The plan is part of a nearly $20 million expansion and remodeling of a county-owned nursing home.
The post YWCA of La Crosse will help start county’s first intergenerational day care appeared first on WPR.
Child care is a hot topic in this year’s presidential election. It was the subject of a question in the vice presidential debate earlier in the month.
It’s an issue that hits close to home, too.
Child care in northeastern Wisconsin is expensive, it’s hard to find, and at the same time, child care workers receive low compensation.
Local families can expect to pay between $9,000 and $15,000 a year for one infant to attend a child care center, median cost data from late 2023 shows. Waitlists are common, with staffing shortages making care even harder to secure.
That’s not to mention program closures. Sally Van Rens, director of Green Bay’s Kidz in Motion Child Care Center, said that in her area, multiple local child cares close each month.
Ultimately, child care affordability and access issues threaten to take parents out of the workforce, a report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum said.
And it stands to get worse, child care providers warn. But, they say, Wisconsin legislators can help.
We asked northeastern Wisconsin child care providers, as well as other early learning experts, what the Legislature can do to help with the state’s child care issues. The answers varied, but there were many throughlines.
We also posed this question to candidates in contested legislative races across northeastern Wisconsin.
The one thing most agreed on? It’s going to take more than one solution to clean up Wisconsin’s child care mess.
The Child Care Counts program routinely distributes federal pandemic era funds directly to Wisconsin’s regulated child care providers. Some providers told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin the funds kept their business open during the pandemic. It also helped many increase wages, hire more staff, weather inflation and make other program improvements without having to pass the full cost onto families.
But Child Care Counts is set to end in June 2025 when the federal pandemic relief funds propping it up will run out. Many in the early learning industry are calling for Wisconsin to invest state dollars to continue the program, or a program like it.
Without continued investment, the already fractured child care system stands to collapse, said Julie Stoffel, owner and administrator of Cradle to Crayons Learning Center in Kimberly.
Programs would have to largely increase their prices just to maintain staffs’ current wages, which are notoriously low compared to other fields, she said. Without better pay, turnover will worsen, so more classrooms, if not entire programs, will close from staffing shortages. And if care gets so expensive that parents can’t pay, programs could also close from low enrollment, she warned.
“People need to wake up and smell the coffee,” Stoffel said. “You talk about a pandemic, we’re going to see a pandemic with child care closures if we don’t invest.”
Ultimately, closures mean children suffer, too, said Taylor Vande Vyver, a Kimberly mom whose two young children attend Cradle to Crayons. If the center closed, her husband would likely have to leave his job to care for the children.
“I feel like my kids are better set up for success by being around other kids and learning from someone who knows the ins and outs of birth to 5,” Vande Vyver said. “At the end of the day, child care is for the kids — it’s so they have a quality upbringing, a quality education and a quality diet.”
The state Capitol saw a flurry of child care proposals last session on both sides of the aisle. Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, said that sometimes in the midst of these discussions, what’s best for children gets lost.
She said this isn’t the case with public investment, as it allows child care businesses to continue providing quality care.
“At a minimum, we need to stabilize care by having state investment into it as a public good,” said Wisconsin Early Childhood Association Executive Director Ruth Schmidt. “Once we do that, then you can move into talking about other models.”
For a while, disagreements in the state’s Legislature positioned Child Care Counts to end in January, but Gov. Tony Evers prolonged its life with unused federal pandemic relief funds from other areas.
It’s often said that addressing child care issues requires a three-legged stool: help from families, government and employers.
The exact role employers should play, though, is up for discussion.
Rep. David Armstrong, R-Rice Lake, and Sen. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac, both running for reelection, spearheaded two bills last session to incentivize businesses to help their employees with child care struggles. Both drew support from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.
One of the bills was signed into law, establishing a new credit under the business development tax credit program for up to 15% of investments made in establishing a child care program for their employees beginning in the 2024 tax year.
The other, which never made it to Evers’ desk, aimed to create state tax credits for employers who help their workers access and afford child care.
Not all businesses may be in a position to take such leaps, though, so such initiatives don’t help all families, Stoffel said. She said one thing that may be more achievable is to allow flexible work schedules.
