What About Child Care?

65 thoughts on “What About Child Care?”

1. There’s not enough consensus on the issue of childcare.
   And I’m on the side opposite yours–so I’ll try to explain where I’m coming from.
   Our family has decided to get by on one income. Government policy has steadily disfavored that model since the 60’s, and I resent that. Our household income is less than the state median, and several percent of it goes to benefit the government’s preferred model households (2-income). I don’t see any reason that even more of it should go for that purpose.
   In short, if family A chooses to have both parents work, and family B chooses to have only one parent work–I don’t see why family B should be asked to subsidize family A.

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2. I agree, Sam. That wouldn’t be fair.
   Well, if taxes are based on a progressive scale, then your contribution towards childcare would be minor. It would mostly help families in the lower income brackets.
   I also think that relief should go to families that make sacrifices to survive on a one earner model.

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3. My preference (not sure if I’ve said this before or not here) would be a refundable, $3000/child tax credit. (Equivalent to a $12,000 exemption, but beneficial if you earn little income–exemptions only help if you have enough income to pay income taxes.) That recognizes that raising children is costly, without favoring some ways of organizing a family over others.

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4. Isn’t there already a child tax credit? (yes, you can tell I don’t do the taxes in our household). And, if one income families shouldn’t subsidize childcare, why should childless families subsidize ones with children?
   Honestly, I find the use of tax policy to “help” to be foolish. If we want to expand government subsidy of care of children, we could expand schools and make them available to younger aged children. We can decide if we want to spend money on that, as a society, and raise the funds with progressive taxes.
   bj

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5. Yes, there’s already a partially-refundable child tax credit ($1000/child), income exemptions for children ($3300/child, equivalent to a non-refundable tax credit of $500-1000ish depending on income), and (for low-income families and single-parent households) the refundable EITC heavily weighs children in both eligibility and benefits. In addition there are credits for higher education expenses and–yes–a child or dependent care credit worth between 20-35% of child care expenses, depending on earned income. (The 20% category does start at “only” an AGI of $43,000, but that’s a middle-to-upper class household income in much of the country.)

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6. There are clearly *lots* of issues here, and a careful untangling of them would take a longer piece than a NYT op-ed, that’s for sure. But just to get some initial clarity:
   (1) there are plenty of families, one and two-parent ones, where every adult has to work to keep heads above water. People who write stuff like “Oh, in Wisconsin you could raise a family on one income” are being silly, since not everyone in Wisconsin could support THEIR family on THEIR one income, and not everyone lives in or can move to Wisconsin. The reality is that there are many small kids who have no non-working parent, this isn’t going to change, and we need to be talking on a national scale about what is the best way to deal with it. (2) There is also the fact that needing money to make ends meet is not the only reason that people work. The arrival of a child does not strip a person of her interest in e.g medieval poetry or banking or housecleaning or purse-designing or whatever, nor does it make her less capable of doing it well. Someone who adds a kid to her family and wants to continue to work should be able to count on some things – I’m thinking a decent amount of time off (paid), good oversight of childcare options, accommodation of the facts of life (illness, breastfeeding, etc.) – and since workplaces have very spotty track records on providing these things, the government should take on the task of making sure that they do.
   I want my kids and other people’s kids to thrive and be well-set for school, adolescence, and beyond. I want to fulfill my potential and be generous to others so that they can do so as well. That is not a bad thing – it is surely a heck of a lot better than “everyone on your own, stop complaining, shut up”.

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7. Chris Lawrence,
   It sounds like there are a lot of different tax benefits for families, but I don’t think they’re really all that generous or that they add up to much. An average family is not going to get a whole lot at any one time–it’s unlikely you’d be using both the child care credits and the college credits at the same time. And if you’re getting the EITC, the college credits probably aren’t going to do much for you. The child care credits don’t sound particularly generous either. The $3300 per child exemption is ludicrously small in this day and age–it’s not like we’re feeding them kibbles and bits.
   bj,
   I don’t think we should feel at all bad about adjusting tax policy to reflect the fact that a household income is covering different numbers of people. If Suzie Smith is earning $60,000 and supporting only herself, she should be taxed differently than if she is supporting four people, or seven people.
   Laura,
   Falling housing costs are going to do a lot to cut living expenses. Unfortunately, there will almost certainly be a recession to go along with it.

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8. Laughing at the kibbles and bits comment — at a meeting I was at today, someone made the comment that the US treats having children as like pet ownership — your choice, but not something that should affect anyone else…
   The argument for a child care deduction is that if one family has one worker who earns $40,000 a year with the other parent staying home, and another family has two workers who together earn $60,000 a year, but they pay $20,000 a year for child care (quite possible in DC if you have 2 kids), they both have net earnings of $40k, but the two earner family pays more taxes.
   The child tax credit was explicitly designed to be neutral between child care and at-home parents. But it’s only refundable if your income is more than about $10,500.
   Hillary’s proposal includes a provision that would let low-income families cash out the child care subsidy in order to stay home (since it’s fairly common for the child care subsidy to cost more than a low wage worker earns).

