The Lead with Jake Tapper: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Is Interviewed About Child Care Crisis
Interview
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Well, look, I'm not a great political pundit here, but Donald Trump is going to do what Donald Trump does. And there are people who know that they're going to cheer him on over the indictments and everything else. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden is the leader our nation needs, and he's delivering. He's delivering on the economy. He's delivering internationally, and he makes America a stronger, safer place.
And I think come November 2024, there were 7 million more people who believed that Joe Biden would be the right leader. And I think it's going to be even back in 2020, I think it's going to be even bigger than that in 2024.
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I see it as whose side are you on in this fight. So, for example, what the President has got and done is he's gotten us $35 insulin for seniors. We're about to watch in 2024 click into a cap on how much seniors pay on prescription drugs. President has been out there fighting to get rid of junk fees, and there are a lot of them that have fallen away. The most recent one that I've been talking about is that we need to make sure that we've got enough money to keep kids in child care.
There are a lot of economic issues that are ones that touch people right where they live, and they recognize, you know, they got to be able to hold it together until the end of the month. President Biden makes it clear he's out there fighting for those people every single day. He's out there fighting to keep those costs low.
The Republicans are fighting the President every inch of the way. And I think when the economics get ground into the politics, people are going to pay a lot more attention to the question of Republicans who just want tax cuts for billionaires. They want to help out giant corporations. They're all for monopolists. And President Biden, who's doing his best every day to lower costs for hardworking American families. That's what it's all about.
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So if our support for child care, our nationwide support goes away, about 3.2 million children are going to lose their child care spots. There are going to be child care centers across this country that just closed. And that's going to have a terrible economic consequence because that's a lot of mamas and daddies who can't go to work, who can't work a full shift because they can't get adequate child care.
So we are urging Tina Smith and I and others to say, as the President is talking about emergency funding for Ukraine, emergency funding for the various problems that we've seen so far, the key one that we should also be focused on in our economy is child care. We need to make sure that care doesn't just fall over a cliff, and we need to put in the kind of federal resources to support that. That's what we need to do in the short term.
But I just want to say, Jake, long term, America needs to make an investment in child care. This is early childhood education. This is investing in our children. You know where America stands among the 37 richest nations in the world, we're number 33. Think about that. Mexico spends more per child on their children than we do in the United States. Romania spends more on their children than we do in the United States.
We want to build a strong future. We need to invest in child care. We want parents to work. We need to invest in child care.
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Yes. You know, I think it's because children just don't have a voice. They don't vote. They don't have political action committees. They don't have lobbyists. And yet investing in our children is how we build a future. You know, we understood this once as a nation. We started investing in public schools and we started at kindergarten because we believed back then that kids zero to five weren't learning anything.
But we made that investment in public schools because we believe that's how America will build a future. We'll have a better educated workforce. We'll have more people who will be more creative, who will invent more things. What we've now learned is those babies zero to five, they are learning. And they need to be in places with lots of well trained teachers and bright colors and big words and playing with each other so they're ready for school.
We have learned that every dollar we spend on a child in those preschool years saves us $7 later on that we don't have to spend because children are struggling in school or having trouble when they're out of school. Those are investments we need to make long term. Investing in our children is investing in our future. And by golly, it's time for us to stand up and say so.
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Look, I always worry about the influence peddlers in Washington, regardless of party affiliation. One of the things, as you know, I've spent a lot of my time in Congress working on is how we bring just more ethics and more oversight in general to everything that we do in government.
Look at, we've got a United States Supreme Court where people take gifts and don't even report them, even though the law requires them to report, and that they somehow think that is all right. It is not all right. But we don't have a set of ethics that apply to the Supreme Court. We have a problem with the revolving door. People who come into government from industry and then they write regulations for the people they used to work with, and then they leave government and go back to working for that same industry and cashing in on their time in government service, selling off their access to our elected officials.
I understand that it is hard for Republicans and Democrats and Independents to say, we've got to have a set of ethics that apply to everyone. And that means we've got to be willing to say to our friends and people who are not our friends the same rules apply across the board. And we got to shut down the revolving door. We got to have ethics rules that apply to everyone. That's what we got to do, both to make government function better, but also so the American people can have confidence in their government. I think that is really a crucial challenge for us in the next few years.
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Thank you for having me.
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