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

theguardian.com

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

#81

Post by hayd »

kalleboo wrote: post #78
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.

My guess would be that in developed countries, people are having kids older and older, so the grandparents are accordingly also older and more tired. That combined with multi-generational households being all but gone so now you're picking up and leaving off and all the kind of cooking and general housekeeping is also doubled.

and most don't live in the neighbourhood, city or even state (in tech anyways).

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

#82

Post by hayd »

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…

The £100k threshold is such an economically illiterate policy for society. The GPs and lawyers I know are working ~3 days a week to avoid it, so much economic output and taxes missed out on.

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

#83

Post by dv_dt »

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…

One option would be implement as a income graded fee. Zero up to 230, and increasing fee above. Allowing all walks of life to access the same gov't services should be a more widely deployed pattern.

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

#84

Post by pfannkuchen »

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.

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

#85

Post by mdemare »

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…

That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.

If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.

You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.

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

#86

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #84

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.…

There is probably a soup kitchen in your town. Nothing obligates you to use it. That doesn’t make it repressive on your diet.

It’s fair to reject state-provided childcare. It’s mean to deny that to everyone else.

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

#87

Post by physicsguy »

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.

I've been to San Francisco twice with work.

The last time was in 2018. I caught a Muni bus, the drive drove past someone at a stop who was in a wheelchair and was signalling to be picked up, another passenger challenged the driver, and the driver shouted something like "I don't want no cripple pee pee-ing on my bus"

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

#88

Post by fyrn_ »

exitb wrote: post #17
bsimpson wrote: post #6

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 contin…

You framed this issue in a certain way, but your position could be described as „lower earning families need to pay for childcare, so higher earning families keep producing two incomes”. Not so attractive anymore.

I think they framing have the mother not working as a positive, as it tends to lead to better outcomes?

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

#89

Post by physicsguy »

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…

Right in the middle of this now. I have another two years of stuffing pension and making a few choice charity donations (like buying a National Trust Lifetime Membership - a gift aidable donation) and then out of that phase.

And then I'll probably be able to retire 10 years earlier too.

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

#90

Post by physicsguy »

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).

I don't really think people understand it, it's quite hard to explain and on paper it just sounds like the person is wrong.

The maths for one child for me works out at ~£10k childcare bill without the free childcare vs ~£4000 with free childcare + tax free childcare (for three days a week). Even that doesn't sound too bad but it's the combination of that, the loss of personal allowance and the fact I still have a student loan that means the actual number of how much I have to earn to break even on losing it is something like £30k more than the actual cut off.

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