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9. The arrival of a child does not strip a person of her interest in e.g medieval poetry or banking or housecleaning or purse-designing or whatever, [snip] Someone who adds a kid to her family and wants to continue to work should be able to count on some things – I’m thinking a decent amount of time off (paid), good oversight of childcare options, accommodation of the facts of life (illness, breastfeeding, etc.) – and since workplaces have very spotty track records on providing these things, the government should take on the task of making sure that they do.
   Hmm, that means I’ll be taxed so some woman can fulfill herself designing purses. NOT!

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10. By the way, I believe Tex is a woman.

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11. Tex: “that means I’ll be taxed so some woman can fulfill herself designing purses. NOT!”
    Not wanting to open the whole “who makes more of a contribution to society?” can of worms, but I wonder: does the kneejerk “NOT!” come as quickly if you replace “purse designer” with “gifted neurosurgeon” or “applied mathematician with an extraordinary gift for responsible management of massive pension funds”?

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12. I wonder in this argument why “one parent should stay at home” (generally = one woman should stay at home) is always accepted as a financial boon to the tax system?
    Families on one income may struggle a lot more down the line to provide for their healthcare, housing, and other retirement costs – not just because they didn’t have the income at the start, but because one partner was not on the salary grid/career arc moving their earning power up, and because that partner was not getting social security credits. Not to get all Leslie Bennetts.
    Also, I know about the two-income trap so I agree it’s not that black and white BUT it is possible that a single-income family is more vulnerable to economic downturns in particular industries, etc…. so that there is a cost to the system for the single-income just-barely-making-it families which fail.
    Day care may actually be less expensive across the system in the long run, as kids need FT care up to kindergarten; and then aftercare for say 8 more years – so maybe 5 years – whereas people can need retirement income a lot longer.
    Also, Tex – if a woman “fulfills herself” and ends up hiring three people, that’s kind of a boon to the economy.

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13. Sorry that should read 5 years ft + 8 years 1/4 time = 7 years of full support, as opposed to 20 yrs of retirement support.

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14. I’m strongly with SamChevre on this. Although I think it is right for the government to support soem ways of living over others, it has no business encouraging people to pay others to look after their children. I’d think that even if I weren’t a feminist, but being a feminist I resent the government for entrenching the gendered division of labour through susbidies specifically for childcare (if, like me, you think men should do more childcaring you want childcaring to be done by parents, because whereas fathers will look after their own children, nobody pays men to do childcare). Increase the child tax credit if you must, or just make it a universal benefit of, say, $6000 per child under the age of 10 (and treat it as taxable income). And cut the tax exemptions for higher ed tuition to help pay for it. I say under the age of 10 (or 11, or whatever) because children are intrinsically more expensive in the earlier years (because they need more constant care): the high expenses attached to older children are in large part down to lifestyle choices.

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15. Loren,
    It may be a can of worms, but it sounds like fun. How about:
    1. mortgage broker specializing in negative amortizing loans
    2. real estate agent specializing in non-English speaking immigrants (is pals with #1)
    3. inventor of new brightly colored sugary snacks
    4. designer of ultra-violent computer games for the teen market
    5. Baby Einstein video producer
    (or anyone producing children’s videos that are mainly toy ads)

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16. Not wanting to open the whole “who makes more of a contribution to society?” can of worms, but I wonder: does the kneejerk “NOT!” come as quickly if you replace “purse designer” with “gifted neurosurgeon” or “applied mathematician with an extraordinary gift for responsible management of massive pension funds”?
    Duh, yes. (Please observe this second “knee-jerk” reaction.)
    I lean towards the libertarian persuasion when it comes to government intervention. No doubt, some others would categorize my views as Darwinian. I see inefficiencies and potentially disastrous unintended consequences if the government provides daycare to all as a way to engineer economic prosperity
    Don’t take my money to give preferences to certain lifestyle choices.

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17. Yeah, I agree with Sam Chevre that it does not seem fair to pay for childcare expenses without helping the families who struggle to get by on one income. Gov’t should not be in the business of pushing one type of lifestyle over another. But for the heck of it, I want to see if I can make the argument for childcare support alone.
    Megan was pushing us to have a argument for subsidy not based on need. Those silly libertarians. Well, we could argue that we need childcare subsidies because the kids raised in poor childcare centers have long term damage to their IQs and emotional well being. Therefore, it makes sense as a society to pay for kids to go to well regulated, well funded daycare. Long term social benefits arise out of well funded daycare. If we follow that line of argument, I can’t figure out why would should have to pay for kids who don’t go to childcare services.