While employers can help, they alone cannot save the day, Schmidt said, referencing figures from a recent report by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It found that if the providers surveyed could operate at full capacity — many cannot because of staffing shortages — they could serve a total of 33,000 more children. To fill those slots, the state would need roughly 4,000 more early childhood educators, Schmidt said.
And that doesn’t even consider all of the children in Wisconsin needing care.
“The numbers are so big you can hardly conceive what the shortage is of teachers for child care is right now, and you’re not going to get that fixed by independent, individual businesses without state government being there to help out,” Schmidt said.
Because of their tight budgets, child care programs often find it difficult to offer their employees benefits. Candy Hall, executive director of Kimberly-based Child Care Resource and Referral, said that in order to incentivize potential workers, child care centers often give them free or reduced priced child care.
But doing so diminishes their revenue.
That’s why Van Rens and Hall suggest Wisconsin take a note from states like Kentucky, where child care workers are eligible for their state’s child care subsidy program, regardless of their household income.
Such policy would help Wisconsin child care businesses to recruit and retain workers, therefore allowing them to serve more children. At the same time, it wouldn’t take as big of a dent out of child care businesses’ budgets, Hall said.
Wisconsin has two main types of licensed family child care programs. Group child care is typically center-based. Licensed family child care programs are usually operated in a provider’s home and can care for fewer children than group centers, specifically between four and eight children depending on their ages.
Rep. Joy Goeben, R-Hobart, and Sen. Joan Ballweg, R-Markesan — both are running for reelection — introduced a bill last session that would have created a licensed large family child care provider category, which would allow up to 12 children with two providers. The exact number of children these programs could serve would also depend on the ages of the children enrolled.
The bill authors said this could boost the state’s child care capacity.
Hall said that because neighboring states can do it (Minnesota has a similar “group family child care” designation), Wisconsin can find a way to make it work too.
With some adjustments and more consideration, large family child cares could be especially valuable to rural areas, most of which are considered child care deserts and often rely on family providers, Schmidt said. That’s why, even though the bill didn’t make it to the governor’s desk, Schmidt said she’d support the new designation if more research shows it can be done safely.
But Schmidt and Nicole Leitermann, who runs Impressions Family Child Care out of her Kimberly home, said that without bigger changes, the new designation won’t make a difference. If family child care providers cannot pay themselves a decent wage, Leitermann asks: How could they pay another person well? They also couldn’t offer benefits.
“This does not solve our state’s problem in child care,” Leitermann said. “We need the state to invest in child care, just as they do for 4K and kindergarten through grade 12.”
Here’s what candidates in contested legislative races across northeastern Wisconsin say the Legislature can do to help child care providers and families with the high price of care:
Reporters Duke Behnke, Kelli Arseneau, Jeff Bollier, Benita Mathew, Rashad Alexander, Jesse Lin and Nadia Scharf contributed to this report.
Election 2024 is a big one for child care in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
The Republican vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, participate in a debate at the CBS Broadcast Center on Oct. 1, 2024 in New York City. (Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)
Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance squared off Tuesday night in a vice presidential debate that marked the last scheduled in-person meeting for the campaigns as Americans decide the country’s next chapter.
Meeting for the first time, Walz and Vance engaged in a policy-heavy, nearly two-hour back-and-forth hosted by CBS News at its studios in New York City. The debate was moderated by Norah O’Donnell, host of the “CBS Evening News,” and Margaret Brennan, who anchors the network’s Sunday political show “Face the Nation.”
The vice presidential candidates emphasized their modest upbringings and laid out their visions to lower high living costs, address charged issues like reproductive rights, immigration and gun violence, and navigate a quickly worsening conflict in the Middle East.
And, with the presidential contest marking the first since the violent aftermath of the 2020 election, and Trump’s continued false claims that he won, the moderators pressed the men on whether voters would see a peaceful transfer of power, no matter the winner. Vance would not provide a direct answer whether he would have certified the 2020 vote.
