Subject: Clinton on Priorities Like Curbing Child Care Costs: 'It Shouldn't Be About Politics – It Should Be About Families'
From: Hillary for America Press <[email-masked]>
To: Hillary for America Press <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 20:16:00 -0400
List-Id: <nationalpress2016.hillaryclinton.com>

*Clinton on Priorities Like Curbing Child Care Costs: 'It Shouldn't Be
About Politics *–* It Should Be About Families'*

Today, Hillary Clinton continued her "Breaking Down Barriers" tour by
outlining her vision to help working families afford the rising costs of
child care and health care, saying in Kentucky that taking on these issues
is important whether you are Democrat or Republican.

Following events yesterday with young parents in Loudoun County, Virginia,
and earlier today with working moms in Lexington, Kentucky, she visited a
family health clinic in Louisville, Kentucky, where she committed to
capping family child care costs and expanding home-visiting programs for
parents of young children. She again reiterated her belief that we must
enact paid family leave, raise the minimum wage and guarantee equal pay. In
her remarks, Clinton said, "The parents I’ve met over the past few days and
parents that I’ve met over the past many years may come from different
backgrounds, they may earn different incomes. They’re Democrats and
Republicans, but they’re facing the same challenges and they desperately
want to give their kids a good life and they are needing help to deal with
the pressures... It shouldn’t be about politics.  It should be about
families."

Clinton's remarks in Louisville follow her campaign's announcement today of a
new, comprehensive child care proposal
<https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/05/10/clinton%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bto%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bcommit-to-bold-new%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bgoal%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bas%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bpresident%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258bto%25e2%2580%258b-%25e2%2580%258b%25e2%2580%258blimit/>,
which would increase child care investments so no family pays more than 10
percent of their income for child care. The plan also would create a new
initiative to fund and support states and local communities that work to
increase the compensation of child care providers and early educators, as
well as provide home visiting services to more than two million parents and
children in the next decade by doubling our nation's investment in
evidenced-based home visiting initiatives like the MIECHV program.

*A transcript of Hillary Clinton's full remarks in Louisville is below:*

Well, I, for one, could listen to Bill for a long time.  His service along
with all of you who have supported this center is really heartening to me
because what you’ve done is what we all know needs to be done – providing
comprehensive health care and making sure that people’s needs are addressed
across the full range of health.  And I am thrilled to be here.

I want to recognize former Lieutenant Governor Crit Luallen.  Thank you so
much for being here, Crit. I also want to recognize former Secretary Audrey
Haynes, former Secretary of Health and Human Services here in Kentucky.  I
am very grateful to them for their service, for being here, but also
because they were part of the Beshear administration that did an absolutely
world-class job. I don’t suppose you need me to say that Kentucky’s
expansion of Medicaid, the Connect program, was really held up as the best
example of any state’s efforts.  And I know that it was a real team
commitment – the entire administration plus all in the health field who
were working so hard to make it possible for more people in this beautiful
state to have the health insurance that they deserved.

And I want to thank everyone here at Family Health Centers, which serves
thousands and thousands of hardworking Kentucky families.  I just met some
of the people who work here.  I met some of the patients.  And they’re all
just beaming – they’re so proud to be associated with such a special
place.  And I am determined to do what I can to help lift up and celebrate
organizations like this.  Nothing is more important than helping families,
particularly hardworking families who need the kind of support that they
get here at the Family Health Centers.

And I was thinking and several people as I was walking around were asking
me about my granddaughter or they were mentioning that they had met my
daughter, and it was just last Sunday that we were celebrating Mother’s Day
across our country, and a lot of moms were given homemade cards, maybe
breakfast in bed, maybe pictures were taken.  I’ve got a whole drawer of
gifts like that.  And they’ll be treasured forever, but it’s also important
that we recognize that our country should be celebrating families every
single day and doing everything we can to support families – not just with
nice words but with real actions that can help parents, moms and dads, do
the vital work of raising their children, which is the most important work
any of us ever do.

And I’ve heard from thousands of families who are struggling who are trying
to figure out how to get from paycheck to paycheck.  They can’t figure out
how to pay for childcare and to put some money away for maybe college
someday.  They’re struggling to be there for their kids, trying to succeed
at home, succeed at work, and they’re finding how difficult that is – how
many stresses are part of it.  And for some families it’s even greater if
they are raising kids with special needs or with chronic illnesses or they
have mental health challenges in their families.  And in places that have
been devastated by job losses not far from here, where coal, steel and rail
jobs are disappearing, raising a family becomes even harder.

