I addressed your second point in another comment. If voters thought there was a societal advantage to financially encourage stay-at-home parenthood with a subsidy, I'd be open to listen to the pros and cons of that, too, but that's kind of a separate issue. This one is about easing the burden for those who already pay for professional childcare, including those on the margin.

The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

It's not a crab bucket mentality. Subsidizing one group that competes in the same markets (e.g. only dual income families, who compete with single income families for housing in desirable areas to raise kids) actually increases costs for the unsubsidized group. It doesn't just make them relatively worse off, but absolutely worse off. It shifts the margin of who can afford a single family lifestyle, all else equal.

Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.

My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.

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chlodwig 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yea, more dual-income families means:

- Bidding up the price of housing

- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.

- Less general slack for parents to help each other out

- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms

- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career

- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.

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gopher_space 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The number of people in this thread workshopping their libertarian edge cases on an item of immediate importance strongly suggests the crab bucket. The comments don't reflect an understanding of the situation people are in or a grasp of the dynamics that led to it.

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ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

How is advocating for a larger unconditional child credit libertarian? As someone else in the thread pointed out, it's effectively UBI for children. It's literally advocating for more people to receive government subsidies. It's not even a crazy proposal since we already have a refundable child tax credit, so it's a matter of making it bigger.

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Anything that might lead more towards decentralizing societal structure away from the state and quasi-state subsidized institutions back towards family units is considered "libertarian" on HN. Truly universal childcare "UBI" puts the power back into the hands of parents, rather than society taxing then lording over the head of parents as to which people are allowed to care for their children with it, just not funded in a libertarian manner. This is seen as a reduction in the power of the state which is a libertarian aim. So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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