I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce.

This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they have, and of course, caring for the family is not a proper job.

That is so wrong on so many levels.

I am not claiming that it is easy, the best or the most engaging or whatever. I only claim that society has given up on valuing raising one’s children and keeping the household together, and this is terrible.

That is to say, caring for a child is a service that costs X. But it is being performed by a person who's skills are valued at Y, where Y > X. That represents an economic loss that doesn't have to happen, if instead you substitute someone who's most highly valued skill is worth X for that caretaker.

Now, that ignores the benefit of having a child's own parents care for them, which may or may not change how you evaluate the question depending on your perspective on these things.

The people who choose to stay at home often either have multiple kids (higher X) or earn little enough (lower Y) that it's not an economic advantage for them to work. But those people would be a net loss (to the government) in the Quebec system too.

Because of time effects.

> In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more money going to work and sending your kid to daycare than being a stay at home parent.

Yes, but if you would make on average, over the course of the years where a child would need daycare if you weren't at home, much more than the cost of daycare but the crossover point where working is an immediate advantage is several years down the line, and you don't have a financial cushion for the short term, you won't be able to afford to work initially, and by not working you’ll lose earning potential and push out (perhaps infinitely) that crossover date; it's a vicious cycle.

And two things that make that much more pronounced are that day care has a much higher cost for kids under about 18-24 months (there are fundamentally greater requirements for young kids which in most places are also reflected in more strenuous minimum regulatory requirements) and significant employment breaks have adverse effects on short-term employability outside of unskilled labor fairly quickly. (If you genuinely haven't lost skills you can mostly recover from that over time, but your initial return-to-work pay is likely to be far lower if you weren't already at the bottom and aren't returning to an existing job after a protected leave.)

We need to get past the ridiculous idea that staying home with one's children while their young is some sort of failure. It's not. It's valuable work, which coincidentally is why childcare is as expensive as it is. Frankly, given the importance of the work, I'm surprised childcare doesn't cost more.

On the other hand, it's impossible for your children to get back the time they could have spent in their most formative and vulnerable years around people that love them, rather than minimum wage daycare workers.

It's complicated, and just saying it's better to have a stay-at-home parent versus "minimum wage daycare workers" (who in my experience are actually often highly qualified), is an incomplete perspective (IMO).

Minimum wage. High school diploma.

>day care professionals probably do that job just as well as me, or better.

If you are truly so terrible at taking care of children that you cannot care for your own flesh and blood better than minimum wage workers can simultaneously care for multiple children to which they have no personal emotional attachment, then please, get your children away from yourself as often as possible.

>Also, there are 168 hours in a week and the kids still spend a large part of that with their parents.

70+ are lost to sleeping, and more for younger children, so no, they don't spend a large part of that time with their parents in any meaningful way.

If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.

If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.

>Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.

I don't really know what the point in this comment is. Do you think kids outside of daycare don't do unstructured play with other kids?

No way! The training after high school for day care professionals in my country takes 4 years and is much better paid than minimum wage.

If nothing else, I could never hope to beat them on experience.

There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.

That's fine. Unless you are emotionally stunted, they could never hope to beat you on love.

>There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.

Starting at what age? Is this what you're referring to: https://theglobepost.com/2018/12/13/denmark-compulsory-dayca...

If so, that's quite a bit different from what you described. That sounds like it's more about forcibly integrating foreign populations. They're not targeting Danish children with that.

Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.

[1]https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/sweden-mandator...

OK, I don't know what that means. What I do know is that if you're dropping them off to be raised by people that don't care about them nearly as much as you do, and who aren't going to miss them very much if they never see them again, they're not going to get the kind of love that they get from you during those hours. The longer those hours are, the longer they go without getting that kind of love, and the more they become convinced they aren't worth the full attention of a person that loves them. I don't think that's good for them.

>Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.

From your link, it looks like this affects children of age 6. When people in the US talk about day care or child care services, they're taking about children up until the age of 5 at most, and usually actually just up until the age of 3. For children aged 3 and 4 it's usually called pre-school rather than day care or child care service.

In the US, children at the age of 6 are entering their second year of school, which if they attend a public school is free from kindergarten (age 5) to the end of high school (age 18). This article is about the expense of child care in the US. The law you've linked is entirely inapplicable to this discussion.

Subsidizing a dead-end low-wage job is a net loss for everyone.

But low-wage jobs are often an important part of the route to other jobs for those entering or re-entering (even with previous higher-wage work) the workforce.

