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San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k
- pickelwix 9mo ago[flagged]
- ares623 9mo agoI chuckled
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- NooneAtAll3 9mo agoa year, I assume
- bsimpson 9mo agoThat sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce. 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). 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- simonw 9mo agoThe subheading says "Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000" which hopefully addresses your point there.
- jeltz 9mo agoWhile 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.
- rconti 9mo agoI 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?
- jeltz 9mo agoI think he is talking about the threshold effects. E.g if one partner earns 200k then it could make more sense for the other to stay at home than to work and earn say 50k or 70k. The 50% subsidy above 230k reduces that issue but I would rather see no cap.
- exitb 9mo agoYou 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.
- fyrn_ 9mo agoI think they framing have the mother not working as a positive, as it tends to lead to better outcomes?
- transcriptase 9mo agoSo basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975? Sound the alarms.
- darkwater 9mo agoWe can all go nomad and berry-picking anytime, then.
- throwaway9e9t 9mo agoWe also had slavery, no advanced medicine, no education for most people, and an average lifespan of about 30. Amazing how selective nostalgia can be. Letting the other 50% of the population make the same life choices is a good idea in my opinion.
- exitb 9mo agoLetting 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.
- bsimpson 9mo agoThe people who wrote the policy presumably want both parents to be able to work. It's the main reason to make childcare free.
- TMWNN 9mo ago> 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). When described that way ... aren't they right about the wife's job?
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoThat's some convoluted logic. The data shows the opposite. Free/cheap childcare significantly increases the number of parents who work. https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/quebecs-child-care-scheme-pays-itself-economist https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...
- Jensson 9mo agoThreshold 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.
- bsimpson 9mo agoI was specifically referring to the cap. It's doing the opposite of what the policy is presumably intended to if both parents are capable of earning 6 figures.
- wotsdat 9mo ago[dead]
- tobi_bsf 9mo agonice to see the city supporting the lower class.
- mindok 9mo ago“Free”. Presumably tax payer funded in actuality.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoWe'll get the super wealthy in California, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to pay for it. Oh wait, they just left.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoThat’s generally how good governments work yes.
- fooker 9mo agoAt some point you run out of other people’s money and have bread lines.
- exitb 9mo agoSo far it looks like we're going to run out of people first.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoBut if you don’t spend money, you will also become a failed state because the infrastructure required to generate value has failed.
- UncleMeat 9mo agoWhat? Bread lines are a response to poverty caused by a failure of the market and typically involve institutions giving out free bread using other people's money.
- nec4b 9mo agoCould you expand more on how bread lines in Soviet Union were a failure of the market?
- amirhirsch 9mo agothis 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.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoHN poster responds: "You have 0.18 kids under 6! That seems unlikely!"
- Groxx 9mo agonah, it just means you get 18% of childcare costs paid.
- normie3000 9mo agoAm i missing the joke? ChatGPT tells me 3% of 100 is 3, not 0.18.
- transcriptase 9mo agoYou’re missing something if you asked ChatGPT that.
- f33d5173 9mo ago.18 is 3% of 6. This might mean something, but I don't know what.
- 9mo ago
- Jensson 9mo agoSo 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.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoProbably 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.
- divbzero 9mo agoThe 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.
- Jensson 9mo agoSo 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.
- eptcyka 9mo agoThese subsidies can be implemented in a way where they taper off instead of imposing a hard cliff.
- Jensson 9mo agoThey can be, but the article says they aren't.
- L-four 9mo agoNo 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.
- 9mo ago
- iwontberude 9mo agoOkay now do everyone
- zingar 9mo agoWe 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. 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. Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
- ribosometronome 9mo agoThis is a whole family threshold rather than individual parent threshold, making the combined total lower.
- zingar 9mo agoA combined threshold of £200k (or whatever this converts to) would be great for me in London since my partner earns roughly the median salary (which is a lot lower).
- hayd 9mo agoThe £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.
- PunchTornado 9mo agoI reduced my hours at job, working only 4 days just to not hit it.
- fooker 9mo ago> Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference? No, you’re missing the insane scale of Silicon Valley tech salaries. See levels.fyi and filter by 5 years of experience in San Francisco. If the city made the threshold 100k or 110k, I bet there would be zero children in the city born to parents making less than that.
- ajay-b 9mo ago
- walthamstow 9mo agoIncome 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. 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.
- Escapado 9mo agoI 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.
- avcloudy 9mo agoIt'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. 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.
- Escapado 9mo agoFirst 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.
- avhception 9mo agoMaybe it's not wise to comment on this while living in Germany and never having been to SF. 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?
- zingar 9mo agoThe staff in my baby’s London nursery all live outside of London. Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.
- Jensson 9mo ago> Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare? 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.
- teaearlgraycold 9mo agoThere's also great (by American standards) public transit into/through the city. Caltrain and BART can get you into SF quickly from quite a large area nearby.
- throwfaraway135 9mo agoIn 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. Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
- shoobiedoo 9mo agoWouldn't that be nice. mine are too busy watching pawn stars reruns for the hundredth time
- ensocode 9mo agovery 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
- assimpleaspossi 9mo agoMy 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. 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. Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
- johanvts 9mo agoSure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.
- 9mo ago
- veunes 9mo agoSubsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
- dragonwriter 9mo agoHousing 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. Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices. 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 want to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem softly by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
- mritterhoff 9mo agoHousing is expensive because homeowners have weaponized zoning laws to make it illegal to build housing the city needs.
- Aloisius 9mo agoSadly, in San Francisco, renters have been even more NIMBY than homeowners. https://www.mhankinson.com/documents/renters_preprint.pdf https://www.mhankinson.com/documents/renters_preprint.pdf
- myrmidon 9mo agoJust 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? 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.
- pfannkuchen 9mo agoDoes anyone else feel like we are moving in the wrong direction? 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. And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck? 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. 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. 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.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo agoThere is probably a soup kitchen in your town. Nothing obligates you to use it. That doesn’t make it repressive on your diet. It’s fair to reject state-provided childcare. It’s mean to deny that to everyone else.
- pfannkuchen 9mo agoI have no clue how your response relates to what I said. Either I’m not understanding you or you’re not understanding me. Since my comment is much longer I’m going to wager the latter.
- nunez 9mo agoIt sucked because society back then (and currently in some cultures) was structured in such a way that women were de facto forced into marriage and motherhood, even if they didn't want to do these things. Women couldn't open bank accounts or buy cars easily without their husbands present; consequently, leaving bad marriages was considered very risky, to say nothing of the social ostricization that would ensure. I thought that AskHistorians would have a more eloquent answer to your question. As expected, they do: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xsyoi/in_most_recorded_history_women_have_mostly_had/k34fweh/?context=3#k34fweh https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xsyoi/in_m...
- up2isomorphism 9mo agoAgain this is benefiting wealthy people has a large amount of capital instead of workers.
- ajay-b 9mo agoSan Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income. But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k. I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
- senordevnyc 9mo agoThis should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k. Uh, it is for them. Why should it be only for them?
- tzs 9mo agoKind of OT, but I heard an interesting thing on a radio program talking about childcare: the US almost got free universal child care in the early 1970s via the Comprehensive Child Development Act. At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it. There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party. But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against. Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.