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Can Tax Policy Address the Childcare Crisis?, Sonic AI
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Can Tax Policy Address the Childcare Crisis?
Tax Notes Talk
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May 1, 2026
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25:38
Interview
Can Tax Policy Address the Childcare Crisis?
From
Tax Notes Talk
Lauren Shores-Pelican
(Professor of Law, University of Missouri School of Law, guest)
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Executive Summary
child care market is fundamentally broken, characterized by unaffordable costs for parents, unsustainably low wages for workers, and a chronic shortage of supply.
Private equity has heavily invested in the sector, with PE-backed firms controlling nine of the ten largest for-profit chains and achieving 15-20% profit margins through financial engineering, not by expanding access to care.
Current federal tax incentives primarily focus on demand-side subsidies for parents, which are insufficient and fail to address the core supply-side problem of a severe labor shortage driven by low pay.
Professor Lauren Shores-Pelican proposes a new supply-side tax incentive, the "child care service provider exclusion," to allow workers to exclude their wages from income and payroll taxes, thereby boosting take-home pay to attract and retain staff.
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The Broken Child Care Market
Private Equity's Extractive Role
Inadequacy of Demand-Side Tax Policy
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Processed May 4, 2026
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