Does anyone else feel like we are moving in the wrong direction?<p>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.<p>And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Maybe it's not wise to comment on this while living in Germany and never having been to SF.<p>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?
> Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare?<p>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.
The staff in my baby’s London nursery all live outside of London.<p>Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.
this won't cost the city too much, there's only like a hundred kids under 6 in this city and 3% of them are mine.
HN poster responds: "You have 0.18 kids under 6! That seems unlikely!"
Am i missing the joke? ChatGPT tells me 3% of 100 is 3, not 0.18.
When I first read it I thought wait, 3% of 6 is 0.18, but then I realized no I'm a dork because 6 is the age of the kid, whereas the number 100 is written as a word hundred, hence I decided to write "HN poster responds:" with quotes around my first non-coffee aided thought because I thought it was funny. I guess I should have just made that full statement, but I do have a tendency to rather oblique communication strategies.<p>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!
.18 is 3% of 6. This might mean something, but I don't know what.
10 months out of six years is 0.14 so it isn't quite prenatal benefits.<p>What happens if an unborn baby has rights to go to preschool, but the birthing parent can't?<p>Is an unborn child a US citizen yet?
the next number in the sequence 3, 6, 18 is 72, but I doubt it means anything.
I think the joke is people trying to figure out why 0.18. I, personally, enjoy it.
You’re missing something if you asked ChatGPT that.
nah, it just means you get 18% of childcare costs paid.
When people say "there are barely any kids," they're often describing the outcome of past policy choices, not a reason to avoid changing them
Income cliffs, even phased, are generally stupid. See Britain's 100k cliff for free childcare. If both parents make 99k, you get it. If one earns 101k and the other earns zero, you don't get it. The workaround (pension stuffing) is widely known and actually means the govt comes off worse than if they'd just given the childcare away.<p>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.
One option would be implement as a income graded fee. Zero up to 230, and increasing fee above. Allowing all walks of life to access the same gov't services should be a more widely deployed pattern.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people<p>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.<p>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.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy.<p>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.
It’s easy to understand, but not easy to live under. If the worst case is I lose 25% of every “extra” dollar in some range, I have to think about it way less than if I lose the entire benefit for being 1 unit of currency over a limit.<p>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.
First off, the following is not meant to combative but I think this confuses me. If there was no cliff there was nothing to do administratively on that front, no new checking at all. We already have progressive tax systems in many countries. Adding 1% at the top end can’t be that difficult. My health insurance (in Germany) raises prices every year and most people don’t have a choice there either. Property taxes increase all the time. If we had a wealth tax and a higher (at the top) progressive capital gains tax it seems to me that the pitch would be politically even simpler: there are 5% that will pay a little more percentage wise from now on while retaining vast amounts of wealth and 95% that will pay less or much less. Genuinely I have heard that we can’t raise taxes on rich people because they will evade them but it also sounds like a lie repeated so often that we just take it as the truth. Didn’t a lot of countries or US states have higher marginal tax rates without seeing mass exodus of millionaires? Can’t lawmakers focus on plugging the loopholes rich people use? I mean our government is currently trying to go out of its way to make sure that unemployment benefits are only paid out to people who „really deserve them“ by tightening the rules around that and the political debates I see put incredible amounts of emphasis on „fairness“ and that we „have to do something about those who just profit off the system without contributing“ when it’s about that topic. The fervour is clearly not applied symmetrically.
the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah
I suspect that the policy is popular with the 90% of voters in the UK who earn less than £80k and that politicians are not very concerned with the ambitions of the rest of us (frustrating as that is when paying London rent).
To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.
In this case, it strikes me as a bad idea because there are advantages to having people - both parents and children - mix across income-levels. It fosters empathy, increases cultural knowledge, broadens social networks.
> Income cliffs<p>This is because people do not understand continuous functions.
In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west.<p>Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
My guess would be that in developed countries, people are having kids older and older, so the grandparents are accordingly also older and more tired. That combined with multi-generational households being all but gone so now you're picking up and leaving off and all the kind of cooking and general housekeeping is also doubled.
