Haspel: Child care is an essential need for families, not a handout.
By Elliot Haspel, The74, Photo: screenshot from article, February 25, 2025
Consider two neighboring towns, Potato and Potahto. Both have collected $1,000 in taxes and their goal is to ensure that all residents end the harvest season with at least 10 of the tubers. Potato spends its money on fertilizing everyone’s soil and making sure they have good seeds and good tools, as well as hiring monitors to ensure the farmers are treating their farmhands well. When the harvest comes, everyone’s plot produces at least 10 spuds. Potahto, on the other hand, holds back the tax money and lets the potato chips (sorry) fall where they may. Some residents do great, but others end up with few or no potatoes, so the town gives out enough money for those who have fewer than 10 to go buy enough potatoes to make up the gap.
I promise this has to do with child care. What I’m describing is a silly and highly stylized version of concepts political scientists call predistribution versus redistribution. Predistribution is the idea that social interventions happen on the front end: They are investments in infrastructure (in this case, related to education) and conditions (for example labor laws and minimum wages) that help level the playing field prior to outcomes becoming clear. Redistribution is when the intervention comes on the back end, after income has been earned, leveling the playing field through “taxes and transfers” — basically, subsidies or other direct payments such as SNAP benefits or tax credits.
Note that one is not inherently better or worse than the other: In both towns, the public purse was used so that every resident ended up with at least 10 potatoes. Moreover, no amount of predistribution, in real life, obviates the need for some amount of redistribution; the field can never be truly level.
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