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Video: Vermont Made Child Care Affordable. Could It Lead by Example?
Vermont had a problem. Child care was too expensive. “We would be paying $3,500 a month, more than twice our mortgage.” Some parents were giving up their careers to stay home — “After daycare, you come home with maybe $60 extra a week. It’s just not even worth it at that point.” making it harder for local businesses to hire workers. Some businesses wanted the state to pay for childcare, but they faced a big obstacle. “The word tax. It’s a very volatile word.” Ultimately, Vermont did manage to make child care more affordable. So we’re here to find out how they’re doing it. This year’s midterm elections could turn on the issue of affordability. “Affordability.” “Affordability.” “Affordability.” “The affordability crisis.” Forty-four percent of voters said having a family was unaffordable in a recent Times-Siena poll. Alison Byrnes and her husband, for example, wanted a third kid. “It felt just like our family wasn’t complete.” But daycare for two kids here costs $3,500 a month, and Alison’s mom was already dipping into her retirement fund to help pay for that. “There’s no way we could make that work.” For years, Vermont’s working-age population has been shrinking, making businesses like Smugglers’ Notch Resort compete to find the workers they need. In 2022, the resort was short more than a dozen housekeepers. The managing director was fed up with the staffing shortage and decided to try something new. He offered free child care for employees. “We announced the new program on a Friday and by Tuesday, we were full. All the jobs had been taken, so we knew we were really on to something.” The child care benefit attracted employees like Becca Bishop, who wanted to rejoin the workforce after a few years as a stay-at-home mom. “I chose to start working here purely because of the child care that we have.” Now before work, she drops off her 3-year-old, Archer, at the on-site daycare and her 5-year-old son, Hunter, at ski camp, which is also free. Then she works full time managing the resort’s arcade. Once Bill solved his staffing problem, he started talking to other Vermont C.E.O.s about the benefits of child care and lobbying for a new tax that would fund it statewide. “When I was first back in Vermont working for the governor, I was talking to all kinds of Vermonters, and what I found was everything that they cared about actually linked back to child care. Aly Richards spent a decade expanding child care in Vermont. She said business leaders like Bill were a crucial part of the push. “Once we had them in here saying, ‘Look, if I paid in to fix child care in a systemic, sustainable way through, let’s say, a payroll tax,’ what happened was it gave permission to lawmakers to move forward on this issue. Often, businesses come into this building and say, ‘Please, do not raise taxes.’ In this case, it really was flipped on its head. They became the most powerful voices in advocating for public investment.” “What we should really do is try it and find out what happens.” The child care bill, Act 76, passed in 2023. It established a new 0.44 percent payroll tax on employers and generates about $125 million a year to fund child care subsidies. Families pay on a sliding scale. So a family of four with a modest income pays no tuition for child care. Higher-income families pay a co-pay that’s supposed to stay below roughly 10 percent of their income. The law has only fully been in place for a year, but already the new funding has led to more than 1,200 new child care slots for kids across Vermont. For years, child care centers were closing because they couldn’t cover their bills. Now, new ones are opening, like this one in the farming town of Addison. Michelle Bishop had dreamed of starting a place like this, but couldn’t afford to open until she could count on the state to pay more than $400 per child each week. “We have 16 children enrolled — 80 percent of them are receiving subsidy.” The additional funding also meant she could actually afford to pay her workers a livable wage. Statewide, Vermont still needs many more child care centers before it can fully meet demand. For now, though, the difference the new law has made for these Vermont residents is clear. Alison and her husband were finally able to have the third child they wanted because they knew their childcare costs would be about $30,000 a year less than it would have been without the new law. “We can’t imagine our family without that third kiddo. It’s literally life-changing. Like — she would not be here.” For Rebecca, free child care means she can afford to save for a new house that fits her family better. “We do plan on staying in Vermont, yes.” Michelle plans to expand into another room for toddlers this spring. “We hope to open in March or April. We’re almost finished.” And as for Bill, he says the New tax is nothing compared to what Vermont gets for it. “We didn’t put in a new tax and find that we couldn’t pay our bills. We’re still here.” “In Vermont, we really came together and it’s working.”