I was with some moms and dads yesterday in Northern Virginia talking about
the challenges that they all face – how to balance work and family – and a
few brought their children with them.  And we were impressed that all these
children were so patient and their moms were keeping them occupied and
happy.  But it was really important to hear from each of them what they
think they need to do the job and how they can get more help.

These moms and dads are running into the middle-class squeeze that many
families face.  Their relative incomes are the same or lower than they were
some years ago, but the cost of everything is higher, so even with two
incomes economic pressures are enormous.  And one mom said she’s paying
$16,000 a year for childcare, which means that there’s nothing to put away
for college, and they’re balancing their budget every week trying to make
sure they’ve got the money they need for everything else.

Earlier, in Lexington today, I met with another group of moms and dads at
the Family Care Center near the university, and just about every single one
of them said how invaluable it was to have a place where they could come to
get help to meet the needs of their kids, including childcare,
home-visiting programs, medical checkups.  That was such a relief, and a
lot of them didn’t even know that such a program was available until they
really needed it and found their way to it.  That freed them up to focus on
work, knowing that their kids were in safe hands.

I hear this across the country, because so many families really don’t know
where to turn.  And the parents I’ve met over the past few days and parents
that I’ve met over the past many years may come from different backgrounds,
they may earn different incomes.  They’re Democrats and Republicans, but
they’re facing the same challenges and they desperately want to give their
kids a good life and they are needing help to deal with the pressures,
because they can’t figure out often how to solve all of this on their own.

So today, even, walking around with Bill, I met parents just very briefly
who come here to this center for all of their medical and health needs.  It
gives them peace of mind, not just services.  And that’s just something
every parent can understand – getting that peace of mind.  I know what it
was like so many years ago trying to balance family and work, when my
daughter would get sick as I was on the way out the door to work, how I
would find somebody to help me take care of her because, of course, if she
were sick, the babysitter was also sick.  And that’s the kind of everyday,
real challenge that families are facing.

And I want us to be really focused on what we’re going to do to make it
easier for families to get ahead and stay ahead.  And it’s going to be one
of the major issues that I’m going to keep talking about because I don’t
think there is anything more important.  I know I was lucky all those years
ago that I had backup.  And I know a lot of parents are trying as hard as
they can.

So what can we do to get our economy and our workplaces that were, frankly,
built for a different time, when you had a stay-at-home parent,
predominately moms, and one income could support a family – but that’s just
not the way it is for the vast majority of American families any more.  And
so what we’ve got to figure out is how to move our family policy into the
21st century and to do more to help women and men find meaningful work, to
earn a good living, but to take care of their most important
responsibilities.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do.  How do we make
government policies more efficient?  How do we make them more responsive to
everything that people have to do, to raise their kids and look after the
home and be there to earn a living and build a career?  Because I don’t
think we can keep going on like this.  We can’t keep saying, families just
have to buckle down and tighten their belts and figure it out.  I think
belts are about as tight as they can get for the vast majority of families.

People are using every single hour of their day, and there’s still not
enough time to get everything done.  And too many parents are lying awake
at night trying to figure out how in the world they’re going to make it all
work.  So something’s got to change, and there isn’t one-size-fits-all.  We
need a menu of options in a country as diverse as ours.  And I think there
are a number of things we could do that would make real differences for
families.

Let’s create a national system of paid family leave. Too many new parents
really don’t know how to handle the family responsibilities.  Too many moms
have to go right back to work after their babies are born, or they try to
cobble together vacation days and sick days and unpaid leave, short-term
disability, anything to get more time with their babies.  Many don’t even
get a paid day off to give birth.  That’s just almost impossible for many
people in many workplaces to believe, but it happens to be true.  There is
no requirement that people get earned sick days, that they get the kind of
support that they need.  And too many dads and parents of adopted children
don’t get any paid leave at all, and neither do sons and daughters who are
struggling to take care of aging parents.  I just don’t think this is fair
to families, and that we can and should do better.

California’s had paid leave for a number of years.  They in fact just
expanded it to cover more of the pay needed and to cover more family
members.  And their economy’s doing just fine.  The arguments we all hear,
like, “Oh, my gosh, you can’t do that,” we will structure a plan that will
be sensitive to small businesses with few employees.  But we’ve got to move
with the rest of the world, the advanced economies in the world that
provide paid leave programs.

