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Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am so glad to join my colleagues on the floor today to really emphasize how a family's life falls apart when they don't have access to good childcare.
I am one of a handful of parents of young kids. I have no complaints. Obviously, my wife and I make enough money so that we have been able to provide quality childcare for our kids, as we have both been working throughout their lives. But when you are living on a more modest salary--not a poverty wage but just a modest, lower middle income salary--your entire world can fall apart when you lose access to a quality childcare environment. People have to quit their jobs. They have to move back in with their parents. They have to move their entire family to a different city or a different State. Your entire life gets upended when you can't find care for your child because you will upend your entire life for your child. Nothing matters more than making sure your child is safe.
So what we are forcing our families to do simply because we don't choose to do the right thing and provide funding to make sure there is affordable, quality childcare available--it is sending our families into unnecessary crisis all over this country.
In my State, I have had 124,000 parents report that their work has been disrupted by childcare issues, that they have had to leave work, that they have had to leave employment because of an interruption in childcare.
Our childcare centers in Connecticut--and we are a high-cost childcare State. We are a high-cost State in general. Eighty-nine percent of them report that they have had difficulty hiring staff, 60 percent of them say that right now they are understaffed, and 70 percent of them say that they have wait lists for new families, which just shows you that all over Connecticut, we have a total mismatch between the number of slots and the number of families who need those slots.
Of course, that delivers enormous harm to families but also to our workforce. I met a young woman a few weeks ago who lives in Hartford. She has a very young child. They are on a waitlist for a subsidized childcare slot. She wants to actually be a childcare worker. She wants to help solve the workforce shortage. But she can't get into the workforce. Why? Because she has to stay home to take care of her young child.
So this cycle that ends up impacting not just families but our economy writ large is one that we have to break.
I just want to leave you with this one last piece of math to just explain how serious this situation is in my State.
In Connecticut, we have a program called Care for Kids, and this is a program that does for lower income families--tries to give them some subsidy so that they can afford childcare. But that program cuts off for a one-child family at $41,500 a year income. That is a lower middle income salary in Connecticut. That is a salary that is not unfamiliar in my State.
Let me just do the very quick math for you. For a family of three, a two-bedroom, one-bedroom house could be about $1,800 a month. Childcare in Connecticut on average is going to be about $15,000 a year. Total up just the costs for a family who makes just above the threshold to qualify for our subsidy programs. Let's say a family makes $42,000, doesn't qualify for our subsidy programs, is spending $22,000 a year on rent, and is spending $15,000 a year on childcare. That is $37,000 a year. They make $42,000. They have $5,000 left. That is $10 a week for everything else--for food, for your cell phone, for clothes for your kid. If you are making above the rate of subsidy in Connecticut, just the cost of childcare and rent leaves you with $10 a week to survive. In the richest, most affluent country in the world, how can we justify leaving families who are doing the right thing, who are working, in that position?
That is why I am so glad to be here on the floor with my colleagues pleading with our Republican friends to do the right thing and support the President's proposed plan to support affordable, quality childcare in this country, for the families I represent in Connecticut.
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