There is one question that I don’t think you answered. Why does the federal government need to be involved? Why not just let states go in their own directions? Some will choose to do it, and some not.

I have more detailed comments at my own blog: http://investinginkids.net/2013/05/20/moving-the-u-s-towards-a-more-universal-high-quality-early-education-system/

In particular, I still think that a more politically practical high-return immediate step is to move towards universal early education for 4-year-olds. This has the highest and most universal returns, and is more politically practical in part because it is cheaper, and in part because there is less political resistance towards government involvement with this age range than for earlier ages.

The situation is worsened by inequality. In days of less inequality regular people had the wherewithal to hire each other for all kinds of services, live music being my favorite example. But no longer.

More generally, the importance of investing in ECEC should not shift attention away from other, even more important, issues such as minimum income protection, which I believe will be far more effective in mitigating income inequality and promoting social mobility (at least in the short run).

Paper on this issue: http://www.centrumvoorsociaalbeleid.be/sites/default/files/CSB%20Working%20Paper%2013%2001_January%202013.pdf

What “public opinion” wants is not very relevant. What matters is what VOTERS want, and in particular what campaign DONORS wnat.

Policy is decided by people who are nominated by donors and endorsed by voters. Public opinion is a very weak input to that process.

Also “big government” is not at all what the debate in the USA is about, because conservatives really like big government too, and use “big government” to mean something else entirely.

What the debate is about is not really the size of the government, it is redistribution.

Conservatives think that currently government redistributes from the “deserving” rich to the “parasitical” poor, so they want less government, but tactically, not strategically.

When government redistributes from the “parasitical” poor to the “deserving” rich, they like big government a lot. Consider their enthusiasm for more spending trillions on investment bank bailouts, on defense and defense industries, on security services.

Consider “big government” conservative G.W.Bush and how enthusiastically he was supported by business and other rentier donors for this massive expansion of spending on “deserving” causes from wars to bailouts, all costing enormous amounts of money, which have made the cost of government balloon far more than “parasitical” spending on social insruance for the poor and unemployed.

Lewis in “Boomerang” points out that many local governments in the USA have unsustainable wage and pension issues, and he is the one of the very few authors to add that this is caused by conservatives giving extraordinarily high wages and pensions to police and fire protection workers.

Because policemen and firemen work in business and property protection, and vote for Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, and big government with high spending on government employees is something that conservatives are very keen if it is funded by taxes on the poor like fees and sales taxes and benefits the rich as in business and property protection and in well paid jobs for the Republican boys.

The debate is not about the size of government, it is about whether it favours business and property interests.

You seem to be missing a very important point here: who has the political power to push for higher wages?

Because as the story with bankers and pharma it is pretty clear that the distribution of income in the US is primarily determined by politics.

The politics in the USA and in the UK and other first world countries are that most VOTERS WANT LOWER WAGES, and have been voting for lower wages for decades. Even more so campaign donors.

It is easy to see why: usually voters, and even more so donors, are in the top half of the income and wealth distribution, they think that they have safe jobs with very much a guaranteed income, and they own assets on which they want to make endless tax free capital gains.

Also most voters and donors are older and the majority of them are asset owning women, who are well known to be swing voters.

What this majority of voters and donors want is lower wages for everybody else, because they think that they have got theirs, and everybody else’s wages are costs to them, and reduce the chances for capital gains.

They also want low welfare spending for everybody else and high welfare spending for themselves, low taxes on themselves and high taxes on everybody else, and so on.

These are the voters and donors who have resoundingly re-elected and endorsed the congresspeople who voted for PATRIOT and TARP.

Their poitics is almost pure rentier politics. These voters want fascism-lite.

The results are that both the Republicans and the Democrats are trying very hard to pander to ehse voters and donors, especialy the older women who are swing voters and voting their wallets, and as Frum said:

http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index4.html

«It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years.

In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused.

Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares.

This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.»

The argument to make to these voters is that it is in their own long term self interest to moderate their greed for rentier politics and let the yopung and working poor or relatively poorer have an increasing share of the pie, but instictively these voters think that being older and rentiers they don’t have a long term, and who cates what happens afterwards.

The characterization of wages at the middle and below as flat since the 1970s is using the CPI-U-RS (http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-table-4-4-hourly-wages-workers/).

Household incomes in the lower half have grown, but slowly and mainly due to adding a second earner (http://lanekenworthy.net/2012/03/11/is-decoupling-real/).

Living standards are harder to measure, but I’d characterize them too as having increased more slowly than they should have given the growth of the economy (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/soc150c2-sharedprosperity2.pdf).

over 30 years, the mismeasure of better product quality and new goods introduces major biases, longer life expectancy is another major issue.

A BBC television documentary placed two parents and four children in their home with only the amenities available in each of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The programme follows the middle class family’s adaption and reaction to being thrown back to a more technologically sparse period and how their pastimes and attitudes change in response to landing in the early 1970s and coming up-to-date.

The programmes revealed the huge transformation that technological change has wrought on family life. The children have to cope when they swap Facebook for black-and-white telly and vinyl records.

Goodbye to their three games consoles, three DVD players, five mobile phones, six televisions and seven computers, not to mention their dishwasher, two washing machines and tumble dryer.

Filming occurred over the winter of 2009, which was particularly cold and snowy for England, a fact which figured into the story. the family had to endure a lack of central heating for the 70s episode.