I think subsidized daycare is a great idea as long as it isn't too much of a disincentive for those who want to stay home with their kids. When I was looking into childcare I noticed there were a lot of options that were only 2-3 hours a day. It took me awhile to realize these were breaks for parents who stayed at home and they were not targeting parents working full time. The parents I do know that have stayed at home could really use and appreciated some reprieve here and there. Nicer gyms and even grocery stores offer temporary childcare. I'm confident there are fewer options in middle/lower class neighborhoods.

Most people I know who chose to stay at home have only one or two kids. Even for those who have, say, five kids I wouldn't say it would still be a net loss to the government (many regulations mandate 1:6 caretaker:child for pre-walkers to 1:15 starting at age 5 for childcare). There are other advantages to group care like being able to spot issues that aren't age appropriate. As a parent I don't have a large sample size for most milestones. "Normal" can have a range of a year for many developmental skills, but others can stick out in a group setting. Spotting these things early can go a long way in addressing them. Scheduled pediatrician visits are only once or twice a year and last ~30m. So many things can be easily missed.

Given our resource utilization rates and sustainability problems, isn't this a good thing? Yes, some social changes will have to happen to account for the change but this is mostly handled by automation.

It was also an easy filter: who cares if child care is expensive if you don't care if the population grows?

Why would you be OK with any kind of disincentive to parents staying home with their children?

>There are other advantages to group care like being able to spot issues that aren't age appropriate. As a parent I don't have a large sample size for most milestones. "Normal" can have a range of a year for many developmental skills, but others can stick out in a group setting.

You don't have to dump your children off to be raised by minimum wage daycare workers in order to put them in a group setting. You can also create these group settings, and gain a larger sample size, by spending more time with your friends and family members who also have children. As a bonus, you and your friends and family members can observe the behavior yourselves, and not rely on the judgment and interest of minimum wage daycare workers, who could get a new job at any point in time and be perfectly content to never see your child again.

I'm just recognizing the realities of incentivizing anything. There's a difference between a work requirement for both parents and attendance requirement for children and maybe, in some cases, a portion of your income tax would go to a program you don't take advantage of.

> You don't have to dump your children off to be raised by minimum wage daycare workers in order to put them in a group setting.

Where did I say this should be mandatory or that full-time childcare was the best and only option? You're grossly mischaracterizing my position here and the realities of daycare. Part of the reason daycare is expensive, as mentioned in the article, is because of the regulations in place around the environment and staff. I've found group daycare staff are often more qualified than individual nannies.

I would love to see studies because the issues I've seen caught and missed are all anecdotal and do involve tight-knit communities--which not everybody has. The situations I've seen caught did not "rely on the judgment and interest of minimum wage daycare workers" but were done through communication. After discussing an issue between the daycare and parent it would be presented to a pediatrician or other specialist to see if intervention was needed.

> you and your friends and family members can observe the behavior yourselves

Kids act very differently when around primary caretakers and others. Like I said, part of something like daycare would be communicating what you've observed and what they've observed. A select few motivated parents read books and seek out information (often only for their first child), I see a lot of "bad advice" from previous generations. One thing I've seen come up a lot is older generations either don't know, or dismiss, "back to sleep" as a way to minimize SIDS. I also notice that knowledge about children atrophies very quickly. I constantly have to give milestones for my kid; birth weight, when they rolled over, crawled, walked, first word, first sentence. As years pass I have a rougher idea about what's normal and completely forgot about more minor milestones like; parallel play, object permanence, when pronouns should be understood, etc. even when I'm close to other families kids hitting those milestones.

If they were lots of things wouldn't need to exist, like companies and employees. You could just hire someone on the open market for 5 minutes to type up a letter and it would be perfectly efficient so you'd know that if you couldn't afford to hire someone then it wasn't economically worthwhile.

That doesn't work in reality, and neither does expecting every young parent to negotiate childcare while putting them in a catch-22 regarding finding work when they can't work without childcare and they can't afford childcare without work.

Markets are a great tool, but they're not the only way to resolve co-ordination problems to maximize economic prosperity.

EDIT: Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care. Such that caring for the marginal child is substantially cheaper than almost anyone's potential income in the traditional labor force.

There are some very difficult to snswer questions with a scale argument applied to young children. Without bothering to look for a source it seems quite reasonable that young children who socialise 1:(small n) with a caregiver in a family unit turn out quite differently to those who socalise 1:(big N) in a 'highly efficient' daycare centre.

I could see that argument either being a pro or a con; most parents are as bad at parenting as they are at everything else. But the issues involved in creating economies-of-scale in child care mean it should be considered potentially neutral until they have been debated (vs considered as a net-positive as is normal in economics).

If your first thought is something like, maybe we shouldn't tax X spent on daycare- well, that's a subsidy.

