The Care Economy Is Infrastructure. Fund It Like Infrastructure.

When a bridge fails, we do not tell commuters to budget better. We rebuild the bridge, because the economy runs across it. Child care in America is a failed bridge, and four million parents are standing at the river’s edge every morning.

The numbers are not in dispute. Infant care now costs more than in-state college tuition in most states. Half the country lives in a measured child-care desert. Workforce participation among mothers of young children — briefly boosted by pandemic-era subsidies — fell back the moment those subsidies expired, taking an estimated $122 billion in annual economic activity with it. Employers report care breakdowns as a leading cause of absenteeism. This is not a family inconvenience. It is a supply-chain failure in the labor market.

We know what works because we briefly did it. The pandemic stabilization grants kept 220,000 providers open, and their expiration closed thousands within eighteen months. The policy lesson could not be cleaner if it had been designed as an experiment — because functionally, it was.

The objection is always cost, so let us talk about cost. Every serious analysis finds public child-care investment returns multiples of its outlay — in parental earnings, in provider wages, in children’s long-run outcomes, in the tax receipts all three generate. We accept this logic without blinking for highways and broadband. The refusal to accept it for care is not economics. It is a habit of mind that counts concrete as an asset and caregiving as a cost.

Fund care like infrastructure — permanent appropriations, capital standards, workforce wages that reflect skill — and the labor market gets its bridge back. Keep pretending it is a private problem, and we will keep paying the toll anyway, in the most expensive currency there is: work that never happens.