And yet the staff are paid as close to minimum wage as possible.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Seriously, where is the money going?
Administrative costs but I imagine insurance and health care costs for those employees. Lack of affordable/open medical care costs are passed on to the customers.
You are assuming they get healthcare. Dangerous assumption these days, as the ACA has been carved down.
there's a great planet money podcast that covers this
It turns out childcare is just a very labor intensive sector due to the amount of adults needed to watch the kids. This means that most of the costs for daycare are already labor:
In fast food, labor is 25% of the total costs. Estimates for day care - it's, like, more than 70% of total costs.
Given that labor is already a disproportionate amount of the costs, raising salaries a little has a large effect on the increased cost that parents would have to pay.
For some real world numbers, daycare is around 1.3k/month for me. The school does 3 kids to 1 teacher, so that's a max of 3.9k/month of income per 1 teachers salary. So already, in an ideal world where 100% of what parents pay go directly to the teacher, the max they'd make is 48k/year.
Factor in things like renting the facilities, utility costs, administrative and security staff, taxes, etc. and you quickly start to see why even though it seems like parents are paying a lot, there's just not that much money to go around.
Yes!!! So many industrialized western nations subsidize child care. I really don't understand why the US has to be behind the curve with fucking everything, especially with this since we need more kids so badly.
All of the money is going to the CEOs and Investors. Every single time. Every single Industry. Stagnant wages is what everyone else experiences because every year the ruling class gets a billion (+) dollar bonus.
Probably also rent for the space in most places, whether they are a home-based business with high mortgage costs, renting space from a corporate landlord, or otherwise exposed to market-rate real estate/rents. If the cost of real estate is high, it impacts the entire economy.
Almost like you can lower abortion rates by making childcare affordable. A lot of abortions happen because the mother cannot afford to have children, unfortunately
Yes there is.
Don't have kids.
If only they hadn't criminalised abortion, and consistently cut funding to sex education and instead funded shit like "Crisis pregnancy centers".
Get your head out of your ass.
And before anyone even tries - I have no kids and want no kids, but to answer this bullshit with "don't have kids" is unhelpful at the very least, and actively licking boot at worst. These problems are not the fault of the people having kids.
A pothole is not my fault but I won’t intentionally hit it
You get YOUR head out of your ass.
Having children when you can't provide for them makes you the problem.
Simple as that.
If you can't care for kids, don't drag them into a miserable impoverished existence then whine at everyone else to bankroll you.
Some people need sexual activity, and not all children are intended. Few of the children we have are actually adoptable, though there are safe surrender sites, and it would be interesting to see if they're being used more.
But sexual frustration figures largely in the motivation of the alt-right, also for rampage killers, spree killers, and Ted Kaczynski.
So sure, we can swear off sex, and some do. But it results in hundreds of thousands of War Boys eager to serve Immortan Joe and get witnessed all shiny and chrome into Valhalla.
There's also the problem of how the German Reich dealt with a population implosion. Himmler started his master-race program, arresting and detaining German women for a breeding program. It was highlighted recently in an article about the historical that inspired Margaret Atwood for the atrocities of Gilead in A Handmaid's Tale We're already seeing interest in rolling back women's rights and women's personhood here in the US.
So don't blame the victims.
You get YOUR head out of your ass.
When was the last time you accurately predicted the next 20 years?
This person gets it. ☺
I don't know how it works in the US but isn't it normal that child care cost are higher than rent or mortgage? Unless you count as child care older kids (like above 3), you can't expect a single worker to take care of more than 3 babies, and rent should be around 1/3 of income. So typical cost of daycare for 1 kif should be about typical cost of housing for 1 worker, no? For reference here in France, my mortgage is about 1300€/month and daycare (full time, private) for one child is 1400€/month, (of which about 700€ is paid by the state).
700 paid by the state
There's your problem in thinking. The government in the US gives you NOTHING to help raise a family. Some in a tax refund but if you're broke today you can't plan for money to feed you tomorrow.
Capitalism rules every aspect of your life if you make under 250,000 dollars.
It doesn't really seem too sustainable to have to be so expensive if you actually want people to have kids, especially when the US is so famously allergic to the very notion of social safety nets. Median household income in my county is just under $50,000/year, so lets call it $50,000 to make things easy. Median rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,588/month, so housing alone leaves you with $30,944. Average cost of child care for my city is $16,250/year for kids 2 or younger, so now we're down to $14,694 to cover all other expenses for the rest of the year for our average household, ignoring the fact that we ignored taxes on that $50,000 income to begin with. That's $282.58/week to feed a potential family of 3, clothe them, pay utilities, etc. which isn't a whole lot.
Indeed, this is why child care is or should be heavily subsidized.
Yeah, unfortunately, it just isn't a possibility for most people in the US, and even in the areas where programs do exist, they tend to be severely underfunded and means-tested like crazy, so only the poorest of the poor will qualify. I'm not interested in having kids, but for those who do want them, it's just insane the expenses they will have to go through to be able to just keep their jobs and have their kids being watched by someone.
California has required child:staff ratios for childcare. Under 1 year is 3:1, age 1-2 is 4:1, age 3 is 7:1, and ages 4-5 is 8:1.
Our childcare center is non-profit. It’s about $1800/month for infants and $1300/month for 3-4 year olds. They cover all the food and diapers, and they do the laundry (sheets). The teachers are paid poorly. The government pays nothing. Anyway I agree with you, for infants it makes sense for the cost to be about the same as renting a small place.
700 paid by state is nice. My kid goes to a non profit day care in the US. Normally they charge $50 / day. I have family that work there and the one benefit they get is costs $10 / day instead. Other people I know pay $100/day at their daycare in bigger cities.
This is fucked up.
Affordable childcare, and living wages for those providing it, would mark a sea change in our system.
But letting parents believe it actually costs anywhere near that much to provide childcare - even considering overhead - is a crime.
I think it would be great if childcare was subsidized (more). However, I don't think this article is accurate. My child goes to daycare 5 days a week for 8 hrs a day and it costs almost exactly half of my mortgage payment which includes the home loan, property taxes, and homeowner's insurance. And we get back a few thousand dollars in tax benefits each year ($1200 just from the FSA reducing my taxable income).