It costs $40k/year for daycare. Start handing out $5k to moms, daycare now costs $45k/year.
There's literally been bipartisan efforts to expand the child tax credit ($1000 per year baseline, expanded to $2000 for 2018-2025 and expiring this year, plus COVID era provisions or up to $3000 or $3600 for 2021), and the bills to do so keep dying without a vote.
If they were serious about this they'd expand the 2021 program to where parents were getting $300 checks every month, and make that permanent and indexed to inflation.
So much of the Trump presidency is announcing a new program that sounds good, but isn't even enough to make up for a program that he already killed.
People are not having kids because the middle class cannot afford it. Assuming your household has the average American household income of 80k. This would give the household something like 40k at most after the kid's associated expenses, which means that each parent would have a whopping 20k to themselves. This is positively fucked because they would have to have a quality of life similar to someone who is eligible for food stamps, but they would not be themselves. Kids are for those who already benefit from government programs, or those who can afford a very expensive pet for a minimum of 15 years.
All this will do is increase the number of children born into poverty, which already accounts for the majority of children born in America.
You want an actual solution? Give parents food stamps up to a yearly income of 120k
I also find the implication that a human life is worth $5,000 disgusting.
It was clear to me that when the gov't went after reproductive rights, it was because declining birthrates are detrimental to capitalism. The money cannot stop; the money cannot slow down. Capitalism REQUIRES exponential growth in every regard.
Any "moral" reason given by a politician against abortion is a thinly veiled disguise to ensure that the machine always has enough cogs to keep running and growing.
How are you going to say a fetus is priceless and then say a live infant is worth $5,000? Fucking disgusting.
Maybe if the world people were raising their kids in didn't look so fucking gloomy thanks to some fascist fucks, they'd want to have more kids.
Maybe they should improve the quality of life for working families to get them to be confident enough to have more babies naturally?
....nah, it's obviously the queers fault!
Do we get to choose how it’s distributed? Here are some fun options I came up with.
$13.69 per day for a year. (Nice). About $419/month. Maybe they could round up to $420 because they stale internet meme culture is hip
$0.76 per day for 18 years. A guaranteed $22.80 per month for an entire childhood
$5000 lump sum. I can’t find any widely accepted figures for average out of pocket cost of prenatal care, child birth, and infant health visits. I’ll wild ass guess it a at covering 20-75% of those visits for people who have insurance. For people without insurance, looks like an uncomplicated vaginal birth averages $14k. But again huge variations in price
y'all understand why they want conservative christians to have a ton of babies, right? the only reason that american conservatives have become as atrocious as they are is that they have the big, dumb numbers. they need another generation of idiots - forcefully uneducated - to continue their legacy of shit.
Yes, we're aware. But they can't even do that right. They're still too greedy to properly implement their own plans
40k a year? So at least 3200 a month for daycare? Who on gods dying earth can pay for that? That's more than 3 times my rent and my landlord is bleeding me like a stuck pig, what the fuck
People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our "version" is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it's normal to them.
I don't think I'm conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it's what they've always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.
It's really fucked up. And it's something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I'm referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).
Oh, it's simple ~~easy~~ to fix, just very painful. Nobody wants to fix this because it means dismantling capitalism and bringing those responsible to justice. This is why there is so much support for fascism. They run from the boogeyman they know into the arms of the ones that promise a return to normalcy.
The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any "simple fix" to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.
Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That's bad, elephant gets bigger...
I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.
I mean yes? I feel like there's an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and that's just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. There's absurdly wealthy people here and there's, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean they're living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I don't really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person's sense of astonishment, because it's cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it's - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don't mean you), that they're astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment
By avoiding COL?
it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? You're talking about "ugly things" too. You're stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I don't see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesn't seem ugly to me?
We go through these versions of life and think they are normal
I genuinely don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesn't make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like you're doing the opposite of comforting the commenter's feelings, it seems you're trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -
(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, I'm just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. I'ma post it, it's Lemmy, why not)
The idea about "versions of life we go through, thinking they're normal" -
That's important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, it's actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just don't see.
The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the "...thinking it's normal" I meant.
One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that "lane", that "version", and we die in the way the people in our "versions" die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.
The barrier I'm describing as strange is that way because it's often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about one's lived "version", and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.
We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish we'd all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.
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