
Americans want paid family leave and affordable child care, why can't we get it? - betolink
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/education/2019/12/02/why-america-doesnt-have-affordable-daycare-maternity-leave-paid-family/2136595001/
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jdkee
"Before having her own kids, Whitney Phinney acknowledges she thought of paid
leave and subsidized child care as "handouts.""

This right here. The American myth that anyone can make it if they just work
hard enough goes hand-in-hand with the "pull yourself up your own bootstraps"
mentality. And poor people don't deserve welfare because they are "lazy". And
other tropes pushed out by conservative think tanks since the 1970s that have
Americans acting, and more importantly voting, against their own economic
self-interest.

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susanb78
What about "Equal pay for equal work"? Why should a company pay their single,
infertile, gay, older, or otherwise childless employees less for doing the
same job?

We've just gone full-circle from the 1950s notion that a married man should
get a higher salary because he had a family to take care than a single man or
a woman, only instead of it being a top-line higher salary now it's the same
salary but with thousands of dollars in paid-leave, healthcare funding,
childcare subsidies, etc.

And don't pretend it's for "the good of society" or something - we don't give
paid leave to do charity work with the poor or environmental cleanup or
anything that would actually meaningfully improve the world.

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javagram
> we don't give paid leave to do charity work with the poor

For what it’s worth, I’ve actually seen this done under the name VTO. Although
the duration is much less than a family leave.

Also, many of the people advocating for stuff like “equal pay for equal work”
would move healthcare and childcare subsidies to the government level. You
could then imagine you would be getting paid the same and these extra benefits
for the good of society are being paid out of taxes.

Of course, whether or not your company or the government pays for it, it comes
from someone’s pocket eventually. But if people don’t have children, then
there will be no one to take care of retirees in their old age, so there
really is a compelling interest in the government fostering that...

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Fjolsvith
> then there will be no one to take care of retirees in their old age, so
> there really is a compelling interest in the government fostering that...

Some governments just open their borders with the hopes of being able to tax
the heck out of the new arrivals to make up for the lower birth rates.

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downerending
The awful truth is that competent child care is very expensive. Nothing is
going to change that.

We could decide as a society to subsidize it in various ways, and/or many of
us could tighten our belts some and cough up for the expensive child care we
need ourselves.

But ultimately, it's expensive and probably going to get more so. It's not
unlike healthcare costs in general.

(source: Have lived with a childcare provider.)

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pasttense01
I am opposed to this: subsidizing child care but not subsidizing parents
staying home to raise there kids. A better alternative is a children's
allowance.

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throwaway7877
According to Census demographic trends, in the next couple decades, half of
America’s population will live in just eight states. The half that is whiter,
older, more rural, and more conservative, will be spread across the other 42
states. That’s 84 senators for them, and 16 senators for the other half of
America- This is why.

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toomuchtodo
Those eight states can enact state legislation to provide those benefits, no?
That's how Canada arrived at universal healthcare: provinces started these
programs as experiments.

Not saying the current system of representation doesn't have issues, but there
are ways to hack around it to deliver progressive policies in the population
centers most will be living in.

~~~
HeroOfAges
This is a fantastic point. Less representation on a national level perhaps,
but maybe the federal government will have to become much smaller in the
future. I personally don't think that's a bad thing.

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lacker
When you look at the Phinney family’s finances the right course of action
seems less clear. The dad is unemployed, and they also spend $500 a month on
child care, which is a chunk of their budget. They could get child care for
all their children for another $2000 a month, but the dad hasn’t been able to
get a job that would cover that. Only warehouse jobs which pay very little.

So, the government could pay $2500 a month for this family to have free child
care. But, the unemployed father could also just take care of all the
children. Why is it better for the government to pay for child care, and then
this father either stays unemployed or takes a job that pays less than the
cost of child care?

It would be nice if there were not such a social stigma against stay-at-home
fathers.

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eukaryote
This is also a problem in the UK. When my children were young, it made little
economic sense for my wife to continue working - practically all of her salary
would have gone on childcare.

If childcare was made tax-deductible, my wife could have returned to work
earlier. This would have meant our household could have contributed a far
larger wedge in taxes to support society.

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qxnqd
They don't, because if they did, they would vote for candidates which want to
do that, but they don't.

~~~
Clubber
Do you feel most candidate pools seem pre-selected? It seems that way to me
and I think Bernie and Trump are recent anomalies. A lot of push back from
their respective parties during their primaries because they weren't part of
the preferred candidates. You can't win an election without being a member of
1 of two parties today.

~~~
MandieD
Our non-parliamentary, first-past-the-post system causes that. We’ve always
been a two-party system. The parties that are those two parties have swapped
(no more Federalists or Whigs) and realigned (Andrew Jackson would be _a bit_
surprised by the current Democratic House Caucus, and Abraham Lincoln would
probably be a bit surprised, as well), but outside of the independents who
sometimes win seats in New England (but are pretty aligned with the
Democrats), it’s effectively a two-party system.

Conclusion I’ve come to while comparing systems with my German colleagues: in
Germany, the coalition negotiations happen after the election; in the US, they
happen before the general election, via the primaries.

I’m curious to see if Louisiana and California “jungle primaries” might begin
to break this up a bit after a few more cycles.

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throwawaysea
Why should childcare be subsidized? It should be an expensive privilege to
bear children, and we should disincentivize it. Our species’ goal isn’t to
keep increasing the population indefinitely, but people pretend like there’s a
god given right to have as many children as one desires.

Rather, our goal should be to reduce population. Higher population = more
consumption = more environmental strain. Plus most humans aren’t very
productive economically, and that suggests we are overweight on population.

So who gets to have children? Those who’ve created more societal value and
proven themselves to be more capable - the best proxy we have for this, as
imperfect as it might be, is economic value. Fundamentally, currency records
the amount of utility others in society have ascribed to a particular
individual. And so it seems fitting for rearing a child to be expensive in
terms of time and money.

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souprock
Probably most of us here on Hacker News already have it. I certainly do.

No, not every job provides this. Also, not every job provides health coverage
and unlimited snacks.

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radarthreat
Because Fox News has convinced a non-trivial percentage of us that it would be
socialist and therefore somehow an affront to God.