Why you need to have access to a DCRA and can't simply deduct child care expenses, I have no idea. It's like with an FSA, it seems someone wants to provide a benefit but is purposefully making it harder to use...

Y = Annual pay on open market

X = Cost of childcare

Y' = Takehome pay after taxes

Y' < X < Y is an inefficient utilization of resources that subsidized daycare can fix (since the subsidies come out of Y-Y', it can be revenue neutral or even revenue positive for the government).

We should subsidize childcare in efficient group settings, but we should also pay women that decide to stay home and do that work from public funds at decent salaries.

Only then, when women are free to choose their own destiny free of financial pressure can we say we've made the kind of difference in the world we want to see.

EDIT: In fact, there are probably many different childcare arrangements that women would pick: alone, in groups with friends or relatives, or in the employed laborforce. All of these should be realistically on the table.

EDIT2: While practically speaking in our current society, women would be the most affected, this should apply to any primary caregiver regardless of gender identity.

FYI, "comparative advantage" has a specific meaning, it isn't just a synonym for "advantage, but in economics".

I assume you mean until the child goes to school or perhaps becomes an adult, and in my experience it's not rare to meet women like that.

It certainly was not rare in previous generations, so to the extent that it is rare today, it's due to cultural changes. If women's mental health is suffering because certain elements of society have convinced them they should be working instead of caring for their children, we should just as strongly consider countering those elements.

What is very rare in my experience is to meet an older woman who wishes she had spent less time with her children when they were young.

Being a part of the workforce in this context means you are contributing income taxes. A full time parent contributes $0 in income taxes from their labor and hence is not a part of the workforce.

The value of raising a child full time is not at issue here and you're attacking a straw-man. A subsidized day care gives a parent the option of returning to the work force if they wish. This could be because they want to work, or because they have to to feed their family. The parent comment was pointing out that this choice does not result in a deficit to society but rather in a net surplus which makes it worth it to implement and offer regardless of how parents choose to raise their children.

Theoretically, we should just grant parents a tax exempt voucher per child every month that is exchangeable for cash or daycare at equivalent rates. That way you aren’t disincentivizing stay at home parents or other familial care (like grandparents or shared part time parenting).

This same statement can be applied to healthcare (our family's health is one of the most important things we have, why do we outsource it to doctors?) and cooking (nutritious meals are the keystones of a good life, why do we let anyone else cook for our family?)

Also how is giving someone a choice to work or raise kids misguided? Are you assuming people don't get satisfaction from their work? Or that there can't be a balance?

I'll agree that we worship at the corporate alter too much, and that our society actively works against raising a family, but helping lower the cost of childcare is encouraging families.

As it stands right now people aren't having kids because it is so expensive, and telling them "your values are wrong, stop working and have a kid instead!" isn't going to change minds en masse.

Regarding your last comment about people not having kids because it's too expensive, while that may be a popular thing to say it's 100% false. As individuals and societies become wealthier they have fewer kids not more. The poorest places have the highest birth rates and that's true both within and and between countries. People are free to have as many or as few kids as they like, but it's silly to argue that money is a barrier when we are living in the wealthiest era in human history. Why are people having fewer kids? Who knows, but my guess is that it probably has something to do with historically high levels of access to birth reliable birth control and the decreased importance that most folks place on having large families. Those aren't necessarily bad things, they're just historical outliers.

Around where I live two types of housing are being built:

1. million dollar+ McMansions. 2. Tiny 1 or maybe 2 bedroom apartments for rent.

Of course there is existing housing stock, for around $600k-$800k for a house that is good for raising a family in.

My friends with kids are dumping 10-25k into education, and the ones with younger kids also have to factor in child care.

So, sure, for dual income families earning 300k a year[1], it has never been a better time to have kids.

I'm not going to argue that higher income countries have less kids, of course they do, the higher % chance kids survive the less need there is to have a lot of kids.

But I honestly wonder if people are having as many kids as they want to if economics weren't an issue.

[1]This is not even an exaggeration, for people living in major coastal metros, the quality of life trade-off is either drive 1h to 1.5hrs and have affordable housing, or have a commute that allows for a life and not be able to afford housing that would allow for kids. Those being the two choices society presents is 5 types of bullshit.

After hearing stories from my wife, who works at a daycare, I believe the crappy pay for childcare professionals is holding down the skill level. If a childcare worker can learn the basics of childhoold developmental psychology, education, and some medical techniques, then what's stopping them from just getting a more profitable college degree? Some people with bachelor's degrees come in, but they don't stay long.

Only after working in childcare for 16 years did she land at an employer who required all workers to pass a decent certification course at a community college. If daycares paid better, they might retain skilled workers.

Maybe, but raising children well certainly isn't...

