How Care Work Trickles Down

As an expert on families and inequalities, one thing I know is that decades of so-called trickle-down economics have led to the actual trickling down of care.

The term trickle-down economics describes a way of justifying policies that help the affluent grow their riches while leaving everyone else fending for themselves. The idea is that policies need not help people at the bottom of the economic ladder since the wealth at the top will trickle down to others below. In fact, according to this logic, helping people at the bottom may even prove counterproductive since it discourages them from climbing up the ladder on their own.

Initially, critics employed the idea of trickle-down economics to satirize policies suggesting that rising tides lift all boats. For instance, in 1896, Congressman William Jennings Bryan gave an impassioned speech at the Democratic National Convention, arguing that responsibility for the extreme poverty and inequality of the Gilded Age rests on “those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.” Similarly, in 1932, humorist Will Rogers mockingly blamed President Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression, suggesting that, under Hoover, “The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. [Since] Mr. Hoover was an engineer . . . he knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest spot.”

Initially, critics employed the idea of trickle-down economics to satirize policies suggesting that rising tides lift all boats.

These criticisms rest on evidence showing that, unlike water, wealth rarely trickles down, since the powerful can so easily hoard it for themselves. In the United States, legislators have riddled our estate-tax laws with so many exemptions and loopholes that it’s easy for prosperous Americans to retain their accumulated assets for their families. And even while they’re still living, the moneyed classes can exploit universities’ dependence on wealthy donors to buy admission for their children and grandchildren and stockpile properties in desirable neighborhoods, driving up prices that lock others out of purchasing homes.

Despite little evidence of its efficacy as a generator of shared abundance, since the 1980s, trickle-down economics has been the dominant principle guiding U.S. policymaking and governance. President Ronald Reagan passed so many programs based on this principle that his supporters affectionately rebranded them as “Reaganomics.” Even Democratic leaders have supported trickle-down policies, like when President Bill Clinton cut capital gains taxes, slandered and slashed the U.S. welfare system, and adopted a hands-off approach to the government regulation of tech companies and the banking industry, and when President Barack Obama extended President George W. Bush’s massive tax cuts for the top economic echelon of American society.

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Together, these schemes have allowed the wealthy to grow their opulence exponentially, but very little of it has ultimately trickled down to the less fortunate. In the 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households held less than 20 percent of all the wealth in the country; today, their share is over 30 percent, while the bottom half of American households holds less than 3 percent of all U.S. wealth combined.

To make ends meet in a trickle-down economy, those who aren’t super-wealthy must compete for what little isn’t hoarded at the top. Meanwhile, trickle-down’s most dedicated proponents will tell you that competition ensures rewards for all those willing to work hard and sacrifice for their families. And yet, that competition is neither fair nor sustainable: It’s unfair because racism and sexism limit access to high-paying jobs and unsustainable since low-income wage laborers increasingly work multiple jobs to make ends meet while higher-paid salaried employees work 50- and 60-hour weeks, if not more. Whether worked across one or multiple jobs, such long hours leave workers with little energy to nourish their bodies, minds, or spirits, let alone help anyone else do the same.

Which brings us to what I call the trickle-down of care. While demand for care grows rapidly in the U.S., most forms of carework are too labor-intensive to be profitable and sustainable for providers or affordable and dependable enough for those who need it. If childcare suppliers paid their employees enough to avoid the worker shortages and turnover rates that undermine these industries, sky-high care costs would leave most families unable to afford the care they need. Meanwhile, profits would be so low that businesses would shutter, leaving childcare in short supply.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle what is left of the U.S. social-safety net, our country’s downward drip of care is at risk of swelling to a flood—threatening to drown not only women but the rest of us as well.

These tradeoffs explain why Americans devalue carework, since most people can only afford to outsource their care needs if that labor—from childcare and eldercare and healthcare to housework and personal care—is done for little or no pay. Those tradeoffs explain why, in a trickle-down economy, care tends to flow downstream from the privileged to the more marginalized and vulnerable.

Essentially, in the context of trickle-down’s competitive pressures, anyone who wants to climb the ladder or keep from slipping down its lower rungs has an interest in getting someone else to do their share of care while paying as little as possible to outsource it. And the most effective way to achieve that goal is to offload responsibility for care downstream onto others whose marginalization prevents them from throwing it back. This is why men tend to dump the work of care onto the women in their families. It’s also why women in more affluent families jettison at least some of that work further downstream onto other women—disproportionately Black, Latina, and immigrant women—whose marginalization leaves them with little choice but to take underpaid jobs in fields like childcare, house cleaning, and home healthcare.

As I show in my book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, this trickling down of care is drowning women. The situation is particularly dire for women at the bottom of the ladder, because they have nowhere to turn for support in managing all the care that has been dumped onto them, and nowhere to hide when others dump even more carework downstream. Yet our trickle-down economy drowns relatively privileged women as well, since in the absence of extreme wealth, most families can’t afford to outsource all of the care responsibility that has been offloaded onto them, and the leftover burden disproportionately lands on women—dumped onto them by husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons focused on maximizing what they can earn.

To that end, and in the wake of President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle what is left of the U.S. social-safety net, our country’s downward drip of care is at risk of swelling to a flood—threatening to drown not only women but the rest of us as well. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, our flimsy safety net was not built to withstand a national health crisis, and if, as a country, we survived that catastrophe—which over a million people in the U.S. did not—it was only by pushing women past their breaking point, leaving them literally screaming in the streets. Now, with attacks on funding for programs like childcare, education, food assistance, disability services, medical research, healthcare, and public-health initiatives, reducing many federal agencies to ghost towns, women are once again scrambling to hold it together for their families and their communities. And a COVID-sized crisis would almost certainly push us to the point where all but the wealthiest Americans would feel the pain.

Ultimately, if we want to prevent that flood and the destruction that will inevitably come with it, then we need to stop the downstream flow of care, which means that we must also reject the false hope that wealth will trickle downstream. Put differently, if we want to protect our democracy, then we must also share our collective responsibilities for care more equitably across gender, race, and class lines. To borrow another line from William Jennings Bryan, we must “legislate to make the masses prosperous,” rather than allow the well-to-do to keep hoarding it all at the top without a fight.