Now that President Joe Biden has been repeatedly compared to FDR, he’s high on “making history” as the most leftist occupant of the Oval Office since 1933. He's demanding, for the sake of prosperity, that massive federal programs be passed to overwhelm nearly every sector of the economy and that government be further inserted into the everyday lives of Americans. When government officials decided to shut down schools across the country during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic last spring, women bore the economic consequences.
“Female workforce participation has already dropped to 57%—the lowest level since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center. The numbers show a tougher journey for women both during and through the recovery of the pandemic,” Fortune reports. “While unemployment numbers were roughly equal between men and women in February 2020, according to a McKinsey analysis of the Current Population Survey that is conducted jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment for women peaked at 15.8% in April 2020, more than 2 percentage points above that for men. In September, when schools resumed, many of them with remote learning, 80% of the 1.1 million people who exited the workforce were women. In December, women accounted for all of the net job losses, while men achieved some job gains. Today, unemployment for women remains 1.9 percentage points above the pre-pandemic level.”
Last May, it was clear the disease didn’t affect children but elderly adults, the obese and those with preexisting conditions. At the time, Republican Senator and Dr. Rand Paul advocated during a hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci that the schools be reopened by the fall 2020 semester.
“It’s a huge mistake if we don’t open the schools in the fall,” Paul said.
Then in July, the CDC officially confirmed the spread of the virus wasn’t a threat in schools, and yet, half of them remain closed today, keeping many women out of the workforce.
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The correct response to getting women back to work is to reopen the schools. Instead, the Biden administration is allowing teachers unions like the American Federation of Teachers to continue their extortion of parents, students and taxpayers while pumping donations to congressional Democrats.
“The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February,” The New York Post reports. “The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.”
Further, instead of demanding teachers unions get back to work, Biden is demanding Congress pass a $2.5 trillion “human infrastructure plan” with “free” childcare.
“President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan would cost far more than the White House estimates, and it would increase government debt while decreasing GDP, according to a study released Wednesday,” CNBC reports. “The administration’s latest stimulus plan, which officials priced at $1.8 trillion, would actually cost American taxpayers $2.5 trillion over the 10-year budget window, about $700 billion more than the White House’s estimate, the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated.”
This massive government invasion will inevitably result in fewer choices for women, and ironically, more expensive child care – not to mention the education of kids left behind and their futures being put at an even greater disadvantage. Until kids are back in school, millions of women can’t go back to work, and childcare isn't a substitute for reading, writing and arithmetic. A heavily subsidized and expensive taxpayer-funded program to supplement public schooling that’s already being funded with taxes won’t solve the problem. Instead, it will create more of them.
Much like the “Life of Julia” introduced under President Barack Obama, President Biden isn’t interested in cultivating an economic environment that allows women to thrive. Instead, he’s pushing them into government dependency.