Walz is a second-term governor who previously served six terms in the U.S. House. Prior to his election, Walz worked as a public school teacher and football coach while also enlisted in the Minnesota Army National Guard for 24 years.
Vance served in the U.S. Marines for four years before earning his Yale law degree and becoming a venture capitalist and bestselling memoirist. He was first elected to public office in late 2022 to serve as Ohio’s junior U.S. senator.
The mostly amicable debate, with some moments of tension, was a noticeable departure from the bitter polarization on display daily during the presidential campaign. Walz and Vance shook hands and lingered onstage afterward chatting and introducing each other to their wives.
The presidential nominees, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, met on the debate stage last month in a more acrimonious exchange during which the former president falsely claimed immigrants were eating pets in Ohio and Harris ripped into him for his remarks on race and abortion.
Trump has refused to debate again. Following the Vance-Walz exchange, the Harris campaign renewed its offer for another presidential meetup offered by CNN in Atlanta later this month.
Answering the first question from the moderators Tuesday night, Walz and Vance sparred over which administration, if elected, would best quell signs of a widening war in the Middle East.
Tensions in the region escalated earlier Tuesday when Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, according to the Pentagon.
Walz accused Trump of being “fickle” on foreign policy and said the world is worse off since Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal. Walz argued for “steady leadership.”
“You saw it experienced today where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, [we were] able to stop the incoming attack,” Walz said.
“It’s clear, and the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” the governor continued.
Vance maintained that Trump headed off heated global conflict by invoking fear.
“We have to remember that as much as Governor Waltz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence,” Vance said. “People were afraid of stepping out of line.”
The barrage in the Middle East followed Israel’s ground incursion into Southern Lebanon and its recent assassination in Beirut of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iranian proxy militant group Hezbollah.
While Israel intercepted the majority of the rockets Tuesday, U.S. Navy destroyers in the Middle East fired roughly a dozen interceptors at incoming Iranian missiles, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said.
The Biden administration promised “severe consequences,” though it has not provided details. Harris said late Tuesday that Iran poses a “destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East” and her commitment to Israel is “unwavering.”
Despite a visit to Washington less than a week ago from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CBS moderators did not ask about the ongoing war in Ukraine, and neither candidate brought up the costly and ongoing fight against Russia’s continued invasion.
Vance and Walz sparred over how Trump handled his loss in the 2020 presidential election and his actions leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol following a rally that Trump hosted.
Walz said while he and Vance found some areas of common ground at other points during the debate, the two were “miles apart” on Trump’s actions following the 2020 election.
“This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say – he is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said.
Vance didn’t directly answer whether he would have certified the electoral count for President Joe Biden had he been a member of Congress at the time, to Walz’s dismay.
“I’m pretty shocked by this,” Walz said. “He lost the election. This is not a debate.”
Walz said he was concerned that Vance wouldn’t follow the example set by former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with a scheme to recognize fake slates of electors and deny Biden the presidency.
Fact check: States Newsroom assesses claims from the Vance-Walz vice presidential debate
Vance tried to pivot to Harris’ actions following the COVID-19 pandemic and whether she “censored Americans from speaking their mind” before saying that both he and Trump “think that there were problems in 2020.”
There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud during the last presidential election, during which Trump lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Walz also criticized Trump and Vance for using the same narrative ahead of this November’s elections, saying they were “already laying the groundwork for people not accepting” the results should Trump lose.
Both Harris and Trump have released economic plans that would add trillions to the national deficit — though analysis after analysis shows Trump’s proposals outpacing Harris’ by at least a few trillion.
Harris and Walz are running on an “opportunity economy” theme that would permanently expand the Child Tax Credit, including giving $6,000 to new parents, and provide tax credits and deductions to first-time homebuyers and entrepreneurs.
Harris, following Biden’s earlier budget proposal, has said she would impose a minimum tax on high-wealth individuals, but vowed steeper levies on long-term capital gains.
Trump has promised to fund the Treasury’s coffers with money raised by taxing imported goods. Largely he wants to extend his signature 2017 tax law and permanently lower the corporate tax rate.
