What could possibly go wrong with this plan? Well, since most media outlets are in the tank for Democrats, they fail to ask or consider the ramifications
Biden administration plans to cap how much families pay for child care through a government program
Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that the government plans to put a cap on how much families pay for child care as part of the Child Care & Development Block Grant program.
Speaking to reporters, Harris went through the details of a proposed rule by the Department of Health and Human Services that follows an executive order on the issue that President Joe Biden signed in April. Families would pay no more than 7% of their income for child care through the program and child care providers would find it easier to be paid on time. The proposal also wants to encourage states to let families apply online for care.
Harris touted the possible savings for families.
“Let’s take a family in Montana making $46,000 a year—they could save about $80 every month, or almost over $1,000 a year,” the vice president said. “That money could go to gas and groceries or to fix a leaky roof.”
Where’s this money coming from? Who’s paying for it? Who authorized it? From that link in the excerpt
But the directives would be funded out of existing commitments, possibly including last year’s laws financing infrastructure projects and building computer chip plants. That likely means their impact would be limited and possess more of a symbolic weight about what’s possible. The Democratic president was far more ambitious in 2021 by calling to provide more than $425 billion to expand child care, improve its affordability and boost wages for caregivers.
So taking money that was appropriated for something else to buy votes. Seriously, child care isn’t exactly cheap, from what I hear. And what will happen going forward? Well, child care services will learn what it means to be in bed with the federal government, and have Los Federales up their butts all the time, and how the government isn’t exactly reliable with payments. And then the child care services will jack up their prices with all that sweet, sweet federal money floating around, much like the way college prices exploded when the feds backed student loans via Obamacare and made them easier to take out.
Will the child care companies be paid directly, or will the money go to the parents? If the latter, this will increase the number of welfare queens with children from multiple fathers, and this will be off the backs of the middle class taxpayers. Who’s kids are these? Why are other people responsible for their cost of upbringing? And, it will get the federal government heavily involved in their lives.
From The New York Times:
So, day care centers are already very short staffed, at least in part because the pay is low, but the Biden Administration wants to cap the costs that they can charge?
Perhaps, just perhaps, the better alternative is for mothers to stay at home and rear their children themselves, rather than entrusting it to an overworked, low-skilled worker who doesn’t see her charges as her children, but just bodies to be fed and housed?
The astute Mr Dana opines: the better alternative is for mothers to stay at home and rear their children themselves, rather than entrusting it to an overworked, low-skilled worker who doesn’t see her charges as her children, but just bodies to be fed and housed
True dat, but changes in our economy over the decades have “forced” women into the workplace. It became nearly impossible for a working class family to live on a single paycheck. That teachers and child-care workers are paid so little, and are afforded so little respect, is a reflection of our own priorities as individuals, and collectively as a society. Our economic system generates millionaire/billionaire money changers, investors, pro athletes, singers, TV talkers and heirs but pays pre-school teachers barely enough to survive.
Perhaps the traditional, public education system is obsolete and it’s time for government to get out of education/child care and let parents take over. Perhaps the government FORCING children into government schools to receive government approved training is the most offensive of government assaults on American’s freedoms imaginable. Parents can decide whether their children require outside the home training and can pay private schools if needed. Time for parents to step up.
Mr Elwood P Dowd tells us the price of feminism:
Why? We did once we had children!
When Elaine first got pregnant, she was lamenting the cost of day care and how soon she’d have to go back to work. I pointed out that it costs money to go to work: a second car, gasoline for the commute, lunches purchased every day, special clothes for work, additional taxes out of the paycheck, and paying for daycare. In 1988, Mrs Pico would have been bringing home, after all of that, maybe $1 per hour, all to have someone else rear our kids!
But feminism, and the push that women should have careers changed our economy in a way the left don’t want to realize. As women began to enter the workforce in significant numbers, employers no longer had to pay a man enough money to support a family; now all that was required was that a man and a woman together could make enough money to support a family, and men could accept jobs which did not pay enough to support a family. With the supply of workers growing faster than the demand for workers, pay per worker decreased.
It wasn’t just women entering the workforce. Opening jobs which had previously been de facto restricted to white men to women of all races and black men really increased the supply of workers for good jobs, which depressed wages.
