The current child care system in the United States isn't working well for anyone, even though the majority of children in the United States are being raised in families where all parents work for pay, and the majority of children have, since the 1990s, been in some form of "non-maternal" care from the age of six months. The Care Index, a data and methodology collaboration between New America, a nonpartisan think tank, and Care.com, the largest online market for caregiving, data shows that no one state is providing all three of the pillars that constitute a functioning early care and learning system that supports both working families of all socio-economic levels and the child development needs of all children: affordable cost, high quality, and easy availability.

Instead, families must rely on a patchwork system that that is expensive to the point of keeping some parents, typically mothers, out of the workforce; difficult to find; and mediocre at best, with teachers paid poverty wages, turnover high and small providers operating on razor-thin margins.

The Care Index found that the average cost of child care in centers is nearly one-fifth the median household income, and nearly two-thirds of a minimum wage workers' earnings. Nationally, only 11 percent of centers and family homes are accredited to meet quality standards. As for availability, the New America Care Report profiled one parent in Georgia who wanted to find quality care for her two young children close to her work, but couldn't afford any licensed establishment within a 20-mile radius.

There is a reason that this hodgepodge child care infrastructure exists in the United States: Policymakers decided in the early 1970s that child care was the private responsibility of families, not a public investment in the economy for the good of society and the future, and that a functioning child care system would have "family-weakening implications."

In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Care Development Fund, a bipartisan effort to create a network of nationally funded, comprehensive child care centers. They were to be administered at the local level and provide high-quality early education, nutrition, and medical services. The services were to be universal, available to all regardless of income on a sliding scale. (During World War II, under the Lanham Act, the federal government supported 3,000 such child care centers in every state, except New Mexico, in order for women to go to work.)

The idea of a government role in child care had broad public support in the early 1970s. Surveys showed that a majority of both men and women not only favored setting up a workable child care system, but that they thought the federal government should play an important role in supporting it, Kimberly Morgan writes in her book, A Child of the Sixties.

Yet President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, writing that it would have committed the government "to the side of communal approaches to child r

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