EDUCATION
Democrats fundamentally believe that every student deserves a quality education, regardless of their parents’ zip code or income.
We know that education starts well before kids go to kindergarten. Studies show that children who attend preschool are nearly 50 percent more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree, no matter their background. That’s why Democrats will provide free, universal preschool for four-year olds, saving the families of 5 million children $13,000 a year.
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Child & Home Care
The United States can’t have the best economy in the world without strong support for caregiving. But today, the cost of care is too high, pay for care workers is too low, and families are caught in the middle of a broken system. Democrats understand that fixing the caregiving crisis cannot wait.
During the pandemic, Democrats’ American Rescue Plan kept 220,000 child care centers open, getting parents back to work and saving families an average $1,250 a year per child. It preserved a million care workers’ jobs, and increased their pay by 10 percent. It expanded support for home- and community-based services for seniors and people with disabilities.
And not a single Republican voted for it.
Last year, President Biden issued a historic executive order directing agencies to further expand access to affordable care. The Administration also capped child care costs for 100,000 low-income families at 7 percent of their income, saving each an average $2,400 a year. Overall, the Administration increased federal child care funding by 50 percent.
Democrats will make investments like these permanent, and guarantee affordable, quality child care to millions of working families for less than $10-a-day per child. And we’ll restore the expanded Child Tax Credit and strengthen Head Start. For seniors and people with disabilities, Democrats will improve and expand home- and community-based services, working toward finally eliminating the 700,000-person Medicaid waiting list, so more people can live and work with dignity in their own communities. We’ll also keep pushing to improve pay and benefits for care workers, for example by fighting to get many of them a bigger share of Medicaid home care payments. Democrats will overhaul the quality of care and quality of life for our nation’s 1.3 million nursing home residents by defending Administration regulations that require minimum staffing standards at nursing homes.
Democrats are the only party with a plan to expand access to care, and to make it more affordable and accessible for all. Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress have voted repeatedly to increase the cost of care, for example by slashing Head Start and child care programs, eliminating slots for half a million kids. Trump has no plan to lower child care or home care costs for American families. Instead, House Republicans have promised to slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, while their continued efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act will strip millions of seniors and people with disabilities of life-changing home support.
Paid Leave
America is the world’s only advanced economy not to guarantee paid leave. The vast majority of employers don’t offer it – nearly three-quarters of private-sector employees don’t have paid family leave through their jobs, including 94 percent of America’s lowest-paid workers. The pandemic only made the economic consequences of this failure more devastating. In the United States of America, no one should have to choose between caring for a parent who raised them, a child who depends on them, and the paycheck that they need to survive.
Trump and Republicans failed to guarantee any new paid leave to private sector workers. Instead, their various proposals included unfunded mandates on states, tax credits that failed to expand access but subsidized large businesses, and schemes to force new parents seeking paid leave to borrow against their own future Social Security funds.
From Day One, President Biden has pushed to do more. He fought to include a comprehensive paid leave program in legislation that ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act. He instructed federal agencies to expand access to paid and unpaid leave for federal employees. He expanded the Military Parental Leave Program, so all active-duty, new-parent servicemembers can take 12 weeks. And his budget includes the strongest paid leave proposals in history, permanently funding the national paid leave plan that America needs.
That plan will create America’s first, full, national paid family and medical leave program, guaranteeing every American worker up to 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new child or loved one to recover from an illness, in cases of domestic violence, or military deployment. It will help families care for one another, and it will help businesses retain valuable talent and small businesses to compete. Millions more parents will be able to work, and it will add hundreds of billions to our economy. Democrats have pushed for this for decades. It’s past time that America caught up with the rest of the world.
SPECIAL NOTE: The full platform for each party can be found on their respective websites. The following excerpts are unedited. Reader discretion is encouraged as these are political statements and have not been checked for accuracy. The Presidential Prayer Team is non-partisan and does not support or endorse any of the following statements.
