3 ms·

>- free childcare Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make

>- free childcare Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors. >- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own This would be great, but most Americans don't want this. They sure as hell aren't voting for it, and achieving it would require basically bulldozing most American cities. Americans have built themselves, ever since the end of WWII, a country and infrastructure that's entirely incompatible with the lifestyle you advocate here. I live in Tokyo now, and it's exactly what you're advocating here, but I simply can't imagine America somehow becoming like this in my lifetime. (It's one of the main reasons I came here.) Anyway, as other posters have noted, other countries have much of what you want here, and their fertility rates are quite poor, worse than the US in fact. If you really want to get people to have more children, you need to force society back to the "good old days", where women have far fewer rights, divorce is highly stigmatized, being non-religious or non-Christian is highly stigmatized, contraception is generally non-available, women basically can't have jobs except for schoolteachers (and only until they're married) or maids and need to just find a husband and become a SAHM, etc. Just look at the societies with high fertility, but contemporary and historically: they're absolutely horrible for women's rights. High fertility and large families have always been accomplished on the backs of oppressed women (and I'm not sure it was all that great for most men either).

ethbr1 3y ago
>>- free childcare > Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education. Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this. Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too. I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    I'm curious, would you support funding to help anyone willing to homeschooled their child as an alternative solution here? I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.
    - shiroiushi 3y ago
      No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids? Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all. Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.
      - _heimdall 3y ago

ethbr1 3y ago

>>- free childcare > Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education. Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this. Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).

shiroiushi 3y ago
Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too. I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  I'm curious, would you support funding to help anyone willing to homeschooled their child as an alternative solution here? I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.
  - shiroiushi 3y ago
    No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids? Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all. Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.
    - _heimdall 3y ago