But in the context of this discussion, “productivity” is an economic term for the production of goods or services, and the generation of income for the workers. Child rearing does neither of those things directly, so as an economic activity, it doesn’t register and thus those parents are not part of the workforce. Again, that does not mean it is not a valuable thing to do for both the child and society, but it also does not directly add to GDP, generate income taxes, etc.

We can observe that the old model was better in terms of a certain metric, but that's not going to help. We need to invest in making child rearing effective in today's world.

This is definitely the wrong mindset.

Also note how in your first scenario both people earn money, in the second scenario only A does (ending up with more than what B had in scenario 1).

There is definitely a good sized segment of America that views homemaking as occupying some position below earning a salary. My wife (a homemaker) encounters this routinely among a certain set of career aspiring women.

There are some (mostly women) who choose this. There are many many more (mostly women) who do this because they don't see any other choice, either due to cultural pressure or due to financials.

There are also studies that show it's good for the kids to be with other kids and in a more structured learning environment than a home can offer.

It's not that childcare is undervalued it's that most women want to see themselves as more than just responsible for bearing and rearing children.

What you are defending is the classical conservative relationship model. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed it can be pleasant for many people. For many more it is not a satisfactory way to live their life. It's also often not satisfactory for the working partner that rarely gets to see their kids.

Now, where it gets interesting would be more flexible models like they are common in the Nordics, e.g. both parents working 60-80% and alternating childcare and household duties on different days/weeks. THAT is a progressive and for all sides positive model.

I would absolutely chose that over punching a clock everyday.

You have to do the cooking and cleaning and laundry anyway and you're also leaving an aweful lot out of the good stuff out in your description.

For example, in lower COL places in the US, it usually costs the range of $100/day for a nanny that works 8 hours a day, and for higher COL places (e.g. Palo Alto) it could even be say $300/day. Daycare (with groups of children) can be a bit cheaper, for sure.

But the point being, to have tax credit that matches that kind of effect, we'd need at least tax credits of $90/day/child for stay at home parents, to make sense, and including weekends too (i.e. 365 days a year).

If childcare is so expensive, maybe in two-parent households, one parent's job should be to raise the children while the other works.

They can, and some do, but there is the tricky problem that women tend not to want to be married to men that make less money than them.

They can, and often do. I know of several executives where I work who have stay at home husbands. This arrangement may not be as common as the traditional one, but it's more common than you think

But here's the opposite view point: as parents, both my spouse and I would rather have either myself or my spouse be a full time carer of our baby, than sending her off to daycare and have both of us working.

What do you suggest is the solution then; other than making enough money / hitting the startup lottery jackpot and retiring before having kids?

I don’t really see the moral panic in having children being raised together in groups rather than by a dedicated or househusband.

First off, what if someone doesn't want to be a stay at home parent? Why force traditional values on them?

But, in terms of pure economics, let's put it at an extreme.

Child-care is too expensive, a woman who would otherwise go on to make breakthroughs in medical science stays at home.

The lost value to society is in the literal millions.

This scenario only has to be repeated a few times before it becomes economically irresponsible to not offer subsidized child care.

And, given how large the population is, this situation will happen.

The ideal of capitalism is that people are rewarded for their contributions to society overall, by providing value for others (ideally increasing net happiness!) people are reimbursed.

Now I'm not going to even try and say that is what always happens, obviously things have gotten a bit off kilter, but by and large I'd say that for many jobs out there, that is still true.

And the thing is, some people have an outsized impact, potential is on a curve, and if a single person on the far end of the "can help out humanity' curve is not enabled to do all that they can do to help out, then we all lose out.

In a very large share of people work either in bullshit jobs or unnecessary jobs or are replacablable.

On the other hand, if children would get more love,maybe more of them would grow to be exceptional?

And of course someone could have a BS job and then later move on to a job that does have an impact!

Trying to evaluate the worth of people is pretty much futile, and whenever it has been attempted there have been huge negative outcomes.

And even during less extreme historical circumstances, it is just expensive to do, the recent example being drug testing for welfare recipients. The cost to do the drug testing far exceeded the money the government saved denying benefits.

In the end being non-judgemental and treating people equally turns out to be a rather economically efficient solution.

Heck, even when we talk about Newton's discoveries , other people on similar stuff at the time and would have gotten there.

And if it's 99%, why not let the family choose which parent stays with the kid ?

Combine that with paying really well to trully important jobs.

You'll get reasonably good results with that.

I think this is a very upper middle class white collar view.

Over 2.1% of Americans work as cooks (!!)[1] and another 3.6% work as grounds cleaning. Just keeping buildings somewhat functional is a lot of work.

Then you have all the people working on sales floors, not everyone wants to buy from Amazon!

