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?
> 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.
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?
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.
I am pessimistic that the reason it is so high is because someone making $220k per year said "yea but what about me, I have to pay for childcare too..." The number should be significantly lower. Anyone making a combined $200k a year has other options and opportunities, the immigrant family making $60k combined does not. This feels like a policy designed to "help" the poor but also benefit the rich..
A combined threshold of £200k (or whatever this converts to) would be great for me in London since my partner earns roughly the median salary (which is a lot lower).
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.
If your parents had you at 25 and you have kids at 25 then your parents are 50 when you have a kid. Nowhere close to retirement age. People who are still working can't watch the kids five days a week.
there is also the sentiment of people in their 50s that they are done with taking care of kids. they want to enjoy their freedom now. it's just an anecdote, but for example my dad tried to marry again, but was unable to find a partner willing to marry someone with kids. i don't know if that translates to taking care of grand kids, but i think it is related.
in developing countries there are no pensions for many people and the young parents provide the support the grandparents need, taking care of the grandkids is one way to ensure that this support keeps coming.
Is it common for women to work in those countries?
What I'm seeing here in Europe is that mothers are working, so when they have grandchildren they are either still working or retired.
If they're working, they don't have time to do childcare.
If they're retired, they are either worn out and don't have the energy/physical ability to do childcare, or they just want to enjoy the few years of freedom they have.
So grandparents can do some childcare, during weekends or holidays mostly, but they are not the one who would take care of the children during the parent's 9-to-5.
On the other hand, I know some families where the mother staid at home to raise her children and she naturally assumed the same role for her grandchildren. But the chain is broken because their mother is working and will not stop working to do childcare for her grandchildren.
My brother's two boys both had kids. One of them, his wife, was going to go back to work after giving birth but had horrible feelings and cried when she took the baby to daycare after maternity leave. She quit and now stays home taking care of her baby.
The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortunate that grandma retired from her job about the same time and now takes care of baby during the day.
Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
Sure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.
Two factors.
1. In an institution there are more kids/adult.
2. Child care is valued below average by society.
Combine these and it makes a lot of sense to trade a few below average valued workers for the release of many above average valued workers into the economy.
Capitalist dystopia summed up. "Mommy cannot see you say your first words because having mommy shove papers around is slightly more beneficial economically".
There's a health and capacity angle. A lot of today's grandparents are still working, dealing with their own medical issues, or simply don't have the energy to provide full-time childcare
i’m about to have my first child soon. My mother died in June. She loved little kids so it’s pretty tragic that she won’t get to experience being a grandmother. My dad is still around but he will likely be useless as a support system.
The man can barely cook anything and tends to make a mess. i also expect he’ll have a tough time changing diapers or holding a delicate baby, one of his hands has lots of numbness from a past stroke.
Thank god i have the BEST in-laws, who are also in great health. I can’t imagine what someone would do in my situation with bad in-laws.
very true! Mine are still working and after all are unable and unwilling to dedicate the whole time. They have plans or want to relax. Children are tiring. The west seems to be not only aging but also getting a bit lazy sometimes
My observations include a wholesale generational problem, where the group that would be responsible for this (boomers) tend to be highly narcissistic and focused on their own pleasures, instead of being a part of their grandchildren’s lives. They simply don’t want to be involved. There are exceptions to this rule but I’d say it’s very common in the US and more so than the rest of the world.
1. People have kids later, and older grandparents are less likely to be able to care for them
2. Kids moved away and left their parents in the suburbs, so they're not exactly around anyway. Also, a lot of Boomers sold their homes during Covid to cash in and moved elsewhere and/or downsized. So they might not be living in a place where you can just drop the kids off for a weekend.
3. Generally, only one of the grandparents in the Boomer generation is realistically capable of providing childcare, and that's the mom. If she's not alive anymore, you're not getting anything from your dad.
San Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income.
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
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.
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.
> 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
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
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.
One thing I've become obsessed with is people trying to solve problems in the wrong domain.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of OT, but I heard an interesting thing on a radio program talking about childcare: the US almost got free universal child care in the early 1970s via the Comprehensive Child Development Act.
At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.
There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.
But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.
Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.
Readit News
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?
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.
Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.
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?
No, you’re missing the insane scale of Silicon Valley tech salaries. See levels.fyi and filter by 5 years of experience in San Francisco.
If the city made the threshold 100k or 110k, I bet there would be zero children in the city born to parents making less than that.
Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
Nobody lives with their parents ‘in the west’, so the best bet is arranging two houses or apartments nearby.
That takes an extraordinary amount of resources for child-bearing age parents.
in developing countries there are no pensions for many people and the young parents provide the support the grandparents need, taking care of the grandkids is one way to ensure that this support keeps coming.
What I'm seeing here in Europe is that mothers are working, so when they have grandchildren they are either still working or retired. If they're working, they don't have time to do childcare. If they're retired, they are either worn out and don't have the energy/physical ability to do childcare, or they just want to enjoy the few years of freedom they have.
So grandparents can do some childcare, during weekends or holidays mostly, but they are not the one who would take care of the children during the parent's 9-to-5.
On the other hand, I know some families where the mother staid at home to raise her children and she naturally assumed the same role for her grandchildren. But the chain is broken because their mother is working and will not stop working to do childcare for her grandchildren.
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The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortunate that grandma retired from her job about the same time and now takes care of baby during the day.
Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
Deleted Comment
Combine these and it makes a lot of sense to trade a few below average valued workers for the release of many above average valued workers into the economy.
Capitalist dystopia summed up. "Mommy cannot see you say your first words because having mommy shove papers around is slightly more beneficial economically".
The man can barely cook anything and tends to make a mess. i also expect he’ll have a tough time changing diapers or holding a delicate baby, one of his hands has lots of numbness from a past stroke.
Thank god i have the BEST in-laws, who are also in great health. I can’t imagine what someone would do in my situation with bad in-laws.
or the aunts, or siblings (mostly sisters), or neighbors (mostly women)
You get the idea
1. People have kids later, and older grandparents are less likely to be able to care for them
2. Kids moved away and left their parents in the suburbs, so they're not exactly around anyway. Also, a lot of Boomers sold their homes during Covid to cash in and moved elsewhere and/or downsized. So they might not be living in a place where you can just drop the kids off for a weekend.
3. Generally, only one of the grandparents in the Boomer generation is realistically capable of providing childcare, and that's the mom. If she's not alive anymore, you're not getting anything from your dad.
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
Uh, it is for them. Why should it be only for them?
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.
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
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.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
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.
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.
And then I'll probably be able to retire 10 years earlier too.
I haven't heard of the charity workaround, sounds really useful, how much does buying the membership reduce your income by?
This is because people do not understand continuous functions.
At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.
There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.
But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.
Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.