7 ms·

Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more mon

by klipt 7y ago

Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? 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. 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.

darawk 7y ago
So, I think the argument would be that many mother's could go back to school and increase their skill-value to Y if they weren't stuck caring for children, maybe. I'm not sure. It's not clear to me that subsidized child-care is necessary, but I think if I were to make the argument, it'd look like that. 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.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care 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).
tharne 7y ago
100%. We shouldn't be creating perverse incentives. Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone. For taxpayers, it's just more money out of their pocket and for the parents, you're being encouraged to leave your children with strangers so you can go and work a job that doesn't pay enough to cover the cost of paying those strangers. 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.
- tristanstcyr 7y ago
  It's not that it's a failure, it's that being taken out of the workforce for many years is damaging to careers. It's more than a matter of perception. Public school starts when kids are 5. If you have several kids, it could then take someone out of the workforce for a decade. While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult, especially at a point where you're past your prime years such as your 20 or 30s.
  - HBKXNCUO 7y ago
    >While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult 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.
    - crashedsnow 7y ago
      It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment? 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).
      - HBKXNCUO 7y ago
        >It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. Sure, as with any social science there are huge numbers of complicating factors, which makes it difficult to really study anything conclusively. No double blind studies, obviously. >If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? Studies would be great, but probably far worse. Teenagers and young adults are developing independence from their parents and would probably feel overly constricted. >Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? No, we can't know it without running trials. >Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? Maybe in some cases. The overwhelming majority of people aren't going to go to any college "better" than a state university and wouldn't benefit from it. >"minimum wage daycare workers" Why put that in quotes? >who in my experience are actually often highly qualified Qualified for what? To show children the love and care that their parents would show them? I don't think so, because I don't think you can fake that, and I don't think their love for the children can be genuine because any loving parent would be emotionally destroyed if they couldn't see their child any more because the child graduated from daycare and moved on to kindergarden.
em500 7y ago
Because your while your gross Y is greater than X, your net Y might be well below (especially when you have 2 or more kids).
aidenn0 7y ago
Subsidized care is needed because of taxes: 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).
pfranz 7y ago
Do you care if the country's population drops dramatically? I'm sure many people are fine with that, but if you're a country looking to stay strong economically the math says you'll need to incentivize childrearing somehow. 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.
- HBKXNCUO 7y ago
  >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. 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.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
Because markets aren't perfect (in the economic sense). 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.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? 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.)
ip26 7y ago
Taxes are one reason. You have to earn Y where Y >= X * 125% (vaguely speaking) just to break even. If your first thought is something like, maybe we shouldn't tax X spent on daycare- well, that's a subsidy.
- lutorm 7y ago
  In fact, we don't (at least the first $5k, if you have access to a DCRA through your employer.) 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...
  - ip26 7y ago
    Indeed, although $5k is nowhere near enough to cover full time childcare.

by klipt 7y ago

darawk 7y ago

So, I think the argument would be that many mother's could go back to school and increase their skill-value to Y if they weren't stuck caring for children, maybe. I'm not sure. It's not clear to me that subsidized child-care is necessary, but I think if I were to make the argument, it'd look like that. 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.

roenxi 7y ago
> Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care 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).

tharne 7y ago

100%. We shouldn't be creating perverse incentives. Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone. For taxpayers, it's just more money out of their pocket and for the parents, you're being encouraged to leave your children with strangers so you can go and work a job that doesn't pay enough to cover the cost of paying those strangers. 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.

tristanstcyr 7y ago
It's not that it's a failure, it's that being taken out of the workforce for many years is damaging to careers. It's more than a matter of perception. Public school starts when kids are 5. If you have several kids, it could then take someone out of the workforce for a decade. While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult, especially at a point where you're past your prime years such as your 20 or 30s.
- HBKXNCUO 7y ago
  >While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult 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.
  - crashedsnow 7y ago
    It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment? 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).
    - HBKXNCUO 7y ago
      >It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. Sure, as with any social science there are huge numbers of complicating factors, which makes it difficult to really study anything conclusively. No double blind studies, obviously. >If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? Studies would be great, but probably far worse. Teenagers and young adults are developing independence from their parents and would probably feel overly constricted. >Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? No, we can't know it without running trials. >Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? Maybe in some cases. The overwhelming majority of people aren't going to go to any college "better" than a state university and wouldn't benefit from it. >"minimum wage daycare workers" Why put that in quotes? >who in my experience are actually often highly qualified Qualified for what? To show children the love and care that their parents would show them? I don't think so, because I don't think you can fake that, and I don't think their love for the children can be genuine because any loving parent would be emotionally destroyed if they couldn't see their child any more because the child graduated from daycare and moved on to kindergarden.

em500 7y ago

Because your while your gross Y is greater than X, your net Y might be well below (especially when you have 2 or more kids).

aidenn0 7y ago

Subsidized care is needed because of taxes: 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).

pfranz 7y ago

Do you care if the country's population drops dramatically? I'm sure many people are fine with that, but if you're a country looking to stay strong economically the math says you'll need to incentivize childrearing somehow. 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.

HBKXNCUO 7y ago
>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. 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.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

Because markets aren't perfect (in the economic sense). 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.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? 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.)

ip26 7y ago

Taxes are one reason. You have to earn Y where Y >= X * 125% (vaguely speaking) just to break even. If your first thought is something like, maybe we shouldn't tax X spent on daycare- well, that's a subsidy.

lutorm 7y ago
In fact, we don't (at least the first $5k, if you have access to a DCRA through your employer.) 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...
- ip26 7y ago
  Indeed, although $5k is nowhere near enough to cover full time childcare.