Free Republic

Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., unveiled a new plan for universal child care if he is elected in November, saying in an interview airing Sunday that a wealth tax would pay for it. The proposal would offer free child care from infancy to pre-kindergarten up to the age of four, Sanders told Anderson Cooper on CBS News' "60 Minutes." The idea was yet another in a slew of progressive plans laid out by the self-proclaimed democratic-socialist, plans that he said would be funded by increased taxation on America's wealthy. Sanders expressed his disdain for opponents -- even some within...

**SNIP** But even supposing the “ultra-rich” would hold still while the state extracted a fixed yearly portion of their net worth, any plan for universal pre-K deserves skepticism — the opposite of what most news stories convey. ABC News, for example, contends, “The benefits of early child care have long been documented, even showing taxpayers can make money back when investing in high-quality early education.” This is tendentious and wrong. The links ABC provided don’t even support its assertion. The first is to a National Education Association publication (hardly a neutral arbiter), citing one famous study of extremely high-quality day...

Philadelphia’s outlandish soda tax is what Democratic-party politics looks like when it lets its freak flag fly. So many classic elements are there: (failed) social engineering and “think of the children!” on one side, paid for with a punitive tax on poor people and destroyed businesses, which means destroyed jobs, which in turn means lives upended. What lives? Greedy capitalists with monocles, maybe? No, they’ll be fine. Think of ex-cons trying to regain their footing in society. To review this debacle, in 2017 Philadelphia, seeking to fund a universal pre-K program, slapped mammoth sin taxes on Coke and Pepsi (and...

Philadelphia's mayor wants to tax sugary drinks to help fund his universal pre-K plan, among other initiatives. Mayor Jim Kenney tells The Philadelphia Inquirer he believes the 3-cents-per-ounce tax could bring in $400 million over five years. He says the money could fund a green jobs plan and repay a bond for rebuilding parks and recreations centers. ...

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WASHINGTON, DC— Among many educators and public officials in the U.S. is a drumbeat for “universal pre-school”—and for government to provide it to all 4-year olds so as to close school-readiness gaps and prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.In his newest book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut (Hoover Press, 2009), Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn, Jr. takes strong issue with this conventional wisdom and examines such fundamental questions as: Which children really need preschool that aren’t already getting it? Will a universal program help the kids who need it most? Will it be a costly windfall for...

Anyone who has taught young children knows how daunting it can be to keep the attention of a roomful of four-year-olds, much less teach them anything. Parents and taxpayers thus have reason to worry that the federal government, having spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to improve the nation’s public schools—with little to show for it—is under growing pressure to spend billions more on a mission even more fraught with peril: helping states create and support high-quality preschools. With 38 states funding prekindergarten programs last year and more than 1 million children attending them—both all-time highs—congressional leaders in Washington...

Maryland's daycare providers are banning together. Dennis Edwards reports the effort to unionize involves more than 2,000 daycare providers state wide, and they believe what's best for them is what's best for the families they serve. Children play outside a daycare center; their parents watch with pride as they stand in support of daycare providers who are taking the first steps toward forming a union. "Today I am proud to announce that Maryland Family Child Care Providers have voted 75 percent to form our union with SCIU Kids First," said child care provider Maydee Green. In May, hundreds of daycare...