We can’t afford not to invest in children

In other news, former Canadian PMs wait their turn. And isn’t it past time to stop tipping?

We can’t afford not to invest in children

Nick Kristof in the Times makes an impassioned plea for President Biden to continue pushing the idea of universal pre-K education and affordable child care. You know, like what most advanced countries have.

Can we afford this Biden revolution in child programs? It will indeed be expensive. And there is a perennial debate over whether it’s better to have programs that are targeted at the neediest (which are more cost-effective) or those that are universal (which are politically more sustainable).

But I’ve written about the heartache in my hometown in rural Oregon: More than one-quarter of the kids on my old school bus are dead from “deaths of despair”: drugs, alcohol and suicide. Taxpayers spent huge sums incarcerating my former classmateswhen the funds would have been far better spent reducing fetal alcohol exposures and tackling childhood trauma, illiteracy, failure to graduate from high school and a lack of job skills.

One reason our efforts to fight poverty haven’t achieved more is that we often start too late. For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.

Over here, we wait our turn

There was a little bit of buzz recently when two former prime ministers — conservative Joe Clark and liberal Jean Chrétien — agreed to be photographed getting their first shot of the vaccine at Ottawa City Hall. Both men qualify. Clark was born in 1939 and Chrétien in 1934. Yes, they could probably have made a call, or had people pull strings for them. They didn’t. They waited their turn and showed up at the same clinic as everyone else. But what about the prime minister? At a healthy 49 years old, he’s too young to be vaccinated in the first or even second round in Ontario where he lives. He’s way at the back of the line. However, having his picture taken being jabbed might help with vaccine hesitancy. He recently explained how he’s trying to time his first shot.

“I can only get my first vaccine once. And the moment I choose to do that should be a moment where it encourages the most possible people to get it,” Trudeau told Mansbridge, acknowledging that politicians have limited influence anyway over citizens’ personal health decisions.

The end of tipping

Also in the Times, a longish piece on tipping. Specifically, wouldn’t it be time to drop the practice? I know we’re used to it. But is that enough reason to continue with a practice that is demonstrably sexist, demeaning and — increasingly — abusive? Consider this:

That night, toward the end of her shift, she was serving a man and his wife. As she was about to hand over their check, he asked if she could remove her masks so he could see “if the bottom half of my face was as cute as the top.” She refused. He declared, angrily, that he’d have to determine the tip by looking at her breasts, instead.

At its noblest, tipping rewards hard work and excellent customer service. In practice, it punishes women who refuse to let customer mistreat them. It’s high time to drop it like yesterday’s fish special.