Pope Leo has said he has never supported nuclear weapons and that those who criticise him need to speak the truth, in response to Donald Trump’s latest tirade accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics” with his stance on the Iran war.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday night after leaving the papal retreat in Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, the first US-born pontiff said: “The mission of the church is to preach the gospel, to preach peace.”
Leo, who is to meet the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in the Vatican on Thursday in an effort to ease tensions sparked by previous Trump broadsides, made a plea for honesty in political debate.
“If anyone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the gospel, let them do so with the truth: the church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, there is no doubt about that,” the pope said. “I simply hope to be listened to because of the value of God’s word.”
Earlier in the day, Trump told Hugh Hewitt, a prominent conservative radio talkshow host: “The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and I don’t think that’s very good.
“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
In April, the US president lashed out at Leo in response to the pope’s criticisms of the war on Iran, calling Leo “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy” and saying he had only been elected pontiff because Trump himself was in the White House. Trump then shared an AI-generated image of himself depicted as a Christ-like figure before deleting it.
Leo, who marks his first year as pope on Friday, often goes to Castel Gandolfo at the start of the week, leaving on a Tuesday night and on some occasions stopping to chat to journalists. But until Trump’s latest tirade against him, he had not been planning to speak this week.
“We were told yesterday that there would be no papal chat,” said Andrea Vreede, a Vatican correspondent for the Dutch public radio and TV network NOS. “But there was, because he thought it was necessary and it was necessary.”
Vreede added: “Things have become really tense because Trump isn’t talking about the church or Vatican, but Leo; he has made it personal. We’re back to the middle ages when holy Roman emperors and popes did this kind of [thing], used this kind of language.”
The Rubio meeting will be the first known private audience Leo has had with a member of Trump’s cabinet since the secretary of state and the US vice-president, JD Vance, met the pope a day after his papal inauguration mass in May last year.
A “frank” conversation is expected, the US ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, said, although Rubio has played down the rift between Trump administration and the Vatican, saying “obviously we had some stuff that happened” but there was “a lot to talk about with the Vatican”.
On Friday, Rubio will also meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whom Trump berated in April after she criticised his remarks against Leo. The president lambasted the Meloni government for not supporting the strikes on Iran and threatening to withdraw US troops from Italy as a result.
But Rubio’s meeting with the pope, which the US secretary of state has been seeking for weeks, could have an ulterior motive, said Vreede.
“For Leo, it’s important to have a photo moment with Rubio and then release a short statement saying they are continuing their dialogue and all want world peace,” she said. “Privately, it won’t be a nice talk, it cannot be a nice talk … but Rubio needs to keep the diplomatic channels with the Vatican open as he’s thinking about himself [ahead of the US presidential elections] in 2028.”
Trump’s rivalry with Rubio possibly triggered his latest outburst, Vreede added: “He believes in rivalry, in winning … perhaps he’s trying to interfere with Rubio because Rubio is being a bit too diplomatic.”
President Trump promised political payback last year when Indiana state senators from his own party voted down his plan to redraw the state’s congressional map to help Republicans.
On Tuesday, he got much of what he wanted, as at least five of the seven anti-redistricting Republicans facing Trump-backed challengers lost their primaries, according to The Associated Press. The results reflected Mr. Trump’s continuing sway over Republican voters and his ability to enforce political consequences for Republican officeholders who defy him.
In the other races, at least one incumbent won his primary and another race remained too close to call.
State legislative primaries are often low-drama affairs, but Mr. Trump’s involvement brought unusual levels of attention and outside spending. The president issued social media endorsements to the seven challengers and hosted some of them at the White House, while outside groups aligned with Mr. Trump poured money into the races.
As the challengers emphasized their ties to Mr. Trump, many of the incumbents focused on their own conservative credentials, as well as endorsements from groups supporting farmers, gun rights or abortion restrictions.
Rather than a contest between moderates and conservatives, the primaries became a test of how much deference Republicans owe Mr. Trump and how much control the president holds over rank-and-file voters.
“It’s not that anyone is less or more pro-life,” said Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican redistricting supporter who backed most of the Trump-endorsed challengers. “It’s really that, do you understand the battle we are in, and do you understand the role Indiana plays in that battle on a national stage?”
State Senator Spencer Deery, one of the anti-redistricting incumbents, described the election as a test of how much sway Washington policymakers and their allies have over state policymaking.
