The cost of child care varies across the country, but in general, it’s unaffordable — so much so that people who would otherwise want to have kids are abstaining because of the cost. Last July, the New York Times asked approximately 2,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 45 who have fewer kids than they’d ideally want why that’s the case, and 64 percent laid blame on the exorbitantly high cost of child care. In Kansas, for example, the average one-child family has to spend $11,201 on infant care alone — or more than 11 percent of their income — which is unaffordable for more than 65.5 percent of families in the state, per the Economic Policy Institute.
Average annual child care costs have risen to between $8,000 and $11,000, or at nearly double the pace of overall inflation, said Elise Gould, economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. But some critics on the right argued that Warren’s plan would exacerbate already rising costs and represent an enormous government intrusion in private life in America, while some on the left argue that it does not go far enough.
That percentage varies largely from state to state, of course. Separate data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that child care in Massachusetts and Oklahoma, the state Warren represents in the Senate and the state she grew up in, eats up 19.5% and 13% of a family’s income, respectively.
“How hard? As any parent can tell you, child care is one of the biggest costs a family faces. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s state-by-state tables, in Alabama it’s $5,637 a year for an infant and an only slightly less daunting $4,871 for a 4-year-old. That’s 69 percent of the average rent and 33.7 percent less than the cost of in-state tuition at a four-year college. At the other end of the alphabet, West Virginia parents are worse off: For them, infant care, at $7,926, is 32 percent more than the cost of college. Pick a state at random and the results are no better. New York: $14,144, or double the cost of a year of college. Illinois: $12,964. California: $11,817. No wonder child care is affordable for only a small minority of families, meaning they pay 10 percent or less of their income for it: 17.8 percent of families in Minnesota, 18.7 percent in Massachusetts, 37.7 percent in Georgia. And that’s for just one child. Most families have more.”
The wage gap has been narrowing for women, but it varies widely by race, class, and education level, a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. found.
The Economic Policy Institute today released its annual report on American wages. It shows, in essence, a continuation of wage inequality trends that have been going on for decades: men earn more than women; white people earn more than Latinos or black people, who are perpetually trapped at the bottom of the income scale; and, overwhelmingly, the gains of the entire economy are captured by those at the very top.
Although wages are increasing for most American employees, growth continues to be sluggish in an economy with relatively low unemployment, according to a new report by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute.
The As You Sow report documents how CEO pay has soared across industries in the past decade, with the average CEO salary growing by more than $2 million from 2013 to 2017, according to Institutional Shareholder Services, while the Economic Policy Institute has found a 17.6 percent increase in average CEO salary, among the 350 largest corporations in the United States, since 2016.
In 2014, Arizona families paid an average day care cost of $9,437 a year, according to an Economic Policy Institute report that says high-quality child care is financially out of reach for most families.