Kentucky made child care free for child care workers
npr.org
npr.org
But couldn’t we come up with a subsidy with less market distortion? A specific subsidy to pay for childcare for childcare workers will just cause the market clearing wage to childcare workers to drop to the point that only people with high childcare costs will work in the field. This labor pool is much smaller and people will tend to cycle in and out as their children grow to school age. At the end of the day society will end up paying a lot more due to lower liquidity than with a plain flat subsidy.
It’s like loan forgiveness for federal workers. Sounds lovely but it just ends up breaking the market for example further subsidizing already wasteful higher education spending.
Yes. Universal childcare. Alternatively, payment for children (as a refundable tax credit or e.g. social security payment for one's first N years).
We do not do parents who aren’t already childcare workers a favor by skewing the market for their labor. For some parents, working in childcare is the right choice, but for many it won’t be, and when you artificially inflate short term wages only if they go into childcare, everyone loses.
It would seem to me that this is only likely to result in more childcare workers, making it more accessible to all, no?
What hypothetical effect would discontinuation of the subsidy have: while it's initially resulting in labor shortage reduction and then after time t?
Are counterfactuals helpful for this problem?
These are the same, just different execution. A slot for your child or children if you want to go to work, a payment if you want to stay at home to provide childcare. The care is universal, the delta being who logistically is providing the care.
Edit: Agree with y'all it is both a marketing and execution story.
Sure. But the branding matters. The former seems to provoke a vitriolic reaction in some people that, if widespread, could tank it in a way that the identical effect under the second's branding doesn't provoke.
I believe (anecdotally) that the rate of unwanted pregnancies are not impacted significantly by economic measures, only by ease of access to free birth control measures and widespread sex education, but it's an unpopular opinion. Welfare from the state is always a hard sell unless it benefits a vocal, influential segment.
One is creating defined resources and using bureaucracy to divvy them out and force people into buckets they might not be happy with. e.g. here's your government cheese.
The other empowers individuals to make their own decisions with cash and lets the free market figure out how best to mine those dollars from the individuals receiving them.
I suspect which option a person thinks is right largely depends on how they view humanity. Either you want to trust people to make their own decisions as adults, suffering the consequences of their decisions, or you want to extend childhood deep into "adulthood" making sure they can't make the wrong choice, because the nanny state makes the choice for them.
I supposed in the case of managed welfare, only those who manage become independently wealthy get the privilege of making their own decisions.
Instead, I would prefer a system where people receive payments relative to income, like a reverse tax system. This way, people in higher income brackets pay in (in the form of taxes) and people in lower income brackets get a pay out.
This is far more affordable than UBI, meaning we can actually do it, and also puts money where it is most needed.
I wouldn’t accept a job role with more responsibility if it meant losing my low-income subsidies and being taxed instead.
Society needs workers to accept more responsibilities and progress in their careers otherwise there will be less creation of jobs for those at the entry level.
I’m not saying UBI is the right solution, but it would reduce the “cliffs” where people lose money for progressing in their careers.
Wealthy people will pay much more in taxes than what they receive in UBI and you can make this system have the exact same distribution of money as the negative income tax system.
At this point in the political universe these are the only measures that get through. We are living in a post policy era of governance. Hopefully the wonks can find some way to get the upper hand again, but I’m not optimistic.
What do you mean by this?
The increasingly accessible and increasingly rapid outrage/feedback loop brought to us by 24/7 cable news, social media, etc. has made it harder to push forward on meaningful complicated legislation.
Something like the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Social Security, or interstate highways would, I suspect, be strangled in the crib today by vested interests spreading misinformation about them.
The ACA and Dodd-Frank, whatever you think of them, were the last counter examples. That was more than a dozen years ago.
The early child-rearing years are hard, and trying to work during this time is hard. The incentives to just add some extra childcare to your life is possibly less difficult than lots of options for a lot of people.
I have a hard time understanding why we don't want talented and ambitious people to raise our children.
I’ve had my kids in some of the best childcare centers in an expensive area so this made me spit up my drink.
Maybe fuck the markets and lets do what is best for the children and the parents. Or is that a radical idea nowadays?
why did you interpret my comment as being extreme?
I’ve noticed there are two kinds of policy advocates.
Agenda advocates: no matter the problem, they push their agenda. Anti tax people are in this category. Down economy? “Lower taxes!” They shout. Up exonomy? “Lower taxes to keep the momentum!”
Issue advocate: these people are creative and will propose the best solution given the day’s issue. The solutions they propose change over the years because conditions change and new solutions appear.
