But the orange leader said that tariffs will pay for child care
Where is all this daycare money going? My daycare was like 8 ladies that just sat around in a playroom doing arts and crafts with us all day and took us to the pool and library in summer. They could have covered that on 2/3 kids each at 40k a year/kid. They didn’t seem to be particularly well off…
Daycare workers can cost about $30/hour, if you include taxes, insurance, benefits like paid time off, etc.
A typical daycare needs about 50 hours per week of coverage, and something like 8am to 6pm is about right.
Each worker can reasonably be expected to look after 4 kids.
So with perfect staffing (no overtime pay, enrollment at a perfect whole number multiple of 4), labor costs alone would be something like $375 per kid per week. Throw in rent, insurance, food, operational costs, administrative costs including certification and licensing, furniture/equipment, utilities, etc., and it’s not unreasonable for that cost to balloon to $750/week, or $39k per year.
This might give some clues: https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Two-Pager-Understanding-Private-Equity-in-Child-Care.pdf
It’s amazing how they get away with paying so little. My field is adjacent, and I’ve been open to working with elementary age, but the positions I see as “master teacher” at daycares are usually around $9-10 an hour - what I was making working at a fast food restaurant in 2015.
40k/year sounds premium. But what little do I know, I am German and pay about 3k/year for a very nice Kindergarten.
This could be “premium” childcare like a Waldorf school or it could be the cost of putting 2 kids into regular daycare in an expensive city like San Francisco. It would certainly be cheaper in less expensive places, but incomes would also be lower.
Here are some estimates by state: https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-in-usa
My friend went to a Waldorf school and she told me they didn’t teach her to read.
Here’s typical day care rates for Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is one of the lowest cost of living states in the nation, because it’s a hell hole with no social services and has been already doing Project 2025 for the past five years. This means salaries are similarly depressed - as a teacher, my first year take home pay per month was $2200. If I had a child then I would have nothing between day care and rent. (And I also would have needed the daycare, first year teaching is 60-100 hours a week.)
The people working at the facility are likely barely qualified and probably not making enough to support their families - likely on welfare.
Like I’d take it if I’m planning on having a baby anyways. But yeah, it’s an absolutely pathetic amount. And childcare is only going to get more expensive with this fucking administration
Yeah childcare is gonna be more expensive, but they’ll loosen the regulations so that anybody can be a childcare provider, without any background checks or anything, so more people can charge more money. And no vaccine requirement, so more kids can go. It’s win/win/win. /s
Anybody but trans people you mean
It might be enough to cover the delivery hospital fees!
Oh you sweet summer child
Are you telling me that hospitals actually charge you for delivering a child?
Yep, quite a lot too. Once baby is out they start getting separate billing too. No, you aren’t reading that wrong. Since we don’t have single payer healthcare the doctors, nurses, drugs, etc are all to be paid for by the patient. Therefore health insurance but insurance wants to make money which means they don’t want to pay so unless you give them more money they have a pretty high limit before they cover things.
This is after improvements by Obama but he compromised too much so not nearly enough has gotten better.
lol, look at this person who doesn’t even US.
Seriously, though, yes. Tens of thousands of dollars. You also have to pay just to get a ride to the hospital (ambulance). You pay for everything.
There are some hospitals that charge for you holding your baby
19000 dollars on average without insurance. Healthcare is a racket. A scam. Don’t trust any of those rat fucks. Get everything in documentation. Kaisers tried to charge me hundreds of dollars at random and when I called them out on it they basically just said “oh our bad”.
Damn fucking right your bad Kaiser. Stupid fucks.
It’s really not, and might not even cover your deductible.
It’s not even gonna cover your ambulance ride to the hospital because your water broke while you were at work.
My experience is that an ambulance ride is in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands. Still terrible but not as terrible
Average ambulance trip in the US is between $950-1300.
Sounds like you got a deal.
Lmao anyone who thinks this is a lot of money has clearly never raised a child in the recent past. (Let’s say 10-15 years? idk)
$5k is gone, like that
lol at one point I was paying more for daycare than my mortgage.
5k, these people are 🤡
In Germany the parents (and later, the children themselves) receive a little over 250€ per month until the child is 25 or finished an apprenticeship or uni.
Germany has a very low birth rate.
Edit: copy of a text where I laid out the benefits we get in a similar discussion:
In Germany we have protection of pregnant people from when their doctor deems them unfit for work until delivery – continued payment of full wages. Two months after delivery with 70% wages and 12 months to split between both parents, which can be taken together and stretched by taking half the money for twice as long. Until your child is six you may (with some exceptions) take unpaid leave for parenting. Your employer has to keep your position for you. Childcare from 1 till school is affordable (ca. 250€/M). Healthcare is paid as a percentage from your income (ca. 15%) and has very little extra cost. You get 250€ per child per month just for having a child. Tax credits. If you are still struggling: Assistance for rent, school materials, clothing and more.
We have (compared to the US) pretty solid workers protection laws. We have a (not great but you won’t starve) state pension. We have unemployment benefits, that don’t run out (conditions apply). We don’t have the weird Japanese shut-in young men on a scale that’s worth a mention.
We also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Yes, the oppressiveness of a capitalist society is a factor – Germany is far from free of that, and getting worse. But compared to the US we should be popping out babies like crazy. But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education, that afaik are the most decisive influences of a low birth rate.
Sociatal factors suppressing birth rate in Germany may be high rents, inability to find places big enough for a child considering today’s standards, and bad outlook. Also work life balance is skewed for some.
