grandparents/aunts/uncles/who the hell knows to chip in, or watch your kid for you for free! Easy peasy lemon squeezee!
No, seriously, that is what he told Turning Point USA head lickspittle Charlie Kirk during a TPUSA event this week. Why did he say this? Is it because he has an angry swarm of bees inside his skull instead of a working brain? Probably, it’s as good an explanation as any for JD Vance.
Kirk kicked off the exchange by noting that daycare is very expensive and it’s “very hard for working families to get by,” and how does Vance think he can lower the cost of daycare for those working families?
Of course there are a lot of possible answers here. Universal daycare. Giving straight cash to working families to help defray the costs of private daycare. Shoot, encourage companies to run daycares at their offices so the parents can at least be close by. Plenty of companies have started doing this over the years.
Vance went with this instead:
“One of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is, maybe grandma and grandpa wants to help out a little bit more. Or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all of the resources that we’re spending on daycare.”
We’re not spending enough resources on daycare now, that’s part of the problem, Yale Law. But beyond that, this is just the standard GOP solution for everything: see a problem, shrug, say “Just get someone else to take care of it,” and then go hang out at a Purge with your rich funders, where you all cackle maniacally while watching poor people kill each other for sport.
This sounds suspiciously close to telling people that it takes a village to raise a child. We feel we’ve heard the Republican reaction to such sentiments before.
Now, Vance isn’t completely ignorant. He realizes that not everyone has a rich parent or an aunt or a mother-in-law who can take an entire year’s sabbatical from her job to help care for her grandchild so JD Vance’s wife can work at her dream job of clerking for John Roberts while he’s on his never-ending quest to roll back the last 150 years of American jurisprudence.
So for those losers, Vance has another idea:
“What we’ve gotta do is actually empower people to get trained for the skills they need in the 21st century.”
Job re-training? Okay! That’s actually a good policy. Hillary Clinton got roasted for talking about it in 2016 because JD Vance’s voting base is made up of angry and dishonest shitheads, but gift horse, mouth, and all that.
“We’ve got a lot of people who love kids, who would love to take care of kids, but they can’t, either because they don’t have access to the education that they need, or maybe because the state government says you’re not allowed to take care of children unless you have some ridiculous certification that has nothing to do with taking care of kids.”
Last we checked, a college degree was not necessary to work in a daycare. Lots of low-paid daycare positions are in fact filled by working class people who might only have a high school diploma. Not every daycare is geared towards wealthy parents who are very concerned with the differences between the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky.
States do have quite a few regulations that daycares need to abide if they want to maintain their licenses to operate. This does not seem like a bad thing if you think the goal of daycare is to provide children with a safe and healthy environment to spend their hours away from their parents.
But that’s what upsets Vance, that people are, you know, educated:
“Don’t force every early childcare specialist to go and get a six-year college degree where they’ve got a whole lot of debt and Americans are much poorer because they’re paying out the wazoo for daycare. Empower working families, empower people who want to do these things for a living.”
Again, plenty of licensed daycares are not staffed by overeducated Vassar grads with degrees in early childhood education. Those daycares can still cost a lot of money, even if they are being run by Millie the Weird Cat Lady who dropped out of junior high.
We know Vance hates daycare, so it’s really no surprise that he seems to have thought about it not at all.
This entire idea seems to be part of Vance’s weird natalism, where (white) Americans should be popping out (white) babies like hens laying eggs, so all the immigrants won’t take over and turn the country a darker shade. And to help parents out, he figures the solution is to turn all Americans into potential babysitters.
How Vance’s idea solves the structural issues in the American economy that result in low wages for parents struggling to raise kids on meager salaries is not something he addresses, because he has no clue. We’re frankly a bit surprised he didn’t just say that we’re going to give all our kids to Peter Thiel so he can harvest their blood and live forever. That would have at least been a plan!
And yet somehow, Vance’s ideas are more coherent than those of Donald Trump, who was also asked at an event yesterday — at the Economic Club of New York, which greeted his “major speech on the economy” with stony silence — about the high cost of daycare and what he might do about it should the nation, in its infinite insanity, return him to the White House this November. About all one can say for Trump’s answer is that the words were all in English, though not in any order or coherence that has ever been recognized outside a bowl of alphabet soup:
Here, we stole the transcript from WaPo (be ready! It’s long!):
“If you win in November,” a panelist asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”
Here is Trump's entire answer, verbatim.
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio [(R-Fla.)] and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.”
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”
“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”
“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.”
“But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”
Somewhere in that vomitus of word-shaped air was Trump’s plan, and it amounts to: I am going to slap so many tariffs on Chinese imports that we’ll have plenty of money to pay for lots of daycare somehow. Also deficits and destroying the Deep State. Thank you. Vote Trump.
Forty-six percent. Forty-six percent of American voters want to put this lumbering case of extreme aphasia back into the most powerful job in the world. It never stops sounding insane.
As a bonus, please enjoy this clip of a low-energy Trump at the same event, reading (barely) a speech off the teleprompter. Very low energy! Sad! We remember a time in this country when such low energy from such an old man raised lots and lots and lots of questions about his fitness for the presidency. You know why we remember this? Because it was less than two fucking months ago and we’re not nearly as old and run down as Donald Trump, that’s how.
[New Republic / YouTube / YouTube]
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