The comment you rape replying to is from the former. The world needs more of the latter.
Well that's a hell of a typo :P
I think the worst example of this I've seen on this site is when someone was advocating removing safety requirements from manufacturing plants because the rate hike in insurance would take care of making sure these companies were giving safe work conditions to their employees.
You know the people who advocate for that do so because they never expect anyone they care about to be working a manufacturing job.
In this case the fundamental problem seems to be that not enough people want to work in childcare, for the money that those businesses are currently offering. Part of that problem is for some of the potential workers the barrier is that paying for childcare for their own children would cost enough to make working in the industry not worth the money for them.
So the two solutions proposed here are: make childcare free for those who provide childcare, and making childcare free for everyone. Both of these solutions solve the problem for potential workers whose main problem is the affordability of their own childcare.
Notably the "free for everyone" does not actually improve solving the one problem we are talking about: it does not unblock anyone else to enable more workers in this one industry. But conversely it would unblock those people from working in other industries, ones that already seem to pay more. So it would probably wind up with less people working in childcare than the more focused "childcare free for childcare workers".
The counter-point to this of course is that we are creating a huge market distortion, essentially "forcing" people into childcare work (not really, but...).
The pure capitalistic solution would be to leave it like it is: let the market decide how much childcare is worth, and that will sort itself out. The problem with this approach is that it winds up producing a less-than-optimal solution: people who would be more productive for society wind up at home doing individual child care, and there are vastly different outcomes for children of well-off families than those of the poor (so societal imbalance based on the birth lottery).
To me the only right solution is for some sort of wage stipend from the government (from tax monies) that goes directly to childcare workers. This would absolutely be the government putting its thumb on the scale to increase the supply of childcare workers, but form the government's perspective it is probably a good investment both to get more workers available in all categories, and to improve outcomes for the children of low-wage families (good both in a floats-all-boats perspective, and a social justice one).
The problem is, of course, that it is absolutely a socialist means of improving things, and those who have made capitalism a religion are going to go nuts about that.
I've seen some pretty heinous opinions on this site, things such as safety regulations shouldn't exist just let the market decide. The companies insurance premiums will raise and so companies will naturally want to be safer!
As if that's more important than _preventing_ the loss of limbs.
Doing what is best for the children and parents is a market intervention, and ignoring how markets work when coming up with market interventions has a pretty bad track record.
Markets don't exist in a vacuum, they can involve the public sector: primary education is mainly provided through public funds and institutions, but it remains a market nonetheless. Throwing out what we know about market dynamics isn't a good way to do what's best for children and parents.
the question isn't "is it a market", the question is "should it be a market"?
The issue here is the idea that the market is more important than the upbringing of a child.
State funded, yes, but police departments are in a labor competition with other police forces, private security, and anything else a cop could be doing instead. If a department wants more police, or better ones, they have to pay for that.
The idea that the market is more or less important than the upbringing of a child is nonsensical, I have no idea what you mean by that, it's like asking if acceleration is more important than luminance.
I imagine that is kind of the point, as those people are often stay at home moms.
How do you increase the workforce without really increasing wages? Pay in a currency only valuable to a group currently not in the workforce.
The only way to make it at all "productive" is cheap dense housing, something that America currently sucks terribly at.
Additionally, the fact that it is a gazillion private providers rather than a simple public service like schools makes it messier.
My prediction is that eventually the housing stuff will be figured out, and also this stuff will be increasingly rolled into the public school system, and both of those will relieve the pressure.
Just as we bring the compute to the data, so we bring production closer to the home with mixed things, etc.
And in generally, people don't get what density can offer. For a silly example example, I've bought the clothes I will wear at an event while traveling to that event. Our suburban culture is not keeping up the material possibilities.
That said it’s somewhat amusing to me to pay for someone’s kids to be watched so others can pay said someone to watch their kids instead.
Single income families are considerably more efficient in real terms, but child care only shows up as GDP and taxable economic activity if a stranger does it.
It reminds me of that joke about the two economists in the woods.
American politics are stupid. This shouldn't be a surprise to you.
An externality [1] happens when there is some additional uncaptured aspect of a transaction, a "missing market". It seems implausible that there is a missing market in child care-- there are plenty of choices out there, different service levels and pricing. And when you put your child into child care and are now freed of child care responsibility for working hours, you can directly participate in the labor market, right?
Instead of externality maybe you could support intervention instead by arguing that there are facets of the child-care market that you don't like, resulting in the observed market outcome, such as capital overheads, barriers to entry, transportation barriers, or regulation.
