Joseph R. Biden Jr. will announce a new investment of $ 775 billion in care programs on Tuesday, with a series of proposals covering the care of young children, older adults and family members with disabilities. His campaign hopes the plan will land with particular resonance during a pandemic that has severely affected the care needs of millions of American families.
The speech, near his home in Wilmington, Delaware, will be the third of four economic deployments that Biden, the former vice president and presumed Democratic nominee, will make before the Democratic National Convention next month. He is trying to mitigate one of the few areas of advantage, the economy, that President Trump maintains even when Trump’s overall position has declined.
Mr. Biden’s plans are intended to appeal to voters who are now more aware of how essential caregivers are, as a health crisis has closed schools, a source of child care for many Americans, and limited options. to care for older family members who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
But they are also targeted at caregivers themselves, promising more jobs and higher wages. His campaign estimated that the new spending would create three million new jobs in the next decade, and even more after factoring in people capable of entering the workforce rather than serving as unpaid caregivers in the home.
In a conference call that outlined the plan on Monday night, Biden’s campaign framed the problems as an economic imperative to keep the country globally competitive and allow it to recover from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. The United States is the only wealthy country without paid family leave and does not have universal child care; Research has shown that labor force participation has stagnated because of that.
But Mr. Biden’s advisers, whose campaign has made empathy a central component of his 2020 bid, have also repeatedly invoked the former vice president’s own story as a single parent. Mr. Biden’s first wife and her 1-year-old daughter died in a car accident in 1972, shortly before she was first sworn in in the United States Senate. Her two children survived the accident.
The Biden campaign is expected to announce proposals to remove the waiting list for home and community care under Medicaid, which has approximately 800,000 people; provide new funds to states and groups exploring alternatives to institutional care; and add 150,000 new community health workers. Her campaign said that outbreaks of coronavirus in nursing homes had highlighted the need to care for older adults at home.
For young children, he proposes to start with a bailout for child care centers, many of which risk closing amid the pandemic because they are almost entirely funded by private payments. Even before the blockades began, they operated with very small profit margins.
Mr. Biden will also propose national pre-kindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, and his campaign noted research that has shown that such programs help women to work and narrow gaps in racial and socioeconomic achievement.
The plan would address the child care shortage by providing financing for the construction of new child care facilities, including in workplaces and in rural areas.
Mr. Biden’s plan also calls for a raise in wages for child care workers, who are disproportionately women and minorities, along with health benefits, professional training and the ability to unionize. A campaign document on the plan said: “There is no reason for an educator who teaches young children to earn less than a kindergarten educator with similar qualifications.” On average, preschool teachers in the United States earn less than $ 30,000 a year, while kindergarten teachers earn more than $ 50,000, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
The plan would provide benefits for people who don’t work to care for family members, an idea that recently garnered support from both sides. The proposal would grant unpaid caregivers a $ 5,000 tax credit as well as Social Security credits.
Mr. Biden’s campaign said the programs, some of which would be operated with state and local officials, would be paid by reducing some taxes on real estate investors with incomes above $ 400,000, as well as increasing the taxation of the wealthy.
Mr. Biden will speak in New Castle, Del., Near the home where he has mostly stayed since the coronavirus began sweeping the country in March. His first economic speech focused on revitalizing manufacturing and strengthening the “Buy American” rules; the second was about building the infrastructure of a new, greener economy; and the last will be on the advancement of “racial equity,” the campaign has said.
