This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 30, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There is still a strong push in Congress to spend more federal dollars on early childhood

education and that push may rest on both a judgment about the lifestyles parents might prefer and

an error about what federal funding might mean to the market for early childhood education.

Cato's Colleen Horonsage recently testified on Capitol Hill on the subject.

She explained some of the errors of this new congressional push.

Colleen, you recently testified on Capitol Hill and there is a clamor, a desire by some people in the federal government to get the feds more deeply

involved in what they describe as early childhood education.

Can you characterize that effort?

It seems to come up every couple of years at the least and the current push

President Biden in his recent budget proposal had much more funding for early

childhood care. A couple years ago he had a universal preschool program. The new one's

a little bit different I believe, but the hearing on Capitol Hill was just in general about investing in early childhood care, not necessarily that budget.

It was interesting because the assumption is

to just throw more money at this issue and that's going to solve it and

getting the federal government more involved is going to solve it.

But I don't think there's any evidence that that ever is the case that getting the federal

government more involved solves any problems.

What are the specific problems that these members of Congress feel that they're addressing?

Well they talked about the high cost of early childhood care especially.

And one of the points that one of the congressmen made or one of the members of the committee

...