"Before having her own kids, Whitney Phinney acknowledges she thought of paid leave and subsidized child care as "handouts.""<p>This right here. The American myth that anyone can make it if they just work hard enough goes hand-in-hand with the "pull yourself up your own bootstraps" mentality. And poor people don't deserve welfare because they are "lazy". And other tropes pushed out by conservative think tanks since the 1970s that have Americans acting, and more importantly voting, against their own economic self-interest.
The awful truth is that competent child care is very expensive. Nothing is going to change that.<p>We could decide as a society to subsidize it in various ways, and/or many of us could tighten our belts some and cough up for the expensive child care we need ourselves.<p>But ultimately, it's expensive and probably going to get more so. It's not unlike healthcare costs in general.<p>(source: Have lived with a childcare provider.)
I am opposed to this: subsidizing child care but not subsidizing parents staying home to raise there kids. A better alternative is a children's allowance.
According to Census demographic trends, in the next couple decades, half of America’s population will live in just eight states. The half that is whiter, older, more rural, and more conservative, will be spread across the other 42 states. That’s 84 senators for them, and 16 senators for the other half of America- This is why.
When you look at the Phinney family’s finances the right course of action seems less clear. The dad is unemployed, and they also spend $500 a month on child care, which is a chunk of their budget. They could get child care for all their children for another $2000 a month, but the dad hasn’t been able to get a job that would cover that. Only warehouse jobs which pay very little.<p>So, the government could pay $2500 a month for this family to have free child care. But, the unemployed father could also just take care of all the children. Why is it better for the government to pay for child care, and then this father either stays unemployed or takes a job that pays less than the cost of child care?<p>It would be nice if there were not such a social stigma against stay-at-home fathers.
This is also a problem in the UK. When my children were young, it made little economic sense for my wife to continue working - practically all of her salary would have gone on childcare.<p>If childcare was made tax-deductible, my wife could have returned to work earlier. This would have meant our household could have contributed a far larger wedge in taxes to support society.
Why should childcare be subsidized? It should be an expensive privilege to bear children, and we should disincentivize it. Our species’ goal isn’t to keep increasing the population indefinitely, but people pretend like there’s a god given right to have as many children as one desires.<p>Rather, our goal should be to reduce population. Higher population = more consumption = more environmental strain. Plus most humans aren’t very productive economically, and that suggests we are overweight on population.<p>So who gets to have children? Those who’ve created more societal value and proven themselves to be more capable - the best proxy we have for this, as imperfect as it might be, is economic value. Fundamentally, currency records the amount of utility others in society have ascribed to a particular individual. And so it seems fitting for rearing a child to be expensive in terms of time and money.
Probably most of us here on Hacker News already have it. I certainly do.<p>No, not every job provides this. Also, not every job provides health coverage and unlimited snacks.