3.5% in construction.

7.8% spread across all maintenance occupations just keeping everything glued together.

Another 5.9% in production (manufacturing), even with the incredible amount of automation that has taken place there.

So we're well above 10%, and that is just taking a look at hard to automate categories that have more than 1% of people in them!

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

And I'm not saying thry don't carry done value , just that raising your kids well, in my view, is much more important.

(1)are all cooks and restaurant that necessary ?

The idea seems pretty ubiquitous, as soon as a society gets any amount of wealth you'll find people being paid to cook food at scale.

And cooking is one of those things that scales up very well, it doesn't have to mean fancy sit down restaurants. There are still a few places I can grab food for cheaper than what I'd be able to prepare it myself at that quality level, though sadly those types of venues have seemingly been on a decline for decades.

Maybe not for fried food, and salads(easy to make). but for most other types of food it can work.

>Child-care is too expensive, a woman who would otherwise go on to make breakthroughs in medical science stays at home.

This sounds like a fun game.

Child-care is subsidized. A child who would otherwise have been raised by a loving parent is raised by minimum wage daycare workers who don't care about the child.

The child consequently develops antisocial behavior disorders and shoots up a classroom full of children, one of which would otherwise have gone on to make breakthroughs in medical science.

You are assuming massive incompetence on the part of child care workers with no prior evidence. At scale of course saving lives will result in the life of a future criminal being saved, but on the whole the # of good people outweighs the number of bad people, thus why society continues to, however slowly, lurch forwards.

In comparison to unknown potential future murders, there are known numbers for how many woman leave the workforce after having kids, 30% of women with bachelors degrees, and 19% with a Masters or PhD. [1]

19% of women with a post graduate degree is huge. How many millions of dollars of investment in education is that? If someone wants to leave work then of course they should be allowed, but if they don't and feel they are forced to? That sucks, and it is a net loss for society.

[1]https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/09/the-number-of-women...

The fact that they earn minimum wage is evidence of their collective incompetence. The fact that they would not be emotionally destroyed by never seeing the child again when either they leave their job or the child moves on is evidence of their indifference.

>19% of women with a post graduate degree is huge. How many millions of dollars of investment in education is that? If someone wants to leave work then of course they should be allowed, but if they don't and feel they are forced to? That sucks, and it is a net loss for society.

Should we not first ask why they thought it was a good idea to get an advanced degree?

So, because society undervalues their work, they are incompetent losers, with anti-social behavior disorders?

Please, pray tell, how much do you think the people who grow the food that you need to live get paid? Do you think as poorly of them?

Because society pays less for that sort of work, the sort of people that end up doing that work will tend to be less competent than the people that do more highly paid work.

I'm not sure how you've concluded that society undervalues their work, though. That seems to me to be a matter of opinion.

School-shootings are such a big problem in Quebec and Scandinavian countries where childcare is subsidized. They must be caused by the evils of subsidized childcare.

The only thing that can shed light on the question of whether childcare is harmful to children is scientific research with large sample sizes that carefully control for confounding variables.

No it doesn't. Rates for Stockholm, Sweden (PDF): https://forskola.stockholm/globalassets/forskola-och-skola/f...

In short:

FULL-TIME RATES

Full-time rates apply to children in the ages of 1-3, who are in childcare for more than 30 hours a week.

Child 1: 3% of household income up to maximum a fee of 1425 kr/month (roughly 149 USD)

Child 2: 2% of household income up to maximum a fee of 950 kr/month (roughly 99 USD)

Child 3: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month (roughly 50 USD)

PART-TIME RATES

Child 1: 2% of household income up to maximum a fee of 950 kr/month

Child 2: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month

Child 3: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month

Every family receives child allowance[1]. Child allowance for one child is 1250 kr/month for one child. Two children: 2650 kr/month. Three chidren: 4480 kr/month.

[1] https://www.forsakringskassan.se/privatpers/foralder/nar_bar...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/sweden-competitive-spite-high-tax-... [3] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-09/bernie-sanders-wants-...

Anecdotally a lot of those same people are 1st generation immigrants, 2nd generation children of recent immigrants or are merely here for school from places such as China in the first place, and as such don't feel much of a tie to Canada or to being Canadian.

Not to mention that Canada, at least in the major English-speaking cities, does not have much of a residual sense of community left.

Hence the situation is very different to a largely homogeneous society with an inherent sense of shared identity such as Sweden.

That's not what I said at all. I said Canadians are leaving Canada because they can make more money outside of Canada(ie. like close to double the salary in some cases). Raising taxes is not going to encourage them to stay if they are leaving because of monetary reasons.