Please don't take this personally. I fairly wonder if the way of looking at these topics is a cultural or political thing.
https://www.thestar.com/life/quebec-s-child-care-scheme-pays...
Second, there's actually a massive shortage of daycare spaces and workers[0]. It was a major election issue.
[0] https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/daycare-bill-gives-quebec-5-year...
It's necessary when both parents need to work (or the rate of cohabiting parents has collapsed leading to single parents, ie moms)
The teacher student ratio must be small to get half decent care.
The care must be affordable so that it is less expensive than the least economically remunerated parent.
The ratio * tuition puts a ceiling on the teacher pay. Pay sucks so the quality of care providers is, for most kids, low (there are boutique facilities with long waiting lists, of course).
Parents have more pressure not to have kids (myself, all my kids care tuitions costs us >$50k/year for three kids).
This leads to a collapse in natality rates.
What's the solution? I don't know.
I may have missed it, but did this get reversed?
(Yes, it did, in early 2021: https://www.wlky.com/article/kentucky-child-care-capacity-si...)
I should have added that I've typically heard it in liberal suburbs, not rural America.
Good, recent example is this thread [1] right here on HN (in particular this comment [2]).
Most things are the same price or cheaper as a percentage of median income today except housing. That’s because housing is treated as investment meant to appreciate, leading to perverse incentives to artificially restrict supply.
IMHO housing is the economic problem in the Western world. Most of the reason younger people feel poorer than their parents is housing. Most of the pressure on families is housing. The demographic collapse issue is due in part to housing costs. Real estate is cancer and the most important economic battle of today is finding a way to break the real estate market.
All the people panicking over demographics should be in favor of state and federal density mandates, telework where possible, and zoning reform.
The same is true for healthcare. Pfizer needs to demonstrate ongoing growth to their shareholders; insurance companies are bound by the ACA to a maximum profit margin so can only increase profits by growing costs; half the new commercial real estate in my area is medical buildings going up.
I think you may be right about the overall problem, but I'm not sure I agree that density is the solution.
People starting families don't just want a house, what they want is enough space. Mothers want a yard they can send the kids out into when they need a moments peace, closets to store everyone's junk, and bathrooms big enough to walk into while pregnant.
I think disaggregating populations into more medium and small cities would help keep costs down and give people more space.
All of this also means said mother can't go to the corner to pick up supplies, but must drive to the store. There isn't an abundance of neighbors to help out or restaurants with cheap delivery; everything must be done themselves.
The notion that families require low density is very culturally-specific and a choice more than a necessity. Yes, four people need more physical space than two, but not to the extent of modern suburbia.
Most of human history has been spent in much lower density living situations than we have now, and I'm pretty confident there is a negative correlation between housing density and fertility.
there is no need for each home to have their own garden. but a multi story building with a dozen or more families that can share one.
take a look at some cities in germany. stuttgart, ruhrgebiet, and many others. they are actually a lot of small cities close together with lots of green space in between. each has their own shops, offices, schools, etc within walking distance and an extensive public transport network to connect them.
We need a multi pronged approach. Basically any policy that improves housing affordability without too much negative or perverse incentive elsewhere should be favored.
And increasing density only works up to a point. Once you can no longer increase density, the prices start climbing back up.
I think rezoning for more mixed use neighborhoods is a good idea, and some high-density living is good (not everyone has kids, or wants to have them) but I am skeptical of increasing density in general.
searching for an answer i found this:
https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/data-study-on-...
which observes that crime increases up to a density of 500 people per square mile, but then decreases as the population density increases further.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173288/tpusa-young-women-sum...
> The influencer saved her most controversial take for last: Daycare is feminist garbage too. It raises cortisol levels in children. It creates disordered attachment styles. It is pernicious poison, Marxist cancer. “I believe the feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce,” Clark said.
One of the hardest things about being human is that human children are ludicrously high maintenance. We have some of the highest maintenance offspring in nature. High parental investment requirements may be a factor in our evolution of complex social systems and longevity (“the grandmother effect”) but it also creates massive pressure and strife in the areas of gender and social dynamics.
I feel like non parents don’t get this. I have kids and listen when I say that nothing can prepare you for how high maintenance human children are. There are no words. Even the process of pregnancy and delivery are a life threatening medical condition that used to kill a large number of women. Our species really is uniquely burdened this way.
Many cultures have what amounts to a system of soft socially enforced slavery in which 50% of the population, namely women, are pressured or compelled to dedicate their lives to reproduction and raising children. Cultures that don’t do this either face declining birth rates or have to subsidize it financially instead because someone has to do it. Humans do not emerge from eggs and raise themselves.