I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.
Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.
Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.
Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.
I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.
I don’t think you need to own your own place to call it a home. Having grown up in East Germany, most kids I went to school with didn’t grow up in a house their parents owned. It’s different in the countryside, but in the city I grew up in easily >90% rented.
It would be nicer though, for sure. For me it’s also not on my financial horizon to ever own a house or flat.
I’m with you on everything else. The question remains: leave for where? Everywhere is going to shit.
I apologize, I think we’re getting tripped up on terminology.
Where ever you live, you are correct in believing you should strive to make that a home. Make a community, make a place of comfort and security and artistic energy etc. But that’s not what I mean.
Owning your place allows you the freedom to make your home better in a way that renting it doesn’t. How many people with they could add AC to their flat but can’t because the landlord doesn’t want them to? How many people wish they could add solar panels to their roof but can’t because the landlord doesn’t pay the electricity bill and therefore doesn’t care if it’s inefficient? How many people want to renovate a bathroom, tear down a wall, install permanent fixtures or shelves, etc etc but can’t because they don’t have permission or the rights to the place they live in?
The relationship between landlord and renter is one whose major purpose is to drain money from the poor to the wealthy. I don’t really wanna turn this into a rant against landlords, but they should be outlawed or taxed out of existence. Landlords are deincentivized to improve their properties, they are deincentivized to help you make your house a home, they are deincentivized to charge you the cost of that housing. The system should be abolished.
Going back to your ancedote, relativity is not a good measurement of objective truth. The fact that most people didn’t own their homes where you grew up doesn’t change the fact that that meant they were losing money every year, that they weren’t building wealth every year. Things should be improved based on and towards objective truths/metrics - not comparatively to bad examples. The US has worse public transit - does that means we shouldn’t strive for better train networks and services? It’s illegal to be a homosexual in Singapore - does that mean we should allowed gay rights to worsen simply because they’ll still have it better than other countries?
I make this point because this argument of relativity often hinders progress. Humans are creatures of relativity and if we allow our systems to be judged relative to others we will make progress slower than is possible (and arguably necessary).
You should be able to own a home. You should be able to own a home within the first 5 years of working at least and it shouldn’t cost you a loan that’ll last a lifetime. Housing shouldn’t be an ever growing cost. We can make this the reality if we vote correctly and hold our politicians accountable (and our neighbors).
If the CDU/SPD/AFD remain in power there will be plenty of countries that are at a similar quality of life and that are improving or worsening at a slower rate. Some country will eventually crack the code of taxing the wealthy and banning landlords and focusing on the working class (the 99%). It’s only a matter of time. The goal is just to avoid needing a WW to get us there.
But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education
Hey, so, funny story about what MAGA is working hard to eliminate…
Japan has an aging population and tried a lot, with not much success…
Prosperity = less kids, so we shouldn’t be surprised what Trump is going to try…
How many friends are we talking about?
Oh there will be a boom of… abandoned babies for the fostercare system.
See: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania
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Sadly, I could see this convincing people desperate enough for cash…
That’s absolutely what this is for. Uneducated people have more kids; trump lives the uneducated. Those kids grow up to lick their oppressors boot, or end up in the prison system. Either way it’s a win for conservatives.
I saw ads before Christmas incentivizing people to refinance car loans and get cash in hand :<
Those poor fucking kids.
40k a year? So at least 3200 a month for daycare? Who on gods dying earth can pay for that? That’s more than 3 times my rent and my landlord is bleeding me like a stuck pig, what the fuck
When you have 3+ kids that are young.
Bay area and I’m sure NYC
People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.
I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.
It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).
Oh, it’s easy to fix, just very painful. Nobody wants to fix this because it means dismantling capitalism and bringing those responsible to justice. This is why there is so much support for fascism. They run from the boogeyman they know into the arms of the ones that promise a return to normalcy.
I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.
You are right, and my French is showing.
The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any “simple fix” to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.
Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That’s bad, elephant gets bigger…
I mean yes? I feel like there’s an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and that’s just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. There’s absurdly wealthy people here and there’s, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean they’re living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment
By avoiding COL?
it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? You’re talking about “ugly things” too. You’re stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I don’t see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesn’t seem ugly to me?
We go through these versions of life and think they are normal
I genuinely don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesn’t make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like you’re doing the opposite of comforting the commenter’s feelings, it seems you’re trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!
I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over issues sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.
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It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
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Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.
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That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.
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Do we get to choose how it’s distributed? Here are some fun options I came up with.
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$13.69 per day for a year. (Nice). About $419/month. Maybe they could round up to $420 because they stale internet meme culture is hip
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$0.76 per day for 18 years. A guaranteed $22.80 per month for an entire childhood
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$5000 lump sum. I can’t find any widely accepted figures for average out of pocket cost of prenatal care, child birth, and infant health visits. I’ll wild ass guess it a at covering 20-75% of those visits for people who have insurance. For people without insurance, looks like an uncomplicated vaginal birth averages $14k. But again huge variations in price
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Maybe they should improve the quality of life for working families to get them to be confident enough to have more babies naturally?
…nah, it’s obviously the queers fault!
After we had our first child we went to some institutions to fill required papers. In the waiting area, there were informational posters everywhere to inform (poor young) people to not get pregnant too early. One read:
A child costs you 160.000€ until it's 18th birthdayit’s? Maybe its? Or their?
Probably neither, seeing as it was most likely not written in English but OP translated it for your benefit.
Shithole state Americans: “One hundred sixty dollars? I’ll take four!”