No, but the Swiss banking system, Panama Papers, Canadian shadow company situation et al. can attest to the fact that when income / wealth rises to a certain level and those who've earned / attained it feel the level of tax being levied at them is of an unfair level, a vast amount of money that could be taxed will be off-shored.

Everyone, particularly those in areas with a low sense of shared identity and the mutual obligations that comes with it, will try to minimize their tax bill some way or another and once one attains a certain level they will unlock mechanisms to avoid tax at a level that will be detrimental to the rest of the players in their given system.

If you make enough money that you can live comfortably and you would have to move up a lot to counter the offset to make more money in the next tax bracket, I think the majority of people would not bother. Outside of HN, a lot of people are satisfied with making an okay salary and having steep tax bracket changes just amplifies that. Obviously, everyone would like to make more money if they could do so easily but if it is very difficult to do so, a lot of people will not be bothered.

The people who do want to make a lot of money and become rich, well if they have to deal with crazy taxes, they are going to either find away around the tax laws, or simply leave the country which both options are not good for the country.

The people in the middle income brackets don't want to move up, in the sense that they don't want to work 20% harder, to get a 3% increase in their paycheck. (Which is how most employers 'reward' hard work.)

That's because effort and remuneration aren't linked in a 1:1 fashion, not because the marginal tax bracket for the next dollar they earn is three percent higher than the previous one.

This is not how tax brackets work.

According to wikipedia (0), the top rate is 60% and kicks in at $70,800. What's your source?

> That $149 per month is deceptive when you are paying very high tax rates.

According to the OECD (1), the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is $31,287 a year, which comes down to $2607 per month, of which $149 is 5.7%.

According to the same OECD, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita in the US is $45,284 a year. According to the OP's article, the cost of childcare is $16,000, or roughly 35.3%.

Would you argue that's deceptively high when you are paying little taxes? I wouldn't. If having children is to be considered a basic human right, why not equally consider universal the ability to raise them regardless of income bracket?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden 1: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/sweden/

I am generally not one to rail against the government running efficient programs for general welfare, I support single payer healthcare in the US and many progressive policies. I do however think we need to consider the line where anything you buy has the government involved in re-distributing resources to make it cheaper for people with less money.

Ultimately, it might be good to allow economic forces to produce an economy again where single income households can afford to raise children, regardless of the gender of the parent who is earning an income. More work doesn't always mean societies or families ended up better off, parents spending time raising kids should not be seen as just sunken cost because we could have gotten tax money out of them.

Before a stay-at-home parent enters the workforce, they may not have the money to pay for the childcare that would free up time to work. Essentially only governments have both the money and the incentive to invest in making childcare widely available.

>So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

> But young Canadians who were eligible for the program experienced, as teenagers, “a significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction” relative to Canadians from other provinces. So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

The paper itself expands on it a little bit more:

> A recent view of effects of previous child care exposure on outcomes in adolescence suggest that more hours in child care in general does not affect test scores, but has a negative effect on non-cognitive outcomes, such as impulsivity and risk-taking (Vandell et al., 2010).

These negative findings have nothing at all to do with subsidized vs. non-subsidized childcare. They're essentially comparing children in daycare vs. children that are able to be raised by one or more parents, full-time.

Would kids be better off being raised by their parents more than being raised by specialized childcare workers? Perhaps. But not everyone is given that opportunity, regardless.

"child care in general does not affect test scores, but has a negative effect on non-cognitive outcomes, such as impulsivity and risk-taking (Vandell et al., 2010)."

Lately. I believe this is serious factor in the seemingly exponential rise in juvenile crimes in our city lately.

I have also been exploring bad learning / testing in the schools along with lots of other problems like bullying and violence.. talking with some people who work in these areas, it appears no amount of money thrown at the schools / teachers / in school counselors / resource officers is going to fix it...

unless things are fixed at the homes of all the kids in the community. I believe in many of these communities one of the prevalent factors is no stay at home parent..

and sadly this has been going on for so long, in many cases the parents do not have the right knowledge or skills to teach the kids as they likely grew up in a similar no at-home parents, stare at the tube and get bigger kind of situation as well.

I am interested in any research into these areas.

Intuitively the extremely poor will benefit (the kid would have been neglected or malnourished &c. without subsidized child care) at the expense of the slightly less poor (the kid would have had a stay-at-home parent without subsidized child care).

Policy is full of tradeoffs (and politics is full of lying about the tradeoffs to get support for a particular policy).

My kids all started daycare quite young (less than a year old) and they LOVE it. I suppose it entirely depends on the daycare just as it can depend on the school your child attends when they're older.