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18. This game can be fun. How about:
    1. non-English speaking immigrants employed at a government funded social services center.
    2. Director of aforementioned social services center who also heads political funding organization for senator who proposed child funding in the first place.
    Who exactly is most deserving of my tax money?

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19. Tex – Governments do all sorts of things to engineer economic prosperity. It’s in the interest of the government to have a prosperous nation. Why do you have a problem with women being prosperous?
    Nobody on this blog is pushing one lifestyle choice over another. We’re non-judgy about the stay at home/working mom crap. But there are benefits for society as a whole, if millions of kids are not raised in substandard conditions in poor daycares.

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20. Given that we as a society haven’t figured out yet how to run a decent public school system, it seems likely that the government is going to screw up daycare, too. Poor children get poor K-12 education, and they’ll get poor daycare, too.

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21. I’m reposting a comment from Ginna, who was posting on MM’s daycare thread. I’ll add thoughts of my own lower down.
    —————————-
    Look north! Subsidized daycare was a huge election issue last time.
    Quebec in particular has had subsidized daycare for a number of years now, although the intention was to increase the birth rate. (Which was not particularly successful.)
    The somewhat predictable problems have been cost and universality. Those parents lucky enough to have subsidized daycare pay $7 a day for a space. The catch? The number of parents who want a space far exceeds the number of spaces.
    Friends in Quebec report that this means you need to put yourself on the waiting list for a spot on average 2 years before you need one. Given that Canada offers ~1 year of paid parental leave, in practical terms you must sign up before you get pregnant.
    The outcome has been that the subsidized spots are almost entirely used by the upper middle class, e.g. those who can plan reproduction most carefully. The poor and accidentally pregnant are out of luck!
    The other problem of course is that costs have spiraled out of control, and are now eating up a huge chunk of the provincial budget.
    Posted by Ginna | October 19, 2007 11:20 AM

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22. We’re non-judgy about the stay at home/working mom crap. But there are benefits for society as a whole, if millions of kids are not raised in substandard conditions in poor daycares.
    And I can see that as an argument for regulating daycares; I can’t see it as an argument for subsidizing daycare in general relative to parent care.

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23. Not wanting to open the whole “who makes more of a contribution to society?” can of worms, but I wonder: does the kneejerk “NOT!” come as quickly if you replace “purse designer” with “gifted neurosurgeon” or “applied mathematician with an extraordinary gift for responsible management of massive pension funds”?
    *****
    I assume the latter two positions pay well enough for those individuals to pay for their own child care. Do I want to subsidize millionaire’s child care? No.

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24. BJ,
    Chris answered more thoroughly than I could have. My goal is to take all the child-related tax benefits, make them refundable (more progressive), and pay them as 1 “child benefit”, rather than making them depend on who proivides child-care.

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25. If Ginna is correct, it looks like universally subsidized daycare in the US would lead to similar results. Even if the supply of daycare equaled demand, there would be quality differences (just as there is in public education), and we would eventually be treated to a heart-rending Jonathan Kozol book on crowded and unsanitary public-funded daycares. The problem is is that even in an apparently cash-free non-market environment, the market persists, but it has been pushed underground and out of sight. (After many years of dutifully waiting in line for medical care, My Canadian relatives have recently learned how to game the system. I won’t give the trick away on line, but I will say that it turns out that there is a Canadian healthcare market, but it doesn’t necessarily run on cash.)

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26. On the one hand, I have first-hand knowledge of just how expensive good day care is and sympathy for those who have trouble paying it. But, I’m still opposed to government funded child care for all but the actual poor.
    Four years of living in a medium-sized rust-belt city (and $400/month in new local taxes while local services have declined in quality) have seen me move steadily to the right. The local Democrats have done what the Republican’s couldn’t and convinced me that big government is the problem, not the solution. My main two political principles are: 1) The Republicans are uncaring and incompetent. 2) Be sure to always vote Republican.

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27. “Although I think it is right for the government to support some ways of living over others, it has no business encouraging people to pay others to look after their children….you want childcaring to be done by parents”
    I certainly share the desire to have a society in which parents share childrearing (more) equally. However: is it so clear that two parents sharing childcare equally can also both achieve work-fulfillment without some paid help as well? I think not, at least in many/most cases. So either we are back at the reality that childcare will be used, and we face the question of whether/how government is to be involved in that paid caregiving – or we say that both parents cannot have work-fulfillment. Most couples I’ve seen who reach this latter conclusion don’t take the ‘compromise’ of both parties getting partial fulfillment, but instead have one (female) step out of work for at least some time. So long, tenure-track job, corporate ladder, law firm, etc.
    So at the very least, there will be competing ‘feminist’ aims. Unless you think that the sorts of high-status jobs that I mention are evolving towards accepting part-time and on-and-off models as equally good (ha ha ha), your suggestion that parents keep childcaring to themselves will, I think, entail far fewer women doing them.