When asked by the moderators how the candidates could accomplish those goals without ballooning the national debt, both Vance and Walz sidestepped directly answering the question. Rather they touted Trump and Biden administration policies and then went on the attack.
“Donald Trump made a promise, and I’ll give you this: He kept it. He took folks to Mar-a-Lago [and] said, ‘You’re rich as hell. I’m gonna give you a tax cut,’” Walz said, adding that Trump’s tariff plan would be “destabilizing” for the economy.
Economists warn that Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on imports across the board — as high as 60% on Chinese imports and 100% to 200% on cars and John Deere tractors manufactured in Mexico — could cause consumer prices to increase and invite retaliation.
But Vance said he wanted to “defend my running mate” on the issue.
“We’re going to be taking in a lot of money by penalizing companies for shipping jobs overseas and penalizing countries who employ slave laborers and then ship their products back into our country and undercut the wages of American workers. It’s the heart of the Donald Trump economic plan,” the senator said.
Both candidates spent significant time addressing housing and child care costs.
Walz touted Harris’ “bold forward plan” that calls for construction of 3 million new homes and “down payment assistance on the front end to get you in a house.”
“A house is much more than just an asset to be traded somewhere. It’s foundational to where you’re at,” Walz said.
Vance said some of Walz’s ideas on housing were “halfway decent.”
One of the central pillars of Trump and Vance’s housing plans is to turn over federal lands to private hands for development.
“We have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used, and they could be places where we build a lot of housing,” Vance said.
On child care, Walz pledged a paid federal family and medical leave mandate as a priority for the Harris campaign, and advocated a parallel workforce development program for the care professions.
“We have to make it easier for folks to be able to get into that business, and then to make sure that folks are able to pay for that,” Walz said.
The dual goals, he said, “will enhance our workforce, enhance our families, and make it easier to have the children that you want.”
Vance said he sees an opportunity for a “bipartisan solution” to the high cost of child care, though he stopped short of agreeing with a federal paid leave law.
Instead he proposed expanding the potential recipients for federal child care grants.
“These programs only go to one kind of child care model. Let’s say you’d like your church maybe to help you out with child care. Maybe you live in a rural area or an urban area, and you’d like to get together with families in your neighborhood to provide child care and the way that makes the most sense. You don’t get access to any of these federal monies,” Vance said.
Vance also repeatedly connected the housing shortage and high costs to immigration — the central issue for Trump’s campaign and a common answer from him for several of the nation’s woes.
The Ohio senator said housing is “totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”
“The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’ open border,” Vance said, referring to the town where he and Trump falsely claimed over and over that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets.
Debate moderator Brennan pressed Vance on his claim: “Senator on that point, I’d like for you to clarify. There are many contributing factors to high housing costs. What evidence do you have that migrants are part of this problem?”
Vance said he would share on social media following the debate a Federal Reserve study that supported his claim.
Access to abortion and fertility treatments was one of the more contentious areas of disagreement, though neither candidate trod new ground for their party.
Vance maintained the Trump stance that abortion laws should be set by voters or state lawmakers, while Walz said women and their doctors are best suited to make those decisions.
Vance told a story about a woman he grew up with having an abortion, then telling him a few years ago that “she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”
“And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said. “And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump, and I are endeavoring to do.”
Walz rejected Vance’s position that state lawmakers should determine women’s access to the full slate of reproductive decisions, including fertility treatments.
Walz referenced some of the stories women have told in the last two years about being denied medical care for miscarriages or other dangerous pregnancy complications because of vaguely written state laws that banned or significantly restricted access to abortion.
“This is a very simple proposition: These are women’s decisions to make about their health care,” Walz said, later adding that people should “just mind their own business on this.”
The two vice presidential candidates had one of the more genuine exchanges of the debate after the moderators asked them about solutions for gun violence.
Vance conceded that he and Walz both want to reduce the number of people killed by guns every year, but said the solution should center around addressing illegal guns, including those used in drug trafficking, and through changing how schools are designed.
“Unfortunately, I think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the door stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger,” Vance said. “And of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers, because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn’t fit with recent experience.”
