Traditionally we think of social welfare expenditures as negatives in national income accounts and we think of economic developments as positive: investments are positive, expenditures are negative. What\u2019s happening now with the new research on early care and education is a reinterpretation of those expenditures as investments, and this is a radical shift because when government or bus thinks about something as an expenditure, it\u2019s just money lost. But when you think of something as an investment, its money that yields a return. And it turns out that both in the short-, medium- and long-terms, early care and education investments yield a positive return. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is huge because as governments are stressed in terms of the amount of taxes they can raise and what kind of expenditures they feel they can handle, those things that are thought of as expenditures pure and simple are more likely to be cut. And programs and activities that are considered investment activities are things that you really need to do to for your short- and long term economic health. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So they are investments and we need to start talking about them in that way and thinking about finance vehicles that we use in other physical infrastructures. We don\u2019t have to pay for the full cost of a bridge today in order to build it. We know we can\u2019t wait and build it brick by brick over the next 20 years but we expect our children to wait. And while we wait in policy trying to figure out what to do they grow up without the care they need. When we need a bridge, we build it immediately: we finance it with long term financing. We build it immediately. We need to start thinking about an investment system in early care and education that acknowledges these highly positive long-term and short-term and medium returns and then goes ahead and builds it today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traditionally we think of social welfare expenditures as negatives in national income accounts and we think of economic developments as positive: investments are positive, expenditures are negative. What\u2019s happening now with the new research on early care and education is a reinterpretation of those expenditures as investments, and this is a radical shift because when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2549","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2550,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2549\/revisions\/2550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}