I think this means if we want gender equality and don’t also want demographic collapse we must subsidize high quality child care.
What really sucks is some European countries have already solved this dilemma by both offering childcare and paying a benefit to stay at home mothers, so parents can act in whichever way suits their individual situation.
To me, this clearly benefits society, but it requires each side release their hostages.
I guess it works if you don't want those experiences and are happier working.
It seems more scammy to me that universal childcare, pre-school, et cetera are twisted to mean mandating both parents work. It doesn't. Countries with universal childcare still have plenty of stay-at-home parents. What they don't have is parents, predominantly moms, forced to stay at home with their kids.
Right now it's not like parent needing to do other things is some low-simmering quasi-strike disciplining labor markets. It's more like the expense of having kids disciplinarians would-be parents.
A post of post-work post-scarity stuff runs through more people working. It is counter intuitive, but that is how things work. So long as people who would like to work are not, it will hang over our heads and we won't be able to shrink the workweek.
If you need some real-world evidence, see right now, at this period of record low unemployment, the one of the UAW's demands is a shorter work-week.
I fail to see why that's superior to a universal childcare subsidy, which can be used for childcare or retained if someone wishes to care for their child themself. Or better yet, a universal child allowance that parents can use to defray whatever child raising costs they see fit.
And I say that as someone whose current plan is to be a stay-at-home dad while my (female) partner continues to work.
You could say the same about the taxes used to pay for public schools.
> fail to see why that's superior to a universal childcare subsidy
For one, it doesn't free up labor. Two, most systems I'm aware of let one take a childcare subsidy and use it at home. Paying providers by default makes administration easier by reducing the number of payees. (There is also an oversight cost with private payments.)
Absolutely, because it is true. Especially considering how much we overpay for public schools (costs having been rising faster than inflation for decades with no improvement in student outcomes).
If it was a childcare voucher that was guaranteed to get your child a seat that could be maybe exchanged for cash if you don’t want to go to work, that would be fine.
It’s the same problem with UBI. I don’t need a basic income or childcare subsidy.
I need a basic purchasing power.
Compared to the existence of HCOL areas without a subsidy, no, its not even incentivizing, much less forcing that.
Compared to a hypothetical system which accelerates existing price divergence by adding extra subsidies in already high-cost areas, sure, but drawing people out of HCOL areas also mitigates HCOL.
With a net reduction in agglomeration effects and resultant productivity. Pointless experiment,
I’d rather the government unleash infrastructure building in HCOL to make it cheaper and incentivize child-care workers (and other essential functions) to move there.
With growth every LCOL will become an HCOL if we don’t solve the problem now. See: Real-estate prices in Boise, Idaho.
What is the evidence for this in the countries with universal childcare [1]?
I believe the missing ingredient is the additional production of women who were forced out of their careers by having kids. Those women are more productive working. That additional production may singularly offset the system's marginal cost.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co...
Don't get me wrong: for some children, childcare is a better alternative than what awaits them at home, but I think for most it produces worse outcomes.
And this kind of thing will force some women into the workforce, because there's no free lunch and some women will have to work to offset the cost to pay for these programs.
Yes! It's totally fine for your wife to want to be a homemaker. But if you're asking for a world where economic necessity forces her into being one, I totally think there's a moral shade to that preference. (Even if it's simply a preference.)
(Clarification: "wrong" as in unethical. I don't think you're a bad person for having that preference. Far from it, I think you're thinking of your kids.)
> this kind of thing will force some women into the workforce
Is there evidence of this in Luxembourg, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Germany or Portugal [1]?
Keep in mind that plenty of women are forced out of their careers to take care of their kids. Adding them back into the economy boosts productivity (whatever they were doing is likely more productive than raising only their own kids, systemically). Taxes from that productivity alone may be the missing variable that balances the equation to not force those who truly choose to stay at home into a profession to keep up with COL.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co...
100% this is disguised handout for home schooling right wing nuts. Property tax is not a significant burden for regular childcare outfits. "Cash poor asset rich" is not a real problem and anyone telling you otherwise it out to swindle you.
Quantitative distinctions matter, binary burden/non-burden thinking is not helpful.
If you are a tenant in cross-subsidized apartment building, it is really easy to work as a building-wide childcare. You want to live in as big a building as possible to have as much addressable market as possible. (Basically you might not be the best nanny but you want as many kids as ludicrously conveniently nearby as possible.)
The government needs to compete for their tax base more. make public school worth it and these folks won't keep pulling their kids out to where the system falls apart like public transportation where only drug addicts/homeless take it.
