Childcare Help Should Start With Single Mothers

Philadelphia is debating a new tax on companies that replace workers with machines, and the debate should include a decision about where the money goes. Not every parent needs the city's help paying for daycare, and the help should start with single mothers, who carry the full cost of care on one income with no partner at home to share either the bill or the hours. An income line belongs in how the help is set up, so that a mother earning below a set amount qualifies first, and the city should remember at the same time that raising a child alone is hard at nearly any income, which means the door should not close too quickly on the mothers who land just above the line.

The bill is the Automated Services Displacement Tax, introduced in City Council on October 29 by Councilmember Jim Harrity, and it would charge companies a tax when they shift work that employees used to do over to automated systems, including artificial intelligence. The idea behind the bill is that when a company stops employing people in Philadelphia, the city loses the wage and business tax revenue those jobs produced, and the company should contribute something back to the city where those employees live.

The timing is not abstract, because Comcast, which is headquartered in Philadelphia, has told state regulators that it will lay off 634 employees at its Philadelphia headquarters starting at the end of this year, in a restructuring built around wider use of artificial intelligence. Some of the workers who lose those jobs will be single mothers, and a mother who loses her job faces the hardest version of the childcare question, which is how to keep paying for daycare during the months she spends looking for the next job, since giving up a daycare spot usually means losing it.

The size of the childcare bill explains why so many mothers stay home longer than they want to, because in Pennsylvania center-based infant care takes about 40 percent of what a single parent earns at the median income, before rent and groceries enter the picture at all, and care for children under three is the hardest care to find and the most expensive care there is. A mother in that position is not choosing between work and home in any free sense, since the math of daycare can erase most of the paycheck that work brings in, and every month she spends at home widens the gap she has to close when she returns.

The revenue from the displacement tax should therefore do two jobs at once, with the first job being direct relief that helps low-income single mothers pay for daycare in the years when care costs the most, which are the years before a child turns three. The second job is workforce development, with a share of the revenue going to training and educational resources that help those same mothers move into better employment than the job they lost or left, so that the help lifts a family rather than simply returning it to where it stood.

Companies are going to keep automating, and much of that sits outside anything the city can control, so the question worth the city's attention is what happens to the people on the other side of those decisions. The point of this help is not to manage poverty at the same level year after year, but to put resources in the hands of the people who need them most, starting with single mothers, so that a family ends up in a better place financially than where it started.