On the bright side, President Joe Biden has finally acknowledged that our nation’s record-low fertility is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Unfortunately, not only will his proposed solution fail spectacularly, but it fails to recognize the contribution mothers make to the economy and ignores their desire to spend more time with their families.
Last month, the National Center for Health Statistics released its annual report on fertility showing that the percentage of women who gave birth in 2023 fell to an all-time low. This month, the White House Council of Economic Advisors released an issue brief responding to the NCHS numbers and admitted that falling fertility “creates significant headwinds to economic growth, the fiscal sustainability of public benefit programs, and the trend of continuous improvements in living standards.”
The Biden White House thinks it can solve this problem by “building out the care economy,” which essentially means using government money to pay some people to care for the young children of other people.
The White House supports this policy by introducing the following tautology:
“Living standards — the material circumstances of the average person — depend on output per capita. This the level of production and consumption available to the economy, adjusted for the size of the population. A simple accounting exercise linking output per capita, as a proxy for living standards, to workers in the population can be written as follows: Output per capita = output per worker * workers per capita.”
In simpler terms, what Biden is arguing is that we can raise living standards by increasing the percentage of people who work full time.
To accomplish this goal of increasing the percentage of those who work full time, Biden then notes that while the percentage of women without young children in the workforce is virtually identical to the percentage of men without young children in the workforce, the percentage of women with young children who are working is far lower than the percentage of men with young children who are in the workforce.
Therefore, Biden concludes, if the government paid people to care for young children, then more young mothers could work full time.
But is our economy really better off under such conditions? Has our living standard really been raised by paying other people to care for our families?
Think of it this way: If a mother chooses to stay home and care for her young children, that is considered consumption. The care she provides her family does not show up in the gross national product, and the work she does is not counted as a job.
But if that same mother pays another woman to perform the exact same tasks she performed as a mother, suddenly all of that activity is considered output, and a new job has been created. No new real economic production or activity has been created. It is just that the government now says what was leisure is now work.
Let’s take this a step further. Let’s say that before they have children, one woman works as a cook, another cleans houses, and another provides child care. If these women were all to leave the workforce and care for their families, three jobs would be lost, and the economic output from those jobs would be lost too.
But if those same women got together and had one mother do the cooking, one mother do the cleaning, and one mother do the childcare, suddenly those three jobs are back and so is the economic output from them, even though no new work has actually been done!
The economic gains Biden imagines from using government money to pay some people to provide care for others is all an accounting fiction.
But, one might argue, what if the services women provide as workers are more valuable than the services they provide as mothers? Well, as Biden’s own issue brief notes, that is often not the case: “For some workers, it may be more affordable to leave the workforce and take on care burdens themselves than to pay for child or elder care.”
If it costs more to work and pay someone else to care for your family than it does to provide that care yourself, that is a pretty strong economic indicator that the services you provide your family are more valuable than other economic functions.
Finally, and most importantly, Biden ignores the fact that most mothers, especially mothers of young children, would prefer to work part time and care for their family instead of working full time and paying someone else to care for them. According to the Pew Research Center, 53% of married women with children under 18 would prefer to work part time, and another 23% would prefer not to have a job outside the home at all. Just 23% want a full-time job.
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Even among unmarried mothers with young children, most would prefer to work either part time (36%) or not at all (15%), compared to those that want full-time work (49%).
Mothers want to provide care for their families. Instead of forcing mothers out of the home and into full-time jobs they don’t want, the government should be making it easier for mothers to achieve the work-life balance they want — not the work-life balance that Democratic Party radicals wish they wanted.