The "buy in to the school district" school apartheid-lite we have in the United States is disgusting failing race to the bottom.
Just supplying more money to a system almost never fixes anything about a broken system.
A few years ago the Chicago teachers Union leader pointed out that part of the trouble with trying to teach students is that they do not have a secure home life. You're not going to fix that by giving more money to school administrators.
of course, hence the need to also push for reform
the trouble with trying to teach students is that they do not have a secure home life
i am aware of that, and i realize that more needs to be done than to just improve schools. but this subthread was about taking money away from schools because they are not good enough. not about students struggling because they have a bad home. those are related but different issues.
But for the people that actually want their kids to exist in a learning environment, they should have an option instead of being forced to send their kids to their locally assigned public school.
If that means that you don't have the means to send your child to your chosen school... then that is capitalism.
Alongside some of the other proposed cuts you can certainly see it as catering to a particular base, but I think the choice to manage it at the county/city level sets it a little bit apart.
On second thought, daycare licensing is quite separate from homeschooling, and requires unrelated children. It can certainly be feasible to operate them together, but is that really targeting home schoolers for a tax break then?
No, estimating tax burdens is more complicated than where it first falls. Depending on how competitive the retail real estate market is in an area, you would expect to find landlords competing for childcare tenants to varying degrees.
This is always true. Even if you give a cash bonus to the childcare facilities, it may only help management, or may only help customers if it results in facilities competing by offering sign-up bonuses and lower prices, or it might circle back to landlords through increased rents if the supply of childcare-compatible real estate is constrained.
What I think it will more be used for: "Homeschool your kids and get a tax benefit!"
And there are a lot of similarly shady deductions out there. I had a co-worker whose wife was a dentist and owned her own practice. He was telling me about how great it was that they were able to expense her car every time they bought her a new one. But when I asked: the only business use of it she has is to drive back and forth to the office. She never drives to other work locations with it, and including that commute, all of her uses of it are personal (commutes are not business expenses). When I pointed out that this means that it can't be a business expense (my wife was taking a tax course at the time), he insisted that all of her dentist friends did the same, and that it was "standard practice".
for example this has a picture of Biden https://www.npr.org/2023/10/06/1204077790/buying-electric-ve...
this is putting the mayor front and center in there, even though she had little merit https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/05/25/edgewater-food-forest-m...
People without kids have to pay higher taxes (via rebates for parents), utilize less resources (public schools), effectively subsidizing people who want to have kids.
I'm all for protecting what's best for children, but I am not happy with people having children they cannot adequately support, causing other people to need to pay for them.
But as part of the deal let’s make sure $0 off of the economic output of the offspring of “breeders” goes to your Medicare or social security.
Deal?
I believe you can always give your children up for adoption so long as all guardians agree to it.
It's not commonly desirable but it's what one would recommend for extreme circumstances like you stated.
Not to be harsh here, but non-parents (which I was for a very long time) are the ones kind of freeloading here.
Why should cyclist have to pay for public transportation?
Also children now will be your future doctor, nurse, bus driver, scientist, plumber, etc. so probably worthwhile making an investment in public goods that support their development.
Because "breeders" are the foundation of society. The most fundamental part of an on-going society.
Because those children, when adequately nurtured (and proportional to the extent to which they are adequately nurtured), grow up to produce goods, provide services, and pay taxes that support the portion of society that can no longer do those things for money (which, with any luck, you will be one day).
There is plenty of reason to believe that the ROI of society subsidizing that nurturing is enormous, not to mention the second-order effects of that subsidy (like parents being able to balance their budgets more easily, consume goods and services other than childcare, and save for their own retirements such that they are more able to support themselves when they, also, become too old to work for pay).
Day care is just the start of it. Being raised broke and working class isn't all that bad. Not being raised with a sense of community and security.. Might as well add prison capacity now for our little social experiment on raising social primates with the goals of independence from society.
Reproducing is such an important part of a society and humanity in general. Imagine everyone decided to be child free, what do you think would happen to the country you live in?
Countries with negative population growth often offer incentives for people to have kids because it can cause economic issues down the road and negative growth of the economy.
I would argue people without kids are freeloaders, all the "breeders" working full time jobs not only have to work but then go home and raise their kids to be productive members of the society.
The actual costs of raising a child are absolutely insane. Daycare cost alone is $20K a year for 4 years. That is enough to be a millionaire if you were to invest it in your early 20s. I'm not even going to talk how much time it takes out of your own life because its depressing.
Our society need people to throw at the money making machine
Time to start paying for them
Humans don't deserve to destroy the earth just so they can keep their ego projects going.