Child Care Veto

So crucial is the matter of early growth that we must make a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life.

THUS spoke Richard Nixon in an early statement as President in 1969. What has now become an important political issue is a proposal that would be a striking extension of responsibility for the Federal Government: taking on greater financial responsibility for the nurture of many of the nation's young, through a broad program of educational and medical aid to children.

The President's own Family Assistance Plan, still stuck in the congressional bogs, would move modestly in that direction; its provisions, together with existing programs, would bring increased federal outlays for child care to some $1.2 billion a year, much of it for centers that would look after the offspring of welfare families moving into the labor force. Last week the Democratic-controlled Congress sent Nixon a bill to establish a more ambitious childcare program that would provide, as Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale put it, "a full range of quality health, education, nutrition and social services" for the young. The very poor would pay nothing for the services, while the more prosperous would be charged a fee; a family with two children and an income of $6,960 a year, for example, would pay about $6 a week. The child-care centers would be run by local "prime sponsors" --cities, towns, counties or even such groups as Indian tribal councils. The price tag for the first year would be $2 billion, not vastly more than Nixon's own plan, but the President chose to veto it. He damned it roundly for "fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkabili-ty and family-weakening implications." -

Nixon warned that the program would eventually have cost the Federal Government roughly $20 billion a year, though he did not explain how he arrived at that figure, which is nearly 10% of the present federal budget. Administration officials, however, said that if the benefits were to go to every family eligible under the bill, its overall costs would reach some $37 billion a year. They said estimates indicate that $17 billion of that total would be recovered from fees paid by participating families with incomes above the poverty line. The bill, Nixon added, "would commit the vast moral authority of the national Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach."

The last charge seemed like a bit of a reach, but Nixon was clearly taking the offensive in order to avoid the peril of being cast as a kind of Scrooge --against day care, against helping working parents, even against children. The Democrats are sure to make a political issue of the veto; Mondale and other backers of the bill were already calling it the most significant social legislation to come out of the 92nd Congress.

The measure had strong backing from Women's Lib, labor, civil rights groups and educational associations. The Senate vote had been a lopsided 63 to 17, but many Republicans who had supported the bill originally fell into line behind the President. Thus the bill's backers could not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override Nixon's veto.

What Nixon rejected was a good deal more ambitious than a federal babysitting service. Congress' bold day-care plan had its defects, but its goals raised a far-reaching question: How much in the way of useful new social services can the world's most prosperous land afford? If the bill and Nixon's veto at least produce what Nixon called "a great national debate upon its merit," then they may have served a vital purpose.

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