Josh Zumbrun
speaker
325 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2018
last heard Oct 2023
Josh Zumbrun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Child Care Faces Threat as Funding for Centers Expires · 2 Oct 2023
podcast
It's been apparent for some time that no new funding was coming into place.
And so rather than everyone just charge off this cliff, places have been getting ready.
A lot of child care centers have already begun raising rates or making staffing decisions in anticipation of the federal funding going away.
If you have a kid in childcare, there's a pretty good chance you've encountered this, that the third big stimulus package that the government passed during the pandemic included $24 billion for childcare spending.
It went to childcare centers, it went to family childcares, and it was a very significant lifeline for the industry during that kind of later pandemic period.
And it was set to expire September 30th at the end of the government's fiscal year.
And so it's over now.
And so the question is, what's going to happen to all of these centers that serve so many kids when they no longer have this extra boost of funding?
There's proposals that are out there from Democratic senators.
And the original idea was that you would do this temporary boost in the pandemic program, and then you would come in with kind of like a permanent child care program.
And they've never gotten to any sort of consensus on how exactly to do that.
So although the idea is out there, there's senators and congressmen that are very passionate about the idea.
It's not really something that seems to be close to coming into place.
And so
The situation for now is that the temporary pandemic program is over, and there's not a big new program to come in to fill that hole of what's going to be missing.
One of the things that's gotten so much attention, and it was kind of what we were looking at when we wrote this column, was there's this estimate out there that...
As many as 70,000 childcare centers are likely to close and that 3.2 million children could lose their slots.
Those are some numbers that everyone has latched onto.
But I think they're actually very dire to the point that even the authors of that estimate, they've described it as the childcare cliff.
But when I talk to them about it, they don't really think this is going to play out like an abrupt cliff where that many centers or that many kids are going to lose their spots anytime soon.
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