Vice President Kamala Harris met with a good number of adults during her quick Friday afternoon trip to the New Haven area, but kids might have provided the highlights of the day.
With much of her visit devoted to talking about federal funding for child care providers, the VP sat on the floor with preschoolers at West Haven Child Development Center. One asked, "How does it feel like being a vice president?" Harris drew laughs when she replied, "Y'know, I kinda like it!"
In West Haven and, earlier, at the Boys & Girls Club of New Haven, Vice President Harris spoke of the wide-ranging impact of the nation's new $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. House and Senate Republicans unanimously rejected the price tag, but Harris suggested it's just the beginning of the Biden Administration taking major steps to tackle what it considers deep-seated problems:
"This is the intentional purpose of the American Rescue Plan, which was to look at childcare, to look at our childcare workers, to look at our children, to bring them out of poverty... There's bipartisan support for this approach. There are certain issues in our country that should not even be bipartisan, but nonpartisan, and one of them should be our children."
"Let's leapfrog over the problems and get into the next phase of all of this. Invest in our childcare workers, invest in our childcare centers, invest in our children, pull people out of poverty, agree that it is not okay in the United States of America that children go hungry. This is the opportunity before us right now: the opportunity to address longstanding racial disparities in every one these systems, be it healthcare, education, the economy... We are at a moment, I believe, that should cause us to have great optimism about what is possible."
The American Rescue Plan sends more than $10 billion into the Connecticut economy, including more than $1 billion for safe reopening of public schools and more than $275 million for child care providers, who have largely been devastated by the ongoing pandemic.
Vice President Harris was joined in West Haven by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D/CT-03) who represents the district and presides as Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. DeLauro is also enthusiastic about the prospects of the American Rescue Plan, especially the extension of the child tax credit, which she has championed for many years:
"It will lift one half of the children of this country out of poverty," says DeLauro. "For me, it is like the New Deal. It is like Social Security, which lifted 90% of our seniors out of poverty. This is what the child tax credit will do."