Editorial: America says it cares about family values. Time to prove it

While both Republicans and Democrats complain bitterly about underperforming public schools, they pointedly overlook the big picture: Learning isn’t just about what happens during school hours from the ages of 5 to 18.

Improving education in the U.S. requires a holistic approach to childhood starting in the very first years. It means ensuring that all families, and not just parents with means, can find housing, feed their children, afford child care and preschool classes, take time off to tend to ailing relatives or other needs, and avoid going deeply into debt to pay for college. Those same steps would lead to better physical and mental health for the nation, a stronger economy in which more women can participate, and reductions in a host of social ills.

The pandemic, however, laid bare the wearying struggles of the American family by worsening them. President Biden is correct in calling for wholesale change. Going back to pre-pandemic reality is unacceptable, and disparate, incremental steps would accomplish too little. This is a moment to grab onto, instead of allowing the continued weakening of family health, education and well-being in this country.

The $1.8-trillion American Families Plan that Biden unveiled Wednesday calls on Congress to continue the newly enlarged child tax credit that puts families in more comfortable financial shape from the start. To that, Biden would add significant per-family subsidies for child care for low- and moderate-income families, free universal preschool for two years before kindergarten, paid medical and family leave, and two years of free community college.

You can quibble with aspects of the plan — does free preschool for all make sense when more affluent families can afford to pay for their kids’ classes? Is paying child care workers a minimum of $15 an hour enough for high-quality care?

At this point, given the opposition of many Republicans to most federally funded social programs, we’d be lucky to get to the quibble stage. But the GOP should heed its base: There are plenty of working-class families in the South and the Midwest who are gasping for relief. This country makes it too hard to function as working parents; they shouldn’t need to worry every second about their children’s welfare or whether their finances can survive the inevitable bumps in the road.

Biden’s plans for funding these programs also will come under scrutiny — as they should, especially his call for a whopping increase in the top capital-gains tax rate. But for the most part, he is not looking at new types of taxes, even on the wealthy, and not raising them at all on people earning $400,000 a year or less. He wants to restore taxes on the wealthiest Americans that were inexcusably cut during the Trump administration, and ensure that all their income is properly reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

We do a lot of talking about family values in this country. But what do we mean by that? Surely not a willingness to continue a tradition of overworked, overstressed families who are a paycheck or two from homelessness.