Walz said school shootings are every parent’s “worst nightmare” before telling a story about how his son witnessed a shooting at a community center while playing volleyball.
“Those things don’t leave you,” Walz said, before talking about meeting with parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, when he was a member of Congress.
“We understand that the Second Amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out,” Walz said. “In Minnesota, we’ve enacted enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks.”
Walz said he absolutely believes Vance hates it when children die from gun violence, but added that’s “not far enough when we know they’re things that work.”
“No one’s trying to scaremonger and say, ‘We’re taking your guns,” Walz said. “But I ask all of you out there, ‘Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?’ … when we know there’s countries around the world that their children aren’t practicing these types of drills.”
Vance expressed sympathy that Walz’s son had witnessed a shooting and thanked him for bringing up Finland as an example of a country with a high rate of gun ownership that doesn’t have school shootings.
“I do think it illustrates some of the, frankly, weird differences between our own country’s gun violence problem and Finland,” Vance said, before mentioning higher rates of substance abuse and mental health issues within the United States.
“I don’t think it’s the whole reason why we have such a bad gun violence problem, but I do think it’s a big piece of it,” Vance said.
The two candidates expressed dismay about the destruction stemming from Hurricane Helene in states in the Southeast, but disagreed about how best to address climate change.
Vance said “a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” before criticizing how Democrats have drafted climate change laws.
“This idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change; well let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of arguments,” Vance said. “Well, if you believe that, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to restore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
Walz said that Biden and Harris have worked with Congress to enact legislation addressing climate change that also created jobs.
“We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy,” Walz said. “Reducing our impact is absolutely critical, but this is not a false choice. You can do that at the same time you’re creating the jobs that we’re seeing all across the country.”
Walz also said that farmers in Minnesota know climate change is real because some years they experience significant drought and other years they’re inundated with too much rain for their crops to handle.
“They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back-to-back,” Walz said. “But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, ‘Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybeans, and I harvest wind.’”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Robert Codero, 49, of New York City, joined hundreds of advocates on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, to speak to lawmakers about tax policy ahead of next year’s expiration of the Trump-era tax law. Codero attended as part of the nonprofit Make the Road New York, which also has chapters in New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Dozens of progressive organizations from across the United States descended on the nation’s capital Wednesday to champion “tax justice” ahead of Congress’ major task of resetting the tax code in 2025.
Led by a coalition named Fair Share America, state and national advocates urged lawmakers to raise the corporate tax rate and ensure those who make over $400,000 annually “pay their fair share.”
Organizers from 20 states fanned out across Capitol Hill, meeting individually and speaking publicly with lawmakers, and testifying before senators.
Kristen Crowell, the coalition’s executive director, said the advocates traveled to Washington to “make sure our representatives know that we know exactly how this tax scam has played out at the local level in our communities.”
“We are getting organized, we are building a multi-racial, multi-sector organization that has real people power on the ground so they can’t cut deals behind closed doors without us holding them accountable,” Crowell said at a large press conference held by lawmakers and advocates outside the U.S. House that eventually thinned out due to rain.
Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told the crowd they are the “only antidote there is to the special interests that come to this Capitol.”
“This is the beginning of a long battle that we’re going to have for tax fairness in this country, and we’re really happy that you’re here,” said Bennet, a Democratic member of the Senate Committee on Finance.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a senior Democrat on the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, co-led the press conference and told the crowd to get ready for the “Super Bowl of taxes.”
A group of 61 care-giving advocacy groups among the visiting organizations urged using tax revenue — raised by tax increases on the wealthy — to fund child care, and care for the elderly and those with disabilities.
One of its leaders, Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, testified Wednesday afternoon before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Policy.
“By asking the wealthiest individuals and wealthy corporations to pay their fair share, lawmakers can leverage the tax code to support robust public investments such as guaranteed access to early education (including child care and pre-K), comprehensive paid family and medical leave, and robust aging and disability care, and good jobs for all care workers,” the Care Can’t Wait coalition wrote in a letter to congressional leadership ahead of the subcommittee hearing.
