San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But my first thought was: Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare? Or the staff? How would the staff afford housing in SF on a "normal" salary? Where would they build the required buildings when land costs an arm and a leg?
Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.
The city itself is tiny, this is not the metropolitan area of San Francisco, its just the city limits, so yeah people in suburbs will commute into the city to work there, just like most other people working in San Francisco.
It is good for getting in and out, assuming you already have a way of getting to the Caltrain station which isn’t exactly in the center of the city.
Not even for the (sadly) semi-regular pedestrian fatalities that happen once or twice a month? Those usually delay trains for over an hour.
Caltrain's own reports say there are hundreds of late trains every month.
The last time was in 2018. I caught a Muni bus, the drive drove past someone at a stop who was in a wheelchair and was signalling to be picked up, another passenger challenged the driver, and the driver shouted something like "I don't want no cripple pee pee-ing on my bus"
What happens if an unborn baby has rights to go to preschool, but the birthing parent can't?
Is an unborn child a US citizen yet?
on edit: basically because I thought hah, this is the kind of mistake I always see poor tired folks make on HN and making the dumb comment and here I am making it!! This is a classic moment!
Is it supposed to give more weight to what you are saying?
Sweet baby Jesus in his high chair.
Whatever happened to just firing up a calculator app that's already on the device you were using? Or bashing "100/3" into the search box in your OS or browser?
Do you ask ChatGPT how long to cook spaghetti instead of reading it off the package you just took the spaghetti out of? Honest question.
FYI: % (percent) literally means "out of a hundred".
It’s interesting to me that the threshold is so much higher in San Francisco given that SF is only 8.7% more expensive than London, at least according to numbeo.
Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
No, you’re missing the insane scale of Silicon Valley tech salaries. See levels.fyi and filter by 5 years of experience in San Francisco.
If the city made the threshold 100k or 110k, I bet there would be zero children in the city born to parents making less than that.
Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortunate that grandma retired from her job about the same time and now takes care of baby during the day.
Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
But they eat the chickens and kill the male chicks
in developing countries there are no pensions for many people and the young parents provide the support the grandparents need, taking care of the grandkids is one way to ensure that this support keeps coming.
The man can barely cook anything and tends to make a mess. i also expect he’ll have a tough time changing diapers or holding a delicate baby, one of his hands has lots of numbness from a past stroke.
Thank god i have the BEST in-laws, who are also in great health. I can’t imagine what someone would do in my situation with bad in-laws.
What I'm seeing here in Europe is that mothers are working, so when they have grandchildren they are either still working or retired. If they're working, they don't have time to do childcare. If they're retired, they are either worn out and don't have the energy/physical ability to do childcare, or they just want to enjoy the few years of freedom they have.
So grandparents can do some childcare, during weekends or holidays mostly, but they are not the one who would take care of the children during the parent's 9-to-5.
On the other hand, I know some families where the mother staid at home to raise her children and she naturally assumed the same role for her grandchildren. But the chain is broken because their mother is working and will not stop working to do childcare for her grandchildren.
Nobody lives with their parents ‘in the west’, so the best bet is arranging two houses or apartments nearby.
That takes an extraordinary amount of resources for child-bearing age parents.
Combine these and it makes a lot of sense to trade a few below average valued workers for the release of many above average valued workers into the economy.
Capitalist dystopia summed up. "Mommy cannot see you say your first words because having mommy shove papers around is slightly more beneficial economically".
1. People have kids later, and older grandparents are less likely to be able to care for them
2. Kids moved away and left their parents in the suburbs, so they're not exactly around anyway. Also, a lot of Boomers sold their homes during Covid to cash in and moved elsewhere and/or downsized. So they might not be living in a place where you can just drop the kids off for a weekend.
3. Generally, only one of the grandparents in the Boomer generation is realistically capable of providing childcare, and that's the mom. If she's not alive anymore, you're not getting anything from your dad.
or the aunts, or siblings (mostly sisters), or neighbors (mostly women)
You get the idea
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
Uh, it is for them. Why should it be only for them?
There are all kinds of other perverse effects like people turning down promotions or dropping down to working 4 days a week. It's a government-sanctioned ceiling on ambition for high earners. Genius.
And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often create regressive tax regimes despite knowing they aren't very good systems.
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
The maths for one child for me works out at ~£10k childcare bill without the free childcare vs ~£4000 with free childcare + tax free childcare (for three days a week). Even that doesn't sound too bad but it's the combination of that, the loss of personal allowance and the fact I still have a student loan that means the actual number of how much I have to earn to break even on losing it is something like £30k more than the actual cut off.
This is because people do not understand continuous functions.
If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.
You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.
And then I'll probably be able to retire 10 years earlier too.
I haven't heard of the charity workaround, sounds really useful, how much does buying the membership reduce your income by?
There are some quite specific rules about whether things are gift-aidable or not (and as a result a lot of memberships to charities e.g. English Heritage are not gift aidable) but if they are then you add them to your tax return and you also get 25% back. National Trust is, so you pay ~£3k for a family membership (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/membership/life-membership), get ~£750 back, and the charity gets £3750 in total.
At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.
There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.
But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.
Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.
Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices.
Increasing housing supply can mitigate the problem somewhat, but the other drivers of cost will still remain, and I Think most people would agree you don't actually want to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem softly by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
I think this is just Baumols cost disease in action: you really cant have amazingly well paying jobs (like in SF generally) AND super low paid laborers without some kind of class system/feudalism/etc.
Even if you eliminate all other overhead costs (rent, admin, materials, insurance, etc) you are still paying for a large portion of somebody's salary.
The reason childcare feels expensive is because society has spent generations undervaluing childrearing as labor.
Like every discussion I’ve seen about childcare takes the 1950s as the baseline for some reason. Like being a housewife in the 1950s sucked and it was unfair that the women had to do it and the men didn’t have to. Like people don’t explicitly say this, but this is what it boils down to.
And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?
It sucked (and still does) because of the breakdown of the extended clan. A long time ago there would be a ton of family very close by to mutually spread the load.
So why did clan breakdown happen, and can we reverse that instead of pushing further and further into more and more atomization? I don’t really see that being discussed, it’s just like “1950s house wifing bad” and the analysis stops there.
One thing people are going to say is that family members are too different from each other now, or that they have economic incentives to scatter. Well, can we make them stop becoming so different? Can we delete the economic incentives? Etc.
It’s fair to reject state-provided childcare. It’s mean to deny that to everyone else.
I thought that AskHistorians would have a more eloquent answer to your question. As expected, they do: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xsyoi/in_m...
My point is that lots of women do reject what exists today for those, and the conservative reaction to this may be wrong. But just because the reaction is wrong doesn’t mean the “progress” is correct. We may be doing the wrong kind of progress, and the “conservatives” may be trying to conserve an overly recent and short lived model. They should instead be trying to conserve (or restore, really) a much older model, one that would resonate better with women and humans in general. IMO anyway.
And replies to me are all stuck in the modern progressive/conservative dialectic, which is not useful or interesting to discuss. We need to break out of that structure.
> Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000
I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).
Free childcare could free those households up to decide which parent(s) work when. Instead, by capping it below a common dual income, it incentivizes the least earning parent to continue to stay out of the workforce.
Sound the alarms.
Letting the other 50% of the population make the same life choices is a good idea in my opinion.
When described that way ... aren't they right about the wife's job?
https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...