The daycare my kids go to have plenty of activities... they do crafts, draw, have plenty of books and toys, play outside, "sports" and dance classes. There's no way I'd have the time or attention span to be able to do all of that with my kids unfortunately. Some parents can do it, but I think most parents need a break more often than not.

It demands a minimum of 80% participation, meaning that if you wanted to stay at home to take care of your children but use subsidized daycare 1-2 days a week to give yourself a break, it's currently not possible. If a child is absent for more than 20% of the "regular" schedule, then the daycare loses that subsidy spot due to it being under-utilized.

There's a movement to help correct this, but it's not simple due to how funds and resources are allocated and planned for.

We should be aiming to have fewer people in the workforce, not more. The economy is for the people, not people for the economy.

Don't forget the gub'ment gets its cut too!

> community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now

What are you referring to in particular? Community booster orgs? The PTA?

> Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families?

Were families really that better off? I think back to the 50's and all I see is things like alcoholism, racism, parochialism, and insularity. I also see a world in the aftermath of WW2, where all other global-scale economies were devastated, save for the US, and could afford to pay husbands fantastic wages while mom stayed home and ran the house; those salaries aren't a reality now.

Yes, yes, and.. social networks. You know, the kind where people call each other and make plans like play dates and canning sessions. These days that seems to be only available to the upper middle class. All of it is still here, but weaker, less pervasive, and unavailable to many.

> Were families really that better off?

You're absolutely correct, and to answer that requires better and more data than I even know how to look at. The 50's is maybe not even the best time to evaluate since the suburban boom was creating some of these problems for the first time, too. How many families were really doing well, vs how many families were struggling? Perhaps the data would show that in fact it's better for families that women can choose either (or even in exceptional cases, both) paths. The good news is that this subject is not as taboo as I'd feared, the comment is not being obliterated.

> alcoholism

There is no evidence I can find that shows we are any better off now than we were in the 50's with regards to alcoholism. In fact, according to [1] and [2], we appear to be in a low point of per-capital consumption, similar to a low that occurred in the late 1950's.

[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-1/30-38.htm [2] https://vinepair.com/articles/americas-consumption-beer-wine...

Good thing none of those exist any more!

Some women will prefer that sort of corporate lifestyle, for sure, and I don't think anyone is advocating for making it illegal for women to work. But you don't get a successful and happy society by catering to small minorities at the expense of the success and happiness of the overwhelming majority.

I'm not sure how we are currently catering to women in the workforce. If anything, it seems quite the opposite.

Far more were happy being homemakers in the past.

>I'm not sure how we are currently catering to women in the workforce.

Affirmative action, equal opportunity laws, corporate funded programs to instruct men how to behave around women in the workplace, pervasive media praising women with jobs, praising the child-free husband-free life, on and on and on. You have to not be looking in order to not know about it.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl... for instance. You can always blame it on there not being enough equality yet, or once they've passed men in whatever metric you have your eye on, you can always blame it on more abstract things.

But I don't think any amount of equality is going to make them as happy as they would be making their homes into warm and loving places for their families, and experiencing their children growing up and eventually having children of their own, in a society that appreciates them for doing just that.

If the small minority of women that that doesn't work for have a worse time in the work force because society prioritized things other than making it nice for them, too bad. I don't care. You make society strong with rules that work for the majority.

We're in a transition period. Women who work still have to do the majority of housework and childrearing at home, due to their male partners' lack of participation. You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places, experience their children growing up, etc? Or is that not the same thing?

You say you don't prioritize making workforce participation "nice" for women, but we're really just talking about making it "fair". You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.

Ultimately, I believe women, as all human beings, are capable of making their own choices and deserve a fair playing field. I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.

You can say that, I guess. There's no particularly compelling reason to believe that getting through the transition period to the promised land is possible or that the grass in actually greener on the other side.

>You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places

If that's what will make quality of life better for them and their families. I don't know of any compelling reason to believe it should.

>Or is that not the same thing?

I don't know, for sure.

>You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.

I think there's a lot to be said for that, in general, but is it really fair to women or to their families if the pursuit of achieving this ideological vision of total fairness and equality between the sexes ends up reducing their quality of life?

>I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.

We know from data that they did like it when the scales were tilted toward that choice better than what they have now. There's no compelling reason to believe that they'll like the "fair playing field", if it's possible to get there, better than they'll like what they had before.

I don't know for a fact that most of them won't like it, but I think there are good reasons to guess that they won't, and, if your goal is to increase their life satisfaction and that of their families, it seems insane to me to push an entirely ideologically motivated set of changes onto our entire culture all at once without having pretty damn good reason to believe your end goal is achievable and actually desirable.

