alt Hacker NewsSan Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k
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this 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.
In 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.
We 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?
Income 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.
Does 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.
nice to see the city supporting the lower class.
Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
a year, I assume
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Okay now do everyone
So 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.
That 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.
Maybe 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?