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Comment by dansiemens | Hacker News Reader

Child care generally comes with a lot of regulation in developed countries. One such regulation being “one caregiver per n children”. If n is too large, the quality of care is poor, and if n is too small, the cost of care per child is too high. Developed countries tend to keep n small, thus the cost is untenable for many low/middle class families.

Here’s a question: how do you solve this problem without the government subsidizing child care costs?

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The sad or horrific reality of many necessary aspects of life like health care, child care and education is that they are simply inefficient. And there really aren't solutions for them. You always need certain number of people to manage small number of patients, kids or pupils.

And there won't be any huge productivity boosts unless we somehow reach full automation, which I doubt won't happen at all...

In the end even with government subsidies these sectors really can't be high paying outside small number of specialist. And governments probably must subsidise them to improve productivity elsewhere.

The biggest inefficiency is that a child care facility occupies real estate that parent care does not.

> without the government subsidizing child care costs

Why not though?

They'll be tax payers soon and I'm sure we'd get more of them if we made it easier to rear them.

There's probably a lot of subsidies that are currently in place that make less sense.

Lower class (financially) people tend to have kids that grow in to more lower class people. The bottom ~50% don’t pay taxes.

Brutal logic even if true. “This newborn is unlikely to become economically valuable enough to worth caring for now.”

This is just the pro-choice position for having an abortion because having a child would be fiscally inconvenient.

~50% of children born into poverty remain in poverty for at least half their lives.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/childhood-poverty...

Taxes are probably the wrong way to think about it. More important question is does lower class people produce net positive effect on economy in general. If they do then subsidising them producing enough lower class people to replace ones producing values will likely make sense.

Now if they are net negative, we get in much murkier waters...

Surely you don't mean yearly car registration, driver's license fees, gas taxes at the pump, liquor taxes on booze or any other daily sales taxes they pay. So are you referring to the lack of property taxes they pay? I'm assuming the landlords are paying those.

Federal income tax.

Maybe they need to vary prices based on the "n"?

Obviously n cannot be too large, but there is likely some still reasonable upper range that would significantly reduce costs without harming kids. Then parents who have enough money could pay more for better care. But surely even a large n is better than no child care.

I realize that there are likely regulations against that today, but that's really one of the underlying problems that could be fixed.

Raise prices or increase n, it’s zero sum

Raise middle class disposable income?

That may count as subsidizing childcare with extra steps.

If lots of people wouldn't go to work, salaries for all the other jobs would eventually go up and families could survive on one salary

If you need childcare but can’t afford it…why are you having kids?

You should ask the opposite. If you have kids and are low class why are you buying child care? Shouldn't it be cheaper to take care of the child yourself instead of paying income tax to let someone else, who also pays income tax and may be gets paid more than you, do it?

I mean the point of childcare is that the carer gets to specialize and the workers who do not have to do childcare get to specialize. If there are people who end up worse off after specialization then something is seriously broken.

How will they make money to live then?

Because you’re a single mother, and must at least attempt to work full time.

Our society to single mothers with poor career prospects: get a job, you mooch! We don’t care that it won’t pay enough for decent childcare and your other basic living expenses.

Our society to married mothers with poor-to-mediocre job prospects and husbands earning non-professional wages: stay home with your kids. Think about going back to school part time to finish that degree that might or might not pay back your loans. Oooh, have you heard about this great new company that helps young moms like you build their own businesses selling awesome cosmetics/supplements/leggings? You can do it from home!

Our society to married mothers with well-earning husbands and careers they love and would like to continue part time while their kids are small: since you can’t really be serious about your work if you don’t have to do it full time, you can forget your real career and go be a glorified administrative assistant for awhile, and possibly till you retire.

Or, there’s what Germany and similar do. I pay about 400 EUR/mo for 7:00-16:00 daycare, and my employer has to allow me to work a job with similar qualifications as the one I was hired for with a 15-30 hr/wk schedule (my choice) until my kid is 3. At that point, they are obligated to allow me to work part time permanently, or for me to switch back to my original contracted hours. My employer chooses to allow us to work part time longer and still switch back to full time later.

Did I pay an absolute fortune in higher income tax the decade before I had a kid, and could have paid for my own maternity leave and unsubsidized daycare with the money I could have saved? Quite likely.

Do I feel like it’s still worth it? Absolutely. A year of maternity leave and several years of serious part time work is so common and accepted here in large part because it’s affordable to people who make less and pay less in taxes (or who would save less even at higher income).

Seeing the daycare vs work outside the home decision as only a function of immediate daycare costs vs. current earnings is extremely short-sighted. A college friend of mine freely admitted that they barely broke even on daycare for two in Boston the year after she had her second, but that in preserving her future earning power, it made long-term financial sense (and personal sense - she loves her work).

That's exactly what they do (even middle class people) The problems start when they can't afford to live on one salary.

That's a really good question. But there are many cases where the unanticipated costs of things non-kids, such as housing, have escalated rapidly enough during that 5 years your child could use child care. As you were planning your pregnancy and the next 5 years, the circumstances around you shift sufficiently that you NEED that second job, or second income, or third job, or whatever it is, just to afford housing or power.

For example, in my regional part of Australia, rent has gone up 30% in the past 18 months. If my kids were 0-5 instead of 11-14, I'd be panicking a little, because child care is expensive and hard to find.

On a basic level, you don't know what someone's material circumstance is when they A) decided to have kids vs B) any future time when they might need childcare. Life situations change and it's very much in society's best interest that we care for most vulnerable, like kids, no matter how rich or poor their parents are.

Yes, agreed when circumstances change. What about when circumstances were never going to work to begin with? That is where my curiosity lies, where people are setting themselves up to fail, never able to cover the costs they’re locking themselves into.

The NYT has a calculator where you can model if you can afford a house. I’ve never seen a similar calculator for children, anywhere.

I’m sure the price is a surprise to plenty of people. I knew childcare was expensive but I didn’t know how much until I actually looked for a provider.

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