My brother's two boys both had kids. One of them, his wife, was going to go back to work after giving birth but had horrible feelings and cried when she took the baby to daycare after maternity leave. She quit and now stays home taking care of her baby.<p>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.<p>Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
There's a health and capacity angle. A lot of today's grandparents are still working, dealing with their own medical issues, or simply don't have the energy to provide full-time childcare
Wouldn't that be nice. mine are too busy watching pawn stars reruns for the hundredth time
very true! Mine are still working and after all are unable and unwilling to dedicate the whole time. They have plans or want to relax. Children are tiring. The west seems to be not only aging but also getting a bit lazy sometimes
We have 30 hours of free childcare in the UK (for nursery, schooling in older years is free) if both parents are working and neither earn more than £100k. It has the interesting impact that a salary of £99.9k is worth more to me than £130k, give or take some extra contributions to pension.<p>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.<p>Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
The £100k threshold is such an economically illiterate policy for society. The GPs and lawyers I know are working ~3 days a week to avoid it, so much economic output and taxes missed out on.
This is a whole family threshold rather than individual parent threshold, making the combined total lower.
nice to see the city supporting the lower class.
Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
Housing is expensive because of lack of housing supply and because of high housing demand because of both soft (non-finance-driven) desirability conditions and a sufficient concentration of very-high-income, price insensitive buyers on prices.<p>Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices.<p>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 <i>want</i> to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem <i>softly</i> by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
Just because of supply/demand alone?
If sitting in a comfy office pays as well as it does, why would people take care of children or build houses for way less?<p>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.
a year, I assume
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Okay now do everyone
So now making 231k makes you worse off than someone making 230k? Why even have that threshold when it doesn't even exclude that many people, it just causes weird incentives.
The article also mentions a 50% subsidy up to $310,000. The details aren’t spelled out, but subsidies like this often phase out gradually to avoid a cliff at the threshold.
Stepwise phaseouts often create more cliffs rather than avoiding cliffs. It is possible to do continuous phase out without cliffs (with or without bend points), the easiest way being to simply give a flat, income-insensitive benefit based on non-income qualifications, and then do the clawback through increases to marginal income tax rates, but if you are committed to clawback internal to the program you can do it through a fixed or tiered marginal clawback rate, instead of having a single or tiered set of benefit cliffs. But programs rarely do that, for a variety of reasons.
So now you are better off making 310k than 311k, is that much better? It doesn't matter how you read it you still get that effect.
You make it sound like a problem, but if you can make 311k, I'd say it shouldn't too hard to make 310k instead if that's better for you? Unless some companies have minimum salaries that high?
No at 310k you get $1 dollar at 311k you get $0. But you know like you have 999 more dollars than before. Assuming Post tax income.
These subsidies can be implemented in a way where they taper off instead of imposing a hard cliff.
Probably because in order to get it passed they had to have some cutoff because there was some people who would argue against it being free for everyone.
“Free”. Presumably tax payer funded in actuality.
That’s generally how good governments work yes.
We'll get the super wealthy in California, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to pay for it. Oh wait, they just left.
That sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce.<p>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).<p>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.
That's some convoluted logic. The data shows the opposite. Free/cheap childcare significantly increases the number of parents who work.<p><a href="https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/quebecs-child-care-scheme-pays-itself-economist" rel="nofollow">https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...</a>
Threshold based benefits decreases numbers of parents who work though, why have that threshold when its that high? If a couple can get free childcare by the wife working part time instead of full time they absolutely will, that is the effect the threshold gives you.
While I too disagree with the cap I think you are a bit blinded by working in tech. A lot of double income households do not reach 230k.
I don't follow. Wouldn't the high cost of childcare make couples less likely to have 2 incomes, because the lower-earning spouse is working for lower marginal pay, just to pay someone ELSE to provide child care?
You framed this issue in a certain way, but your position could be described as „lower earning families need to pay for childcare, so higher earning families keep producing two incomes”. Not so attractive anymore.
So basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975?<p>Sound the alarms.
We also had slavery, no advanced medicine, no education for most people, and an average lifespan of about 30. Amazing how selective nostalgia can be.<p>Letting the other 50% of the population make the same life choices is a good idea in my opinion.
Letting someone make free life choices is good. Disincentivizing not working isn't. It's a reasonable choice for one adult in a family to not work, especially if their earnings don't exceed the costs incurred by having both adults at work. We shouldn't set up our societies in a way to forces people to work even if it makes no financial sense.
We can all go nomad and berry-picking anytime, then.
> 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).<p>When described that way ... aren't they right about the wife's job?
The subheading says "Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000" which hopefully addresses your point there.