| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago |
| I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of). (The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare) https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-... https://childcaredeserts.org/ https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064... |
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| ▲ | evantbyrne 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| As someone who grew up homesteading and seeing the benefits of it, I find it wild that people want to not only send their kids away to school full-time but also institutionalize them afterwards just so they can spend seemingly excessive amounts of time at work. The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income in the US [1] [2]. Half of American renters are cost burdened [3]. I find it wild someone thinks "Why don't you just stay home with your kids?" looking at the macro. Can't all just live on a farm and homestead to raise kids in an unfavorable, punishing macro. Parents work because they have to work. To work, they need childcare and flexible work arrangements. > "The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently." Indeed. Is the solution to sacrifice for it? Or tax it to care for the human? [4] We can make better choices, as New Mexico shows. I'm tired of hearing its impossible. It isn't, it's just a lack of will and collective effort in that direction, based on all available evidence. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o... [2] https://lisep.org/mql [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY (I am once again asking to think in systems) | | |
| ▲ | evantbyrne 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nobody said homesteading is the solution. Allowing a parent of young children to care for them is not a radical idea though. It should not be hard to imagine a society that is more flexible to childcare being performed by parents, because that was the norm for all of human history prior to industrialization. People should seriously consider the ways in which their imaginations on this subject (and others!) are constrained by their post industrial upbringing, and importantly, why the current norms exist and who they benefit. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Indeed, this only occurs with unions and rising wages, where a single income from a secure job can support a family while a parent stays home to perform childrearing. Are we there? When will we get there? These are important questions to ask if this is a dependency to improving household financials to encourage the outcome in this context (a stay at home parent). If jobs are tenuous or insecure, long term financial obligations will not be made (the cost to raise a child in 2023 dollars is $330k, not including childcare or college). If jobs do not pay enough, people will need to put their kids in childcare (which will have to be subsidized) or they will forgo having children [1] [2]. [1] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons... | | |
| ▲ | evantbyrne 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Regulation, my man. Doesn't require fitting into the existing framework that was invented to as a stopgap for dangerous factory working conditions. The barrier is people's preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Can you expound on this? What regulation? What "preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like"? Unions and higher wages enable people to afford families, and I am an aggressive proponent of a 4 day work week at 100% pay considering productivity gains over the last half century, but I'd be interested in your thoughts. | | |
| ▲ | evantbyrne 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There are infinite ways to do this and we could riff all day on it. The simplest as I see it would simply be giving individuals with young children the autonomy to dictate their work schedules, allowing them the option to make up the hours later, or even choose not to. In a way this already happens informally in nicer companies. |
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| ▲ | defen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Portland OR is trying to do something similar ("Preschool for all") and is running into the exact problems OP identified, to the point that the Democratic governor is sending warning messages to the county: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count... They aren't just theoretical concerns. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I will find time to build an inventory of every example of where subsidized childcare works and reply with said inventory. | | |
| ▲ | hedora 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but can you find any that work well when the branch of the government that’s running it refuses to process paperwork from daycare providers or issue checks to pay those providers, and where its leader has prioritized getting the system shut down on the grounds that it’s “broken”? (Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.) | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Governance is hard. People are hard. I can show you examples across the world where policy works, and where it doesn't. Success is not assured, but if we're not willing to try, why even get up in the morning? If it sucks in Oregon, my apologies; states are where experiments can take place, and there are 49 other states we can give it a go in. | | |
| ▲ | hedora 2 days ago | parent [-] | | No, clearly, if it doesn’t work when 100% of the people administering it are intentionally sabotaging it from within, it must be a bad idea. /s (I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.) |
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| ▲ | qgin 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something. |
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| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There are bad public services and fairly good public services. There are also some great private services and some bad ones. There's no public roads where I live. They're all private easements, but you can pass through them no problem for miles and miles and get most the way to town without ever touching a taxpayer dime. I first built my bit of the road with a shovel , a 4x4 truck, and a hatchet which blows away what it would have cost my neighbors in taxes. If I tried to explain this to someone with no real concept of anything but a public road system their brain would probably explode trying to understand how this works out better than even many public road systems. There are a lot of people with exploding brains who can never get to the point of realizing our private road system is working as well as public road systems, and other exploding brains not realizing the public roads are working as well as their private roads. The main pain point I have tends to be that when the option for peaceful voluntary trade is available, I strongly prefer it over the violence of forcing others via taxation. Therefore I much prefer the situation of my community -- i.e. basically no police/fire, no public roads, and no public utilities. It works great but the pride point is the very low level of violence / involuntary funding necessary to make it happen. | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Americans have been brain washed, these are deeply rooted belief systems like religions, that have an immune response when challenged. Steep climb ahead. |
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| ▲ | Isamu 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’m also fond of civilization. I like your point that enabling parents to work helps drive the economy to everyone’s benefit. |
