Americans want paid family leave and affordable child care, why can't we get it? | Hacker News Reader

Americans want paid family leave and affordable child care, why can't we get it?

usatoday.com

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"Before having her own kids, Whitney Phinney acknowledges she thought of paid leave and subsidized child care as "handouts.""

This right here. The American myth that anyone can make it if they just work hard enough goes hand-in-hand with the "pull yourself up your own bootstraps" mentality. And poor people don't deserve welfare because they are "lazy". And other tropes pushed out by conservative think tanks since the 1970s that have Americans acting, and more importantly voting, against their own economic self-interest.

What about "Equal pay for equal work"? Why should a company pay their single, infertile, gay, older, or otherwise childless employees less for doing the same job?

We've just gone full-circle from the 1950s notion that a married man should get a higher salary because he had a family to take care than a single man or a woman, only instead of it being a top-line higher salary now it's the same salary but with thousands of dollars in paid-leave, healthcare funding, childcare subsidies, etc.

And don't pretend it's for "the good of society" or something - we don't give paid leave to do charity work with the poor or environmental cleanup or anything that would actually meaningfully improve the world.

> Why should a company pay their single, infertile, gay, older, or otherwise childless employees less for doing the same job?

Essentially for the same reason billionairs should pay wealth tax: these single infertile gays are using the benefits of living in society.

This is, of course, a question deserving a more articulate answer.

> we don't give paid leave to do charity work with the poor

For what it’s worth, I’ve actually seen this done under the name VTO. Although the duration is much less than a family leave.

Also, many of the people advocating for stuff like “equal pay for equal work” would move healthcare and childcare subsidies to the government level. You could then imagine you would be getting paid the same and these extra benefits for the good of society are being paid out of taxes.

Of course, whether or not your company or the government pays for it, it comes from someone’s pocket eventually. But if people don’t have children, then there will be no one to take care of retirees in their old age, so there really is a compelling interest in the government fostering that...

> then there will be no one to take care of retirees in their old age, so there really is a compelling interest in the government fostering that...

Some governments just open their borders with the hopes of being able to tax the heck out of the new arrivals to make up for the lower birth rates.

I encourage you to imagine a world where nobody has babies. Sure the economy will be great for a while without that pesky maternity leave. But then it will crumble because it turns out that people get old and retire.

From what I understand, the universe won't last forever, so someday we will be forced to stop having babies. In that sense, what you're describing is essentially a sunk cost. Although, it sounds like you'd prefer that your descendants pay that cost in your stead.

I think you are misunderstanding your adversary. I don’t think I should have to pay your kid’s babysitter, and I’m not conservative, and I didn’t form that opinion by hearing it from a trope pushed by a think tank.

I do support universal health care though, and I see these as very different issues.

Childcare costs are fixed unlike healthcare so socializing it makes little sense. It however should be tax deductible, it amounts to significant percentage of incomes and it boosts economic productivity.

The awful truth is that competent child care is very expensive. Nothing is going to change that.

We could decide as a society to subsidize it in various ways, and/or many of us could tighten our belts some and cough up for the expensive child care we need ourselves.

But ultimately, it's expensive and probably going to get more so. It's not unlike healthcare costs in general.

(source: Have lived with a childcare provider.)

I am opposed to this: subsidizing child care but not subsidizing parents staying home to raise there kids. A better alternative is a children's allowance.

According to Census demographic trends, in the next couple decades, half of America’s population will live in just eight states. The half that is whiter, older, more rural, and more conservative, will be spread across the other 42 states. That’s 84 senators for them, and 16 senators for the other half of America- This is why.

Those eight states can enact state legislation to provide those benefits, no? That's how Canada arrived at universal healthcare: provinces started these programs as experiments.

Not saying the current system of representation doesn't have issues, but there are ways to hack around it to deliver progressive policies in the population centers most will be living in.

This is a fantastic point. Less representation on a national level perhaps, but maybe the federal government will have to become much smaller in the future. I personally don't think that's a bad thing.

That's quite the flamebait. So the theory is that we don't have affordable childcare today because of where we'll be demographically in twenty years?

Right now it's 9 states that have 50% of the population. In 20 years it will be 8, but this is very much a today issue.

I'm going to go the other way and say that white, older, rural, conservative Americans care about child care as much as anyone else. And if anything, older Americans have a habit of donating their time for free child care.

When you look at the Phinney family’s finances the right course of action seems less clear. The dad is unemployed, and they also spend $500 a month on child care, which is a chunk of their budget. They could get child care for all their children for another $2000 a month, but the dad hasn’t been able to get a job that would cover that. Only warehouse jobs which pay very little.

So, the government could pay $2500 a month for this family to have free child care. But, the unemployed father could also just take care of all the children. Why is it better for the government to pay for child care, and then this father either stays unemployed or takes a job that pays less than the cost of child care?

It would be nice if there were not such a social stigma against stay-at-home fathers.

This is also a problem in the UK. When my children were young, it made little economic sense for my wife to continue working - practically all of her salary would have gone on childcare.

If childcare was made tax-deductible, my wife could have returned to work earlier. This would have meant our household could have contributed a far larger wedge in taxes to support society.

They don't, because if they did, they would vote for candidates which want to do that, but they don't.

I think the problem is there are candidates who do support it but they also support other things their electorate finds less favorable.

So it will require a “maverick” who aligns with them politically in major areas AND also supports FMLA improvements.

Do you feel most candidate pools seem pre-selected? It seems that way to me and I think Bernie and Trump are recent anomalies. A lot of push back from their respective parties during their primaries because they weren't part of the preferred candidates. You can't win an election without being a member of 1 of two parties today.

Our non-parliamentary, first-past-the-post system causes that. We’ve always been a two-party system. The parties that are those two parties have swapped (no more Federalists or Whigs) and realigned (Andrew Jackson would be a bit surprised by the current Democratic House Caucus, and Abraham Lincoln would probably be a bit surprised, as well), but outside of the independents who sometimes win seats in New England (but are pretty aligned with the Democrats), it’s effectively a two-party system.

Conclusion I’ve come to while comparing systems with my German colleagues: in Germany, the coalition negotiations happen after the election; in the US, they happen before the general election, via the primaries.

I’m curious to see if Louisiana and California “jungle primaries” might begin to break this up a bit after a few more cycles.

Why should childcare be subsidized? It should be an expensive privilege to bear children, and we should disincentivize it. Our species’ goal isn’t to keep increasing the population indefinitely, but people pretend like there’s a god given right to have as many children as one desires.

Rather, our goal should be to reduce population. Higher population = more consumption = more environmental strain. Plus most humans aren’t very productive economically, and that suggests we are overweight on population.

So who gets to have children? Those who’ve created more societal value and proven themselves to be more capable - the best proxy we have for this, as imperfect as it might be, is economic value. Fundamentally, currency records the amount of utility others in society have ascribed to a particular individual. And so it seems fitting for rearing a child to be expensive in terms of time and money.

Probably most of us here on Hacker News already have it. I certainly do.

No, not every job provides this. Also, not every job provides health coverage and unlimited snacks.

Because Fox News has convinced a non-trivial percentage of us that it would be socialist and therefore somehow an affront to God.

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