I also want to expand home visiting programs nationwide.  In some states,
nurses, social workers, volunteers who are trained go right into the home.
And we heard about a great program in Lexington.  They answer questions
about nursing or sleep training.  They screen for health and developmental
benchmarks so problems can be caught early.  They emphasize how important
it is to talk, read, and sing to your baby to build your baby’s brain,
which will better prepare your child to succeed in school.  Every family
deserves that support, no matter where they live.  And the testimonials to
the home visiting program that I heard in Lexington were just so glowing
about what it meant.

I brought a home visiting program for toddlers to Arkansas called the Home
Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters, and it really works.  It
really helps – not only prepare kids.  You know what else it does?  It
helps parents, predominately mothers and grandmothers, if they are caring
for children, feel competent and confident in being that educator in the
home that every child needs to have.

We also have to raise families’ incomes.  Start by raising the minimum wage
at the national level, which would give – that would give millions of
American families – two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women.  So it
would give a lot of single-parent families a much-needed boost in their
income.

And then of course we have to guarantee equal pay for women’s work because
when – when a woman is paid unfairly, that doesn’t just shortchange her.
It shortchanges the whole family.  And it hurts them down the road in the
form of lower Social Security contributions and retirement savings.  And I
want to do more to encourage employers to embrace family-friendly policies,
and here’s just one example.

There are these new sophisticated scheduling software programs that help
employers squeeze every last once of productivity out of their workforce.
But they also throw their workers’ families into chaos.  Too many workers
don’t even know what shift they’re working until the last minute.  If they
have kids, that means they’re constantly scrambling to line up childcare.
And how can you even plan to take your child to the doctor or go to the
parent-teacher’s conference or sit down at the dinner table as a family if
you are working until 1:00 a.m., and then you’re told you have to report
back at 4:00 a.m.?  And it just infuriates me because I have talked to
predominately women who are on these kinds of unpredictable, absolutely
back-breaking schedules.

That instability is not what families and kids need.  So I want to do more
to work with businesses and workers to help workers gain more control over
their schedules.  We cannot be sacrificing families and children for these
unpredictable scheduling choices that are really not necessarily.  You
cannot convince me that you can’t do a little better planning.  In fact, if
businesses can’t, then there’s something wrong.  They need to get some help
themselves because that’s not a very smart organizing or managerial
approach.

And then we’ve got to put quality childcare within the reach of every
family.  Right now, in many states, childcare is more expensive than
college tuition.  That is just a shocking figure.  Now, we know that
college is too expensive, and that’s why I’m advocating for debt-free
college.  But for many families, childcare costs are even more, and it puts
parents in an impossible position.  Either they put their kids in a
not-so-great place and spend the whole day worried and distracted, or they
do whatever it takes to pay for childcare, even if it means taking on debt;
or they decide they just can’t afford it, so one parent stays home or they
put their child in a setting they’re not enthusiastic about.

And I’ve been talking with so many parents that are just caught in this
childcare bind.  And if they leave the workforce – predominately, again,
the mothers – then it makes it harder to get back in the workforce and to
get paid what they should have been paid anyway.  And for single-parent
families, these choices are even more difficult.  So I think we’ve got a
lot to do to make quality childcare affordable for all working families and
to move us toward a much more family-friendly set of policies.

I looked it up, and here in Kentucky two parents earning the minimum wage
have to spend about 20 percent of their income on childcare.  For a single
parent, that number goes up to 40 percent.  Now, if we’re going to say we
are for family values, then we need to value families.  And no family
should have to pay more than 10 percent of their income on childcare.  And
under my plan, that would be what we would do.

And at the same time, we would work to give childcare workers a raise
because despite how high the price is for families, the people who actually
do the work aren’t paid well at all.  A lot of them are minimum wage
workers, and a lot of them can’t stay in the profession because it just
doesn’t provide enough of a living.  In fact, in many places dog trainers
are paid more than childcare workers.  And I’ve talked to a lot of
childcare workers who can’t give their own children the care that they want
them to have.  And with the high turnover, it doesn’t lead to the quality
that any family should expect.

