Elizabeth Warren: Tax on Rich Will Pay for Day Care for Every Newborn in U.S.

Democrat 2020 contender Elizabeth Warren promised teachers’ union members Friday she would tax the wealthy to provide free day care for every newborn in the country.

The senator from Massachusetts told members of the National Education Association (NEA) at a 2020 forum in Houston she would enact a two cent per dollar tax on every $50 million levied against 75,000 of the top earners in the United States.

Courthouse News Service reports:

The tax would raise more than $1 trillion, Warren said, enough to pay for child care for every baby in this country from newborns to 5 year olds, universal pre-kindergarten for every 3-and-4-year-old child, and tuition-free technical school, community college and four-year college for everyone who wants a higher education.

“Plus, we can cancel student loan debt for 95% of people,” Warren added.

The Washington Examiner noted that a Moody’s Analytics report found Warren’s plan would cost an additional $700 billion over the next decade:

Warren also called for strengthening teachers’ unions.

“Make it easier to join a union, and give those unions more power when they come in to negotiate,” Warren said to applause.

The NEA is the nation’s largest teachers’ union. The union criticized the Obama administration for its emphasis on high-stakes testing. The Common Core State Standards – originated soon after former President Barack Obama took office – required teachers to be evaluated, in part, based on the performance of their students on Common Core-aligned assessments.

Education Week reported Warren was asked how she would end high-stakes testing.

“This notion that it’s all about testing – that it’s all about what someone far off in the state capital and the national capital says, ‘Here’s what constitutes success and worse yet, here’s what constitutes failure,'” she responded. “No, that’s not what education is about. Education is what goes on in the classroom, what a teacher has set as the goal, and when a child gets there, it is the teacher who knows it – we do not need high-stakes testing.”