In 1971, a gallon of gas cost 36 cents, a new house averaged $25,000, and the median cost of full-time daycare was practically an afterthought for most working families.
Today, in more than half of American states, sending an infant to daycare costs more than in-state college tuition.
That is a feature of a system that decided children are a private expense and profit is a public good.
Follow the money and the picture gets stranger.
Private equity firms have spent the last decade quietly buying up childcare chains across the country.
When Wall Street buys your daycare, the math changes.
Staff wages get squeezed, ratios creep up, and tuition climbs.
The investors win either way, because parents have no choice.
You cannot negotiate with the only licensed provider within twenty miles when your job starts at eight.
Meanwhile, the federal subsidy that kept 80,000 providers afloat during the pandemic — the Child Care Stabilization program — expired in 2023, and Congress let it die without a vote.
The ones that survived raised prices or cut staff.
Both outcomes land on the same people every time: mothers, who still carry the bulk of caregiving, and low-wage workers who cannot afford to stay home and cannot afford to work.
The United States is one of the only wealthy nations on Earth without a national paid family leave policy or universal early childhood education.
France, Germany, Japan, and even countries we routinely dismiss as "socialist" treat childcare as infrastructure, like roads or electricity.
We treat it as a luxury good, then act shocked when birth rates fall and women drop out of the workforce.
So ask yourself who benefits from keeping it this way.
Not the underpaid teachers changing diapers for $13 an hour.
The beneficiaries are the investors collecting returns and the politicians who fundraise on culture war distractions while the actual family crisis happens in plain sight, every Monday morning, at every daycare drop-off line in America.
The real scandal is not that childcare is expensive.
It is that someone is making money off the fact that you have no other option. **Our take:** Every parent paying $1,500 a month for toddler care is subsidizing an industry that was never designed to serve them.
Until Americans connect the cost of daycare to the same corporate consolidation squeezing housing, healthcare, and groceries, nothing changes.
Final Thoughts
The receipt is right there in your bank statement.