Sure you could keep a child alive on less, but to "raise" one involves a host of social social capital, enrichment, and cultural integration. Child care is ridiculously expensive because most attention is captured by frivolities (and companies abusing child labor).
Say you spend 10K a year on food, school supplies and some sport, unless your child becomes a scholar or athlete you have failed to raise them. You might have prevented obesity and built some amount of discipline, but you've prevented them from making connections outside school/sports. Do you think hiring a nanny would, over time, go most of the way towards raising your children? If so then $400,000 isn't ridiculous, if not then shouldn't it be higher?
Unfortunately more than 99% of children in America are chronically undervalued, parents have overly cynical beliefs about their children starting from ages even earlier than 4. By the time a child sees any real investment they are likely to just give it straight to the mag7
> Across the U.S., the average annual cost of care for an infant and a 4-year-old is $28,190, according to Child Care Aware of America. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers child care affordable when it accounts for no more than 7% of a household’s income.
It’s been awhile, but the $28k number seems reasonable. It’s more expensive in different areas and the article goes into the numbers by state. But the part where it gets difficult to see is the 7% number. You only require $400k/year if you cap child care costs at 7%. When my kids were in daycare, it cost significantly more than 7% of our income.
Sadly most of us pay far more than 7%. Fortunately mostly that’s ok and it all works out.
(Except we will work until we die, but hey! Capitalism!)
The capitalism is the least bad one where there the correlation between "making something that people want" to the value you can keep to feed yourself.
The parent comment is complaining about capitalism draining savings such that retirement becomes impossible.
Other systems have robust retirement available for the elderly.
Taxing the rich is great but it's not gonna fix any of those.
If even the rich couldn't or didnt want to afford $5 quarter potatoes then they'd have to lower the price
If we took all the assets from all the billionaires in the US, that total is something like $6-7 trillion if we pretend there's no asset price decrease in the selling of said assets.
Sounds like a lot, but we're nearly $40 trillion in debt. Taxing the rich heavily won't solve a spending problem.
The federal government specifically, and the admin class in general was a lot smaller during our parents' era.
Regulations prevent that, and kill the free market. Now everyone pays a crapton to some facility where the owner jumped through all the hoops to get certified, while hiring minimum wage people. Not that some aren't great, but is it really a better system?
Childcare is much cheaper in other countries, even relative to the lower earning potentials.
Canada for example is working towards $10/child/day childcare https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campa...
Cheaper, or more heavily subsidized? It's an important difference.
For the record: I'm not opposed to subsidies, and think the US need them in a lot more areas (and a lot more government involvement in the economy, in general).
Given the cost of health and life insurance, unemployment insurance, paid vacation (4-6 weeks generally), healthcare (I once paid $32 for 5 weeks hospital care), paid parental leave, childcare, school and university, I am confident this more than makes up for the higher taxes. I believe people are calmer when the risk of living is low. No broken leg or depression will set us back financially, and if we have a few too many kids they can all go to college even if we don't earn much. And both parents can work (70% at least) while their kids go to daycare. This is at least an extra 5 years of salary compared to supporting a stay-at-home parent.
It might not be charming to brag about all our advantages, but as a European I really want e.g. Americans to know that there is another way. Life doesn't have to be about chasing money until you can afford to live.
And you get a small monthly stipend per child during this time. It's small but it's something.
Another way to look at that is one parent brings in 100% of their income, and when the second parent wants to get a job they have to sacrifice 14% of their pay to get childcare while they're away. That seems low to me.
Another way to analyze this is to look at how many children a single worker has to take care of to hit the same pay. If childcare for 2 kids is 14% of a salary, and salary is half the cost of running a daycare, then you need 29 kids per childcare employee?? How is that supposed to work?
Edit: And yes I'm aware subsidies can exist but this hits an area where the subsidies are so high that the 7% number still needs explanation.
What Americans seem to only just now be waking up to is that lack of work/life balance, lack of family leave accommodations, and loss of community has a very real, very tangible dollar amount cost. I’m very, very tired of the knee-jerk response to every “socialist” proposal being, “yeah, that’s great, but how are you going to pay for it?”
How are you going to pay for not having family leave? How are you going to pay for not having universal healthcare? How are you going to pay for not having tuition-free college for all? These choices have a cost, and Americans are paying that cost every day!
Take a tour in Afganistan. I heard they just enacted a law for beating housewives. https://htnworld.com/taliban-afghanistan-domestic-violence-l...
We are not building a society, we're building some kind of mass labor camp.
Which means eventually we're going to get a prison riot because people are tired of the conditions.
Moms often nurse past infancy, and once she's taken 18-24 months off work, it makes more sense for her to continue the pause.
On average, moms seem to derive more enjoyment from spending time with babies. I have some male friends who had almost zero desire to spend time with their babies/toddlers. I don't know many women who feel similarly (I'm sure there are some, just many fewer).
When I was a child, it was normal for neighborhood moms who didn't work to just watch kids for favors or a nominal fee. My memories are fuzzy, but I seem to mostly remember watching daytime TV soaps and eating PBJs probably more often than a child should.
Now that I'm older, I'm flabbergasted by regulations and costs for simple daycare. I've met numerous people who spend more on childcare than they make in a month. Not to sound trad anything, but that just doesn't make any financial sense to me.
I've no idea what the solution is. NM recently announced free child care, interested to see how that plays out. For everyone else... there's gotta be a saner solution.
I do know that my own wife, who was home all day watching just one child, was open to taking on more for free, but regulations around it made it way more of a headache than it was worth. There are laws about how many kids you can watch, how long you can watch them, licensing, child to adult ratios, state visits, etc.
Basically, if you wanted to be open to watching 5 kids for a working day, doing so would be illegal in every state I've lived in.
Every state has regulations and laws that at face value most people would agree with, but together end up in a system where you have to pay thousands per month for a facility to watch a child.
That's perfectly legal where I live, but... There are no friendly neighbours with that kind of time on their hands. My entire townhome complex of 34 units (ranging from 2–4 bedrooms each) has only one single elderly woman who's retired. Everyone else is young people in their 20s (working), or families with their own kids and—in all families but one—two working parents.
This model doesn't really make good sense. On one hand, I'm glad my wife and I can have careers. On the other, I doubt I would care much if we lived in a society where we didn't need to so badly. $160k of childcare doesn't pay for itself.
toomuchtodo•13h ago