The science is still out on whether men and women are genetically predisposed toward different average behaviors and preferences. The idea that they are seems completely reasonable to me, given the simple fact that men produce thousands of gametes per second for their entire post-pubescent lives, while women produce one per month for 20-30 years. Reproductive and child-rearing behaviors are obviously vitally important to how we turned out because we only descend from the people whose succeeded in reproducing and keeping their children alive. I don't know for a fact that our brains are hardwired to help us out differently as a consequence of our different relevant anatomy but I think it's totally reasonable to guess that they do, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary.

If they are predisposed toward different behaviors and preferences, then trying to socially engineer men and women to all be exactly the same is doomed to failure, and a whole lot of people are going to suffer for it, and indeed they already are, as we can see. And sure, some women would benefit from it while the majority suffered, but like I said, if you want a strong society, you make rules that work for the many, not the few.

It's a "nit pick" for sure, but in my understanding, something that "pays for itself" is not dependent on government subsidies. Quebec has some of the highest income taxes in the country - you pay for such services one way or another.

Plus, according to the linked article, there is not enough space in the subsidized program to meet demand, so there are private options available, which must be paid for out of pocket and covered by a tax rebate. According the to the article, the private options do not provide the same standard of care.

I think you are ignoring the aggregate here. A govt program can "pay for itself" in ways private action cant because the govt can help smooth out risk among the participants.

Your point that this is ultimately funded by taxpayers is correct, but that doesnt mean the program cant generate more in new tax revenue than it costs. Like roads, education, and other areas, reliable and affordable child care can enable a lot.

(Note I have no actual knowledge of the specifics, so I'm arguing what is possible, not what is definitely happening)

The subsidies that are required are offset by the increased labour force participation that occurs as a direct result of said subsidies. Conversely, if the subsidies disappeared, then there's a good chance that many of those currently employed parents would have to make a choice – do I remain in the workforce and pay $1-2k/month for childcare, or do I quit my job and raise my child/children?

I've had relatives that live in Ontario that had to make this choice. Daycare in Toronto is $1600/month, and can be around $2500/month if you have two children. If one of the parents is pulling in $50,000/year (net pay of $38,979), and you have to drop close to $30,000 for childcare, for 2-4 years, is it even worth staying at your job?

That the program "pays for itself" in increased taxes implies that the additional tax burden is at least the $1-2k/month required to pay for the childcare.

So if you just cancelled the childcare and reduced the taxes you'd end up at the same place on average, except you wouldn't have non-parents subsidising childcare for parents.

Non-parents are not subsidizing parents in this scheme. And if the additional amount collected in taxes is greater than the cost of the program, then parents are subsidizing non-parents.

If you cancelled the childcare, the GDP increase would disappear, so the increase in tax revenue would disappear, and you wouldn't be able to reduce the tax rate.

If you argue that you don't want to pay now because you won't benefit in the future because you'll be dead, I assume you're not willing to support any other investments either. That sounds like you're just freeloading on the investments that our ancestors made.

From the article:

But young Canadians who were eligible for the program experienced, as teenagers, “a significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction” relative to Canadians from other provinces. So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

The program was measured to be productive in the sense that the increased expenses for the program was paid back by the increase income taxes generated by more parents going to work IN THE PROVINCE. Since beginning the program more than two decades ago, Quebec has seen the rate of women age 26 to 44 in the workforce reach 85 percent, the highest in the world (and in Canada). More taxes paid by moms (and dads) paid for the price of the program. So yes, you can measure the success of the program and has nothing to do with the provincial perequation system for having a lower GDP.

Also, the birthrate is not among the lowest, it's actually right in the middle (per capita) and ahead of Ontario (which has the most similar economy). Quebec used to be among the lowest rate in Canada and what the program has done is increasing it dramatically, this has been measured by multiple studies.

Source: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/daycare-difference-quebec-fert... https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...

Getting around 50-80k of untaxed labor value for the household is an excellent reason for any family that can manage to have one parent do the childcare job. It’s not so much an affordability issue as it is a cash flow management issue.

In the US both the left and right play a game where the only way to increase tax revenue is tax cuts to the rich. It has never worked...but politicians be damned if they will ever try anything other than trickle down economics.

Any response to the view that universal-childcare-educated children are "DQN" from over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21745453 ? (I'm not sure I understand it.)

Moreover, they are comparing kids that are in daycare vs. kids that are raised solely by one or more of their parents; the fact that the daycare is "universal" or subsidized doesn't have anything to do with it. Moreover, the studies show that the kids are effectively more impulsive and more prone to risk-taking, and have found zero correlation with their cognitive abilities.

1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571.pdf

A big part of this is because the workers have to be Francophone, and often bilingual (esp. in Montreal).