-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, across the country, parents and caregivers are bending over backward to try to get their children in early education. They are paying tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, relying on family, friends, and neighbors, or are simply giving up work or their own educations because they can't find a childcare program with an opening. At the same time, overworked and underpaid providers are struggling to prop up childcare programs, burning themselves out, and leaving empty, shuttered classrooms behind them.

The system is broken, and if we leave it broken, we are failing multiple generations of people who are relying upon us to fix it--to fix the broken system.

As Marian Wright Edelman said, investing in children is not a national luxury or a national choice; it is a national necessity--a national necessity for our future.

If we want the 21st century to be better than the 20th century, we don't have a choice--it is a necessity.

When the pandemic began, Congress stepped up and provided the largest ever onetime investment in the childcare sector through the American Rescue Plan, and it worked. In Massachusetts, childcare providers received higher pay; programs stayed safe and open in more places and for more hours through the day. We kept classrooms open and prevented families from trying to decide how to continue working and finding a safe place for their children to learn, to grow, and to thrive.

But the pandemic-era money is drying up, and those cracks that ruptured in 2020 were from years of underinvestment long before we had ever heard of COVID-19. If we fail to maintain this investment--if we fail 3.2 million children who would lose their care and the 232,000 childcare workers who would lose their jobs--then it would be a tragedy for our country. It would ultimately be an economic catastrophe for our country that we did not invest in those children in the same way that we were invested in by preceding generations.

One of the reasons that they called an earlier generation the ``greatest generation,'' they weren't as wealthy as us, but they were wiser than us. They knew that every child had to be invested in. And that is why we are the country that we are today.

The challenge for this generation is, are we as wise as preceding generations? Do we understand that it is only out of selfishness that we would not make the same decision that those earlier generations made in children to whom they were not related either, who did not come from the same ethnic group as they did either, but they did it because it would help our country?

I am so proud that Massachusetts is a leader in childcare. State- level investments have saved almost 1,000 programs and 18,000 seats across the State from closure. But we can't expect States to keep plugging the holes of a failing system. We can't keep letting early educators and childcare providers bear the weight of underinvestment. We can't let generations of families fall behind because of a broken system. And we cannot let our childcare system--and all of the children, all of the families, all of the workers and providers in it-- fall off a cliff because there isn't enough funding for the children in our country to get the care that they need.

We need to give States the financial freedom to invest, to improve quality, to reduce costs, and to expand access. We need to guarantee children and families have high-quality childcare. We need a national, permanent solution to the childcare crisis.

If we want kids to thrive when they start school, if we want families to move out of poverty, we need to fund stabilization, support children and families, and build a childcare system that works.

So I thank Senator Murray for her great historic leadership on this issue, for fighting for all of those children in our country to make sure they get the help that they deserve, because they are the ones who are going to make America better in the 21st century.

Young people are only 20 percent of our population, but they are 100 percent of our future. That is all Senator Murray is talking about. Let us invest in them in the same way that we were invested in by previous generations.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source