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