The advocates’ coordinated visit comes as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump make broad tax promises on the campaign trail ahead of November’s presidential election.
Prior to his Wednesday night rally on Long Island, New York, Trump declared on his social media platform Truth Social that he would lift a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, otherwise known as SALT. The deduction was part of Trump’s signature 2017 tax law, which is set to expire in 2025.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE? VOTE FOR TRUMP! I will turn it around, get SALT back, lower your Taxes, and so much more,” he posted Tuesday.
A full SALT deduction is more valuable for higher income taxpayers, and prior to the 2017 cap 91% of taxpayers who claimed it lived in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.
Pennsylvania is a key swing state in the presidential race, and several competitive U.S. House races in New York could help decide which party will gain control of the chamber.
Before this change to his platform, Trump had been running on fully extending his 2017 tax law beyond its 2025 expiration date, with the addition of permanently lowering the corporate tax rate even further to 15%.
Analyses from several economists estimate a wholesale extension would add anywhere from $2 trillion to roughly $6 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade.
Trump has also promised to get rid of taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime.
When asked about the effects of Trump’s tax proposals on the nation’s deficit, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who is eyeing the position of Senate majority leader if the GOP takes control, told reporters Wednesday, “We’re starting to have some of those conversations already, what impact do some of those changes have? And what does, you know, what are the trade-offs that would happen as a result?”
Harris’ “opportunity economy” platform includes plans to make permanent a pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit and attach an additional $6,000 credit for new parents. Like President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, Harris also vows to not raise taxes on anyone earning under $400,000 a year.
When speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists Tuesday, Harris revived an earlier Biden administration promise to cap child care costs at 7% of a household’s income.
“If you think about the benefit to the economy overall, it strengthens our economy to do things like pay attention to affordable child care, affordable home health care and extending the child tax credit,” Harris told the association at a discussion in Philadelphia.
The National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, one of the interest groups on Capitol Hill Wednesday, said Harris’ plan would be “transformative” for families.
Harris also promises to increase the corporate tax rate to 28% from the current 21%; tax long-term capital gains at 28%; give a $25,000 tax credit to first-time home buyers; and give new small businesses a $50,000 deduction for start-up costs. She has also embraced the promise to end taxation on tips.
Organizers on Capitol Hill Wednesday represented groups from Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.
Wisconsin voters will soon decide whether to give the Legislature more power to choose how federal funding is spent. Some warn the decision could have consequences for the child care industry.
Currently, state statutes allow the governor to accept and allocate federal funds that the state receives in certain circumstances, while other cases require legislative approval of some sort. The Aug. 13 primary ballot will carry two referendum questions that ask whether Wisconsin’s state Constitution should be amended to shift such power away from the governor.
The questions stem from Gov. Tony Evers having sole discretion over how to spend more than $3.7 billion of the $5.7 billion the state received in federal pandemic relief funding. The proposed amendments are the latest in a series of Republican lawmakers’ attempts to change the way future federal funds are allocated. The amendments, they say, will ensure no one person will have too much power over how federal funds are spent.
Some are raising concerns that the proposed amendments would instead concentrate too much control over federal funds in the Legislature. Brown County Democratic Party Chair Christy Welch, who is running for Wisconsin’s 88th Assembly District, called the amendments a “GOP power grab” at a press conference that urged people to vote “no” on the referendum questions.
But amendment authors note that that the same rules would be in place no matter what party controls the Legislature.
“I often hear from residents that ‘you need to work together in Madison.’ Well, that is exactly the goal of the referendum questions,” said Rep. Robert Wittke, R-Racine, who co-authored the amendments. “This is not a partisan issue, but a matter of good governance. It’s working together, not exclusively with one individual (deciding).”
There are unanswered questions about the amendments — namely, the processes by which the Legislature would allocate the federal funds in question — that make it difficult to pinpoint the effects the amendments would have.
What’s not in question is that the amendments would affect how the governor could use federal funding for child care, said Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which published an analysis of the ballot questions.
Within the past few years, much of the support that Wisconsin has directed to child care has been via federal funding — specifically using pandemic relief funds.