Mr Dowd will be appalled by that, but think about what the previous restriction of good jobs to white men meant: it was a form of unionism, something which did just what unions do, try to restrict the labor pool for unionized jobs, to keep wage pressure higher.
Child care workers don’t make much, but public school teachers generally make, by themselves, more than the median household income in their communities. I have little sympathy for unionized teachers trying to force higher wages for themselves, which means higher taxes on the taxpayers of their communities, most of whom earn less than teachers.
Mr Dana: Mr Dowd will be appalled by that, but think about what the previous restriction of good jobs to white men meant…
Mr Dana has made this point more than once. America was a better place when white men ruled. He will claim that this is not racist but rather realist. Fair enough.
America was a better place when women stayed and took care of hearth and home for the king.
Clearly, it was a better place for white men.
Mr Dana: public school teachers generally make, by themselves, more than the median household income in their communities
Are you certain a public school teacher makes more than the median household income in their communities? Most public school teachers are paid less than similarly educated workers in other professions.
The national median household income was $70,784 in 2021. Almost all public school teachers are required to have a bachelors, many a masters.
I point at the moon; they stare at my finger:
I made an economic point, that the good jobs were restricted by a form of unionism, the restriction of the labor pool, to enable good jobs to pay enough for one man to support an entire family, something he combitched previously no longer existed. I pointed out why it existed, and he was, as I said he would be, appalled.
Anyone who has taken even the most rudimentary course in economics has heard of the division and specialization of labor, something which promotes productivity and makes the economy wealthier for all. We’ve had division of labor, in which people do the jobs that they are better at doing, for as far back into history as we have any real information.
So, what did feminism do? It told millions of women that they were being subjugated, and rather than doing the jobs at which they were well suited, they should go out and compete with men for the jobs in which men had been more experienced, skilled, and suited. We ended division of labor, for ‘equality,’ don’t you know, and made the economy as a whole less productive . . . and consequently it takes both father and mother working outside the home to support the family, even as family size has decreased.
What Mr Dowd, what the left as a whole, simply don’t get is that men and women are not meant to be competitors, but complementary, two halves of a unique whole; men and women together make a much stronger unit than a single male and single female alone, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Of course, saying that also tramples upon another part of the liberal mindset, that two males or two females, together, are just as good and strong as a normal, heterosexual couple.
I apologize if I implied that Mr Dana actually preferred an America where blacks and women were second class citizens, when all he really did was to point out that America was a “superior” nation when blacks and women were second class citizens.
I do quibble that women moving into the workforce was a result of “feminism” rather than a shift in economic necessity. Mr Dana pointed out that an influx of inferior workers (black men and all women) into the workplace reduced the incomes of white men. But in a nation and society ostensibly built on freedoms and equality was there an alternative to allowing black men and all women access to good jobs?
Biologically, there is no question that men and women are different, both physiologically and psychologically, but in a nation and society ostensibly built on freedoms and equality can that justify segregating employment – that is, boy jobs and girl jobs? Especially when boy jobs pay much more than girl jobs?
We get it. America was more “peaceful” when all women and black men knew and respected (fear?) their places in the pecking order. America was “better” when wives were subservient to husbands as the Bible commands. It has been that way for generation after generation. Husbands stayed in their lane by not cooking or cleaning or caring for the children. Wives stayed in their lane by not questioning the man’s authority or trying to interfere with his primary responsibility in harvesting resources for the family.
If all America needs to be a superior nation is oppression of 50% of the population (women) and 15% of men (blacks), isn’t that a small price to pay?
Not that Mr Dana advocates a return to the America of the 1950s, or supports men who want a return to the America of the 1950s, only that he is pointing out that America was better then, than now.
1. This is not a function of the government. The government has no business getting involved with competitive, free market capitalism. Period. If the government has people on the payroll to manage such programs, we have too many government employees. Fire them.
1. Face it. Baby sitting is not a high skill or a high cost job. But that won’t stop for-profit centers from making a buck.
2. Want to know how to bring prices down? Massive government subsidies. It worked so well for Medical care and education.
3. Funny how the administration that is making the cost of everything increase because of massive inflation thinks some costs need to slow down.