It was done so mothers could work building tanks and airplanes, not out of any concern for the children.
We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
The government does not need to be run like a fucking business.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
That isn't necessarily true. If we find continual efficiency gains, it may never stop growing for thousands of years.
Most growth curves in life are S-curves. Population growth, etc. But technological advancement could continue until we become a type II civilization.
That's absolutely sci-fi speculation, but there are no signs of technological advancement ending.
If each round of advancement increases efficiency, growth continues. I don't see an end in sight.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
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Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.
Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.
The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
0-18 months, there is no skill other than being the parent(s).
In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.
In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
Not exactly a “rich” thing, just a matter of “scale” (in YC terms).
My daughter's at an in-home daycare with IIRC five or six other kids. There are two adults there full-time, sometimes three.
Two adults supervising 20-40 daycare-aged kids is simply not feasible.
0-18 months: 1:3
18 months to 3 years: 1:4
3-5 years: 1:5
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars
2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
Yes, 100% agreed.
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
This is hypothetical, isn't it?
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
And, of course, reducing the complexity and cost of welfare ought to be a left wing talking point as well! Again, it depends on what you do with the savings - sure, it can just be taken and used elsewhere, or you could maintain the spending but raise the bar on how much UBI provides.
But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
Multiply the US population by the poverty level annual income ($15.6K) and the resulting number is higher than all US federal tax revenue combined. In other words, tax rates would have to more than double across the board.
Subtracting out existing social programs barely moves the needle. Are you sure you did the math, or were you just assuming?
It's not as simple as multiplying the population. The point is that if everyone gets that check, then you can raise the nominal tax rate much higher but still get the effective tax rate (i.e. income - tax + UBI) in reasonable territory. As I recall I actually went all in and also made it a flat income tax to see how much the UBI offset would work at making it effectively progressive, and that also works out.
Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
US tax rates are complex due to local variance and other factors. Tax rate on the median NZ income appears to be ~30%. Tax on median US is lower, but state taxes can add significantly. There is not a neat divide between red states & blue states here; Alabama & Georgia have state income taxes, for example.
> The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country.
And that's before the health insurance premiums!
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
Given New Mexico's tax rates, it seems like it would be difficult to do so.
It looks like the program will cost about $600M next year. In order to generate more tax revenue than it costs, it would need to increase personal income somewhere on the order of $12-15B of personal income, taxable sales, business profit or some combination.
Now, a fraction of that will come from the childcare workers. Some may come from stay-at-home parents or parents working part time going to work, but given they say it'll save on the order of $12K/year/family, a family would need to increase their income by about $260K/year in order to pay $12K in extra state income taxes.
It's rare to see spending programs actually pay for themselves. Mostly when politicians talk about a program paying for itself, they preform verbal slight-of-hand, arguing that $x will come back as $x*y in economic activity. That is, of course, a lie, but no one calls them out the fact that economic activity ≠ taxes.
Now as a low population state implementing this at the state level means most of that federal savings/revenue helps people outside of the state, but that’s the issue with implementing such programs at the state level rather than an issue with the type of program itself.
I doubt many people would say they want to raise their taxes to cancel program X because it also helps people they don’t like. You could be right, but I think the more logical conclusion is they are simply being misinformed.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
See https://www.statsforvalteren.no/innlandet/barnehage-og-oppla...
France AFAICT
https://www.newsweek.com/us-mom-unpacks-costs-child-care-par...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/explainer-how-childcare...