Federal pandemic relief funds used for child care were funneled to Wisconsin via two main pathways.
The first was through existing federal block grants, which have more flexible requirements and can be used for broader purposes than most other federal grants. The Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance must approve the allocation and spending of these funds.
The second method was through discretionary funding that the governor could direct without legislative approval, a power Evers — or any governor — would no longer have should the proposed amendments go through.
Child Care Counts, which directs stabilization payments to child care providers, is one of the most well-known child care supports born out of the pandemic. Since its inception, it has relied on both pathways, explained Britt Cudaback, communications director for Evers’ office.
The program was set to run out of money by January 2024 as federal pandemic relief waned and Republicans declined to devote state dollars to the cause. That is, until Evers used his statutory power in fall 2023 to allocate $170 million in federal pandemic-related emergency funding to extend its life through June 30, 2025.
Opponents of the amendments argue that requiring the governor to gain legislative approval before allocating federal funds could slow getting help to those who need it.
This could be particularly critical in the case of crises — such as the pandemic, natural disasters and economic recessions. It could also affect the spending of federal funds in general, not just those related to emergencies.
Some opponents of the amendments say that, if Evers did not have the authority to funnel $170 million into extending Child Care Counts and the funding were to cease completely, an estimated 2,000 child care programs could have closed.
Corrine Hendrickson, a New Glarus child care provider and co-founder of the advocacy organization Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed, said the $170 million did not fix all of the industry’s problems and that more investment is needed, but it did keep many programs from closing. It also allowed them to maintain the pay raises they gave with previous rounds of Child Care Counts, she said.
Christina Thor, a Green Bay mom who advocates for what she sees as a family-friendly policy, questions whether the child care industry would see any meaningful help should the referendums pass.
“It’s giving more power to the Republicans who may not see (child care) as an investment in the workforce,” Thor said. “Historically speaking, and also from recent experience in leading and supporting care bills, especially child care and paid leave, they were not on board.”
Thor cited the Republican-controlled Legislature’s refusal to put Child Care Counts in the state budget and its quick adjournment of a special session called by Evers that was to be largely about child care issues.
The state’s 2023-25 biennial budget set aside $15 million to help child care providers; Cudaback said the fact that the GOP-controlled Joint Finance Committee did not release those funds per Evers’ request shows it is “not interested” in funding child care and that it cannot act quickly.
Republicans favored a different approach to addressing problems in the child care industry, arguing that grants will not solve the underlying issues within the industry. They introduced several proposals they hoped would be more sustainable, including changing regulations, opening more child care slots and creating a loan program. Few of their proposals made it to the governor’s desk, and even fewer were signed.
Republicans did, however, bring about some changes to help families pay for care. During the state budget process, the Legislature allocated millions in federal funding to expand Wisconsin Shares, the state’s child care subsidy program. Republican lawmakers also put forth a bipartisan plan to expand a state tax credit for care expenses, which Evers later signed into law.
A common argument against the amendments is that requiring the Legislature’s involvement could delay getting federal funds out the door. But, said Wittke, the Racine lawmaker, improvements in transportation and communication mean the Legislature can now gather more quickly than it could back in the 1930s, when the law giving the governor discretion to distribute federal money was enacted.
Involving the Legislature will better serve constituents, Wittke argued.
“The Legislature is the closest to the people, and it is their responsibility, under the Constitution, to hold the ‘power of the purse,’” Wittke said. “The taxpayers of Wisconsin should have a say in how their tax dollars are spent.”
Wittke also said that in non-crisis situations in which an influx of relief funding flows into the state, most of the federal funding Wisconsin receives for child care is via federal block grants that require legislative signoff. Wittke said this process of disbursing would remain even if the amendments are approved.
Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, who co-authored the amendments with Wittke, did not respond to a request for comment.
This story is part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab’s series covering issues important to voters in the region. The lab is a local news collaboration in northeastern Wisconsin made up of six news organizations: the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Appleton Post-Crescent, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch.
Constitutional amendment questions on Wisconsin’s August ballot could affect child care, providers warn is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Login