“What’s at stake,” he said, “is the question of whether state legislators are going to be free to listen to their constituents and to govern their state without the outside meddling of enormous financial sums of dark money.”
On Tuesday, voters had diverging views of the political landscape and of the president’s endorsement.
In Granger, Ind., along the Michigan border, Tony Xouris said redistricting was his top issue and that he turned out to vote for the Trump-backed challenger to Senator Linda Rogers, who voted against the redrawn map.
“She lost my vote,” said Mr. Xouris, a semiretired insurance agent. “She’s a RINO. She’s a bad Republican.”
But outside the polls in Schererville, Ind., near Chicago, Matt Bartz said he was voting for Senator Dan Dernulc even though Mr. Trump had endorsed a challenger.
“I’m a Trump supporter,” said Mr. Bartz, a retired steelworker. “I was under the understanding that he wanted states to regulate themselves, take care of themselves, but now he’s coming back with this revenge type of thing and I’m not happy with that.”
The races also split political leaders in Indiana, where Republicans have amassed power over the last 20 years, but where there are longstanding fissures between the party establishment and an ascendant movement that hews closely to Mr. Trump.
Gov. Mike Braun and Mr. Beckwith, along with some members of the congressional delegation, came out in support of many of the challengers.
On the other side, former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who helped usher in Indiana’s era of Republican dominance, became a leading voice against redistricting. His successor as governor, former Vice President Mike Pence, endorsed one of the incumbents seeking re-election.
The rupture began last year when Mr. Trump was pushing redistricting nationwide in a bid to gain seats in Congress in the midterm elections. Several Republican-led states quickly fell in line, and some Democratic-led ones moved to counter with their own maps. But a critical mass of Indiana lawmakers remained opposed to the plan to draw a map that would position Republicans to flip the state’s two U.S. House seats held by Democrats.
When lawmakers returned to Indianapolis in December, the Republican-led House approved a new map. But the Republican-controlled Senate said no, with a slim majority of Republicans joining Democrats to vote the bill down even as Mr. Trump threatened political consequences.
“Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED,” Mr. Trump wrote in a November social media post that referred to two senators as Republicans in name only.
He soon followed through on that promise, endorsing challengers to seven of the eight anti-redistricting Republicans who ran for re-election this year. Other Republicans who voted against the bill have two years remaining in their terms or did not run for re-election.
Kim Bellware, Robert Chiarito and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
Stephen Zenner/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Wealthy biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has won the Ohio Republican primary for governor, according to a race call by The Associated Press.
He took an aggressive but traditional route to securing the nomination. On President Trump’s inauguration day, Ramaswamy announced he was leaving the president’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency. That evening, Trump threw his support behind Ramaswamy with what he called his “complete and total endorsement.”
Tuesday, Ramaswamy won with a comfortable margin over Casey Putsch, a northwest Ohio car designer and racing team owner new to politics who attacked Ramaswamy for his South Asian heritage.
Democrat Dr. Amy Acton will face Ramaswamy in the general election. In red Ohio, where a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor in 20 years, the race looks competitive. The Cook Political Report, which tracks elections, shifted the race from one Republicans were likely to win, to one that just leans in Ramaswamy’s favor. But the Republican has vast financial resources of his own and has raised an enormous amount of money.
Acton is the former state health director, appointed to the position in 2019 by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. She played a major role in Ohio’s response to the COVID pandemic, signing orders from DeWine that restricted in-person gatherings, shut non-essential businesses, and closed K-12 schools. Republicans have called her “Dr. Lockdown” and have used her pandemic response to campaign against her. DeWine has defended Acton’s work as health director, even though he’s endorsed Ramaswamy, and has said pandemic-related decisions “were made by the governor”.
Her campaign has focused on the high cost of living, an issue that has left voters disgruntled with Republicans. She’s called for child tax credits, reducing prescription drug costs, lowering utility costs and helping Ohioans stay on Medicaid, among other things.
When Ramaswamy launched his campaign in February last year, he said he wanted to see property taxes eliminated. He’s backed off that proposal, and now talks about instituting “the largest rollback of property taxes in the history of Ohio.” He’s also raised fears with a proposal to consolidate or close public universities in the state.
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