Alstott Delivers Pugh Lecture Today At San Diego On Child Care Reform After The Pandemic

Anne Alstott (Yale) delivers the annual Richard Crawford Pugh Lecture on Tax Law & Policy at San Diego today on Child Care Reform After the Pandemic: Towards a Public Option:

This lecture will build on the work that Ganesh Sitaraman (Vanderbilt) and I do in our book, The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality (Harvard University Press 2019), to make four points:

First, child care should not be understood as a private responsibility, one to be met by market purchases by individual parents. Instead, we should frame child care as an important public investment – as we do in the case of public education and public utilities.

Second, we should recognize that the economics of child care doom the market model to failure: by treating child care as a consumer product, like Doritos or air freshener, we guarantee the trifecta of high cost, low quality, and poor working conditions. And tax-based subsidies cannot effectively cure these defects.

Third, there are existing models for a public option in child care, and many states, localities, and nonprofits have begun to take measures that we could extend. A public option has been proved to provide affordable care, verifiable quality, and sound working conditions.

Fourth, a public option will help us weather a future pandemic or public emergency, for reasons of high quality and public accountability.

Previous Richard Crawford Pugh Lectures on Tax Law & Policy:

• Chief Judge Maurice B. Foley (San Diego), Mountains And Mentors: My Path To The Tax Court (2022)
• Anne Alstott (Yale), Child Care Reform After The Pandemic (2021)
• Rosanne Altshuler (Rutgers), The International Tax Landscape: Past, Present and Future (2020)
• Lily Batchelder (NYU), Optimal Tax Theory and Distributive Justice (2019)
• Deborah Schenk (NYU), Horizontal Equity Redux (2017)
• Michael Graetz (Columbia), Tax Reform Beyond the Headlines (2015)
• Edward Kleinbard (USC), Progressive Tax or Progressive Fiscal System? (2014)
• Stephen Shay (Harvard), Coherence in International Income Taxation (2013)
• M. Carr Ferguson (Davis Polk, New York), Simplifying the Corporate Income Tax (2011)
• Eric Solomon (Steptoe, Washington, D.C.), A Framework for Tax Reform (2010)

For more on Dick Pugh, see here