So I want to make childcare a profession that attracts and retains
talented, qualified workers.  As president, I would support states and
cities that take steps to increase pay for childcare providers and early
educators while at the same time making childcare more affordable for
families by having a bigger government backstop.  What I learned today in
Lexington, they have a really great program, and they get subsidies from
the state.  They have a sliding scale of payment that is affordable.  And
that’s exactly what we need to be doing for everyone.

And I want to help students who are also parents.  That means getting more
childcare centers on or near college campuses, like the one I visited today
near UK.  It also means easing the financial burdens on student parents so
they don’t give up on school because they can’t afford it.

Back in Arkansas, I helped to start a scholarship for single parents,
called the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund, to help defray some of
the costs that single parents ran into because if your childcare falls
apart, you can’t go to class.  If your old car that – you’re living out in
the country and it’s the only way you can get to college dies, you can’t
get there because – and lots of places in Arkansas, Kentucky, and
elsewhere, there’s not a lot of mass transit that’s going to get you to
school.  Right?

So we’ve got to do more.  I’d like to do something similar to what I did in
Arkansas nationwide because parents who get their degrees – their community
college degrees, their four-year degrees – have better job options and
better incomes down the road.  So if we’re serious about helping and
supporting families, we’ve got to do more to support parents who are in
school.

Now, every issue that I’ve mentioned, of course, matters to women.  But
let’s remember, they matter to men, too.  We need to help dads just as much
as moms, and that goes for every kind of dad and every kind of mom.  It
shouldn’t be about politics.  It should be about families.

Now, having said that, we are in the middle of a presidential election
right now, and there are real differences between what I believe, what we
believe, and what the presumptive Republican nominee believes because at a
time when families are struggling to pay for childcare and so much else,
Donald Trump actually stood on a debate stage and argued that Americans are
being paid too much, not too little.  He’s even talking about getting rid
of the federal minimum wage, leaving it totally to the states, to the mercy
of Republican governors, who have already cut the minimum wage for state
workers.  And that’s happened right here in Kentucky.

And it’s troubling to me because if you’re going to grow the economy, I
think it’s kind of obvious you want people to be making money so that they
can actually spend it and put it back into the economy.  Donald Trump wants
to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.  Your governor is working hard to
undermine what Kentucky has accomplished.

So I think with somebody like Donald Trump, you would see a race to the
bottom across our country, with working families paying the price.  And I
don’t think that’s a risk we can afford.  So we have to reject that vision
and instead come up with a much more positive one for families and children.

I love being here at this center because I can see how patient-oriented and
family-oriented you are.  And I’ve fought for a very long time for
childcare and paid leave and early learning.  And I’ve done it because,
obviously, I believe in it, and I’ve lived the work-family balancing act,
trying to be a good mom, trying to be a good person at work.  But I really
believe that healthy, secure families are the foundation of a strong
economy and a strong country.

So for me, this goes way beyond the specifics.  And I would be so proud to
be the champion of a center like this, or like the center I saw in
Lexington, to carry your mission into the White House, and try to move into
the 21st century with our family and health policies.  I am defending the
Affordable Care Act because it is working.  And if somebody has a better
idea, of course we will listen to it.  But Kentucky did a really good job
in getting people connected, and I met two people signing up just upstairs
a few minutes ago.  If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it.  Right?

And so I’m going to continue to speak out on behalf of the Affordable Care
Act.  And when people say they want to repeal it, they want to end it, they
really can’t tell you what they want to do because what they want to do
will just send us back to where we were, where we had so many uninsured
people, so many people suffering, so many people left out of the health
care system.  I think we are so much better off now than we were.  And I
know it gives a lot of peace of mind to mothers because we are the
principal purchasers and motivators for health care.  All the studies show
that.  We’re the ones getting the checkups.  We’re the one urging people in
the family to go to the doctor for X, Y, and Z.  So we know that we need a
system we can rely on.

And in order to have that system, we need a country that really values what
you do here at the center, that is behind you all the way.  And I’ve always
believed, as some of you know, that it takes a village to raise a child,
that we have a responsibility to support each other and create the best
possible environment for kids to grow up so they, too, can thrive.  Because
when families are strong, America is strong.  I think it’s really as simple
as that.

And so for me, I want to do everything I can, working with you, visionaries
who have created this great comprehensive health center, to do more on
behalf of all of our families.  So I’m really here to say thank you for
leading the way.  Thank you very much.

###

For Immediate Release, May 10, 2016
Contact: [email-masked]

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