Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 151 posts

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#51

Post by zingar »

walthamstow wrote: post #40

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…

I suspect that the policy is popular with the 90% of voters in the UK who earn less than £80k and that politicians are not very concerned with the ambitions of the rest of us (frustrating as that is when paying London rent).

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#52

Post by thomassmith65 »

walthamstow wrote: post #40

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…

In this case, it strikes me as a bad idea because there are advantages to having people - both parents and children - mix across income-levels. It fosters empathy, increases cultural knowledge, broadens social networks.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#53

Post by Escapado »

zingar wrote: post #51
walthamstow wrote: post #40

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…

I suspect that the policy is popular with the 90% of voters in the UK who earn less than £80k and that politicians are not very concerned with the ambitions of the rest of us (frustrating as that is when paying London rent).

To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#54

Post by ribosometronome »

zingar wrote: post #37

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 Londo…

This is a whole family threshold rather than individual parent threshold, making the combined total lower.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#55

Post by throwfaraway135 »

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.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#56

Post by socalgal2 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #49
Jensson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There'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.

"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#57

Post by shoobiedoo »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #55

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.

Wouldn't that be nice. mine are too busy watching pawn stars reruns for the hundredth time

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#58

Post by avcloudy »

Escapado wrote: post #50
walthamstow wrote: post #40

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…

I 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.

It'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.

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#59

Post by RugnirViking »

Escapado wrote: post #50
walthamstow wrote: post #40

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…

I 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.

the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah

Re: San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

#60

Post by exitb »

throwaway9e9t wrote: post #35
transcriptase wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975? Sound the alarms.

We 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.

Letting 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.
Post reply on HN