I am reading the article and it looks like it is being compared to the elder cohorts of Qubec children and also rest of Canada.

Looks like Quebec's past and rest of Canada is the control.

It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.

> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight

This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.

Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.

The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.

I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.

Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.

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That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)

I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.

Behold the glory of private equity.

Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.

The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.

My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.

It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.

My kids were young 25 years ago but the same was true for us then.

The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.

> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression

There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.

Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?

4.5? At a US daycare those kids will be in a group of 20-40, with one or two adults supervising.

> At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.

How is this bad?

Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.

Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?

How do you "skill" yourself more attention to give?

It's inflation IMO. Wages started stagnating in the 70s which is exactly when the USD became completely unbacked (due to the end of Bretton Woods), enabling the government to go endlessly deep into debt, which we proceeded to do with gusto, sending inflation skyrocketing.

Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.

In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.

We've strayed pretty far from the original topic here, but the reality is that the US military is literally running out of working aircraft because they're so old. The average age of USAF aircraft is now about 28 years. The fleet was allowed to decay and not substantially recapitalized during the GWOT. Many of the fighters in the combat coded inventory aren't even allowed to hit their original 9G maneuvering limit any more due to accumulated airframe fatigue. Now we're paying an overdue bill.

And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.

Everyone should learn how to build drones.

Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones.

Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.

We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.

It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:

- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)

- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture

- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.

- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure

The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.

For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.

Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".

Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.

> Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it

Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).

Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.

Yeah this is sort of the reaction I had. Removing "risk" with UBI and free healthcare and free childcare also removes the filters for a lot of people who would be bad at running a business. If you don't have the stomach to take the risk and do the work to make your idea a success, then maybe you shouldn't try.

We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.

The data on UBI isn't out there, but it is notable that countries with similar tax rates to the US manage to have universal healthcare and more expansive safety nets. Some examples: New Zealand (tax rate ~30% less than the US), Korea, Switzerland, Australia, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Norway.

Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.

Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.

Yeah, it’s like forgetting that the point of money in life is living, rather than the money itself.

How can trust be irrelevant? Why would anyone want pretenders and deceivers to have better families?

No, you simply are unable to reap the benefits that are available to high trust societies.

"productive"

From the perspective of 2025, it's pretty incredible how much of a higher trust society we had as recently as 2019.

It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.

It's a very recent story, but for example:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a...

The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...

There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.

But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.

Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.