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They haven't solved the "not sourcing wood illegally from Romanian primordial forests" yet though. Baby steps.
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Right, because raising kids isn't contributing to society.
That's exactly why child care workers who look after packs of 15 to 20 kids at a time should be highly valued and paid a decent wage. It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, huntin…
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Many many executives do not believe happiness improves productivity and in fact many believe it reduces it. Specifically midwesterner’s who think pain is honor and grit vs a waste of energy and distraction.
Interesting comment, is there any quantitative study or data corroborating regional attitudes in the US?
They haven't solved the "not sourcing wood illegally from Romanian primordial forests" yet though. Baby steps.
They are reportedly working on it https://www.wsj.com/articles/keeping-sanctioned-russian-timb... My impression is that it's really difficult to do at scale because it isn't trivial to tell this tree from that tree, especially post harvest and paperwork is always spoofable.
They haven't solved the "not sourcing wood illegally from Romanian primordial forests" yet though. Baby steps.
They are reportedly working on it https://www.wsj.com/articles/keeping-sanctioned-russian-timb... My impression is that it's really difficult to do at scale because it isn't trivial to tell this tree from that tree, especially post harvest and paperwork is always spoofable.
At such budgets, scale, and lobbying there is no such thing as "ooops, we didn't know where this come from, some lumberjack lied to us". You have folks in suits flying in private jets and arranging agreements (and cocaine and prostitutes as well of course).
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For the people that want the childcare, it’s better than more money, because it’s tax free
I suppose that depends on location. In the UK, it would count as a benefit in kind, and is taxable in exactly same way as regular income.
workplace nurseries are tax free as is any child care for lower incomes. other benefits are tax free up to a certain amount.
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Look, I'm a DINK, don't have kids, never plan to have kids, don't even like kids. But child care is important to both the parents and society. Not subsidizing child care often means one parent has to leave the workforce, and that's almost always worse off for everyone than if they were able to afford child care and can contribute
This is such a regressive view — a household that can only function on 2 incomes is more stressful than one that can operate on 1. Not saying earning potential needs to be the same — but claiming 1 is worse than 2 doesn’t hold water and is a pathological case. In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”
In post-WWII US, it was generally easy for fathers to find stable, lifelong careers with a low risk of layoffs and a low risk of an untimely death, which allowed families to thrive on single incomes. But that was an outlier, not the norm.
In most places and in most periods of history, mothers have had to work (sewing, gardening, spinning, knitting, brewing, laundering, midwifery, etc., etc.) because fathers have not had widespread access steady, well-paying, low-risk work. Unless she was independently wealthy, a mother who did not bring in income was playing a very risky game with her children's lives.
The biggest difference is that, today, most work must be done outside the home, which is very difficult for mothers. Childcare helps close the gender pay gap and is necessary for a fairer, less sexist society — at least until/unless our economy returns to primarily home-based work.
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Some firms are very profitable and still pay many workers very low, eg: Amazon and Walmart. They have money to pay more but they just don't.
Actually they don’t have the money. Retail is notoriously a cutthroat, thin margin business. Walmart is a public company, so you can just look at their profit margins. They’re sub-3%. Amazons margins are only higher because of AWS.
https://stock.walmart.com/financials/quarterly-results/defau...
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Look, I'm a DINK, don't have kids, never plan to have kids, don't even like kids. But child care is important to both the parents and society. Not subsidizing child care often means one parent has to leave the workforce, and that's almost always worse off for everyone than if they were able to afford child care and can contribute
This is such a regressive view — a household that can only function on 2 incomes is more stressful than one that can operate on 1. Not saying earning potential needs to be the same — but claiming 1 is worse than 2 doesn’t hold water and is a pathological case. In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”