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28. “Four years of living in a medium-sized rust-belt city (and $400/month in new local taxes while local services have declined in quality) have seen me move steadily to the right.”
    I don’t get this at all. It seems pretty clear to me that massive deregulation (a principle of the right wing), reduction in federal funding (again, a principle of the right wing) and kowtowing to the insurance industry (mainly but not solely a practice of the right wing) among others have increased costs for local governments. And you blame the Democrats for all this?
    Ooookay.

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29. I blame local Democrats with good reason. For one thing, no Republican has won a local election here in my lifetime (or my parents’ lifetimes). How did the right-wing make the school board run a district with 4 times as many administrators as comparably sized districts? Was the recipe for asphalt classified under the Patriot Act or did forty years of Democratic officials not notice that the pension fund was out of whack until it was too late to do anything to fix it except cut essential services? And health insurance is getting expensive, unless you work for the city or schools where they have managed to pass all of those costs on to the tax payers. As for a decline in federal money, I’m still waiting to see that. Instead, we have federal money being used to build a light-rail tunnel for a transit authority that can’t fund enough buses for me to fit on the bus to get home, but can afford pension plan that lets drivers retire at 50. I especially enjoy watching the teachers threaten to strike over position cuts when the enrollment is dropping like a rock (4% this year alone) and the drop-out rate is 33%. I wish that the ghost on Ronald Reagan to do to them what the living Reagan did to the air traffic controllers. From where I sit, the Republicans may not care about the middle class, but the Democrats are actively trying to make it leave the city and the state.

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30. “How did the right-wing make the school board run a district with 4 times as many administrators as comparably sized districts?”
    Are you kidding me? Four letters: NCLB.
    Listen, I don’t know where you live and I don’t need to know. You may be right, and Democrats may have fucked up your city. But I don’t see in your responses a real understanding of some of the macro issues involved, the big picture of what’s been happening in a country where the GOP and its pro-business policies and bloating of a for-profit health care system.

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31. Yowzers, MH, that’s pretty hot stuff. What state is that?

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32. Wendy,
    If MH is correct that her (?) district has 4 times as many administrators as comparable districts, why the heck should NCLB be the sum explanation. Doesn’t NCLB apply to those districts, too?

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33. NCLB is a very unlikely explanation for excess administrators. I’m as left wing as anyone who comments here, but you’d have to be blind not to notice that large metropolitan school districts have a habit of using public funds for patronage purposes, and are frequently clogged with a management layer that is not optimally designed and staffed by not especially effective managers. I don’t know where MH lives, and he/she might be making it up, but there are plenty of places where he/she wouldn’t be making it up.

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34. Washington DC famously spends about half its education dollars on administration.

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35. It all depends on what is meant by “comparable.” “Comparable” could refer to size or characteristics of student body. We don’t know for sure. (I’m not saying MH should name the city–if MH wanted to, s/he would have done so in the first place.) I’m just saying that NCLB could be a good reason why a district might feel the need to bloat its administration.
    Two districts could be the same size but have a different population of students and different levels of performance according to NCLB standards. Thus, it might have a need for more administrators (or a *perceived* need for more administrators).
    You don’t need to be left wing or right wing to see the potential flaws in MH’s analysis.

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36. This has been happening long before NCLB and long before President Bush (either of them). In fact, I know nothing about NCLB except that fact that the local teacher’s union opposes it. Which is enough to make me support NCLB.
    In answer to Amy P, I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s not all bad, but the local government is an old school machine. The school district started shedding jobs a couple of years ago, just not as rapidly as they are losing students. I think the actual liberals in town are nearly as unhappy as I am. They aren’t really any more a part of the machine than Republicans. The tax increases have hit the poor and lower middle class the hardest. Anyway, to go back to the point of Laura’s post, I have developed a general opposition to expanding the government, based on four years of bad experiences with government. That said, I would welcome an increase in tax breaks for families with children, even if it only applied at family income levels lower than my own. In fact, I’d rather see that the tax cuts that the Republicans did in 2000. But I’d much rather have what we have now that anything that would result in a new government initiative into a field where costs are basically bottomless depending on who is defining need.

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37. (Hey, MH, I’m a (non-native) Pittsburgher who’ll be voting Republican for the first time in my life this November. Go DeSantis!)

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38. I was tempted to mention some of my Pittsburgh experiences when MH started posting, so no big surprise that Pittsburgh was what MH was talking about.
    Pittsburgh has for a long time been angsting over the exodus of the young people. The government has decided that the key to keeping the young folk in town is build as many big shiny things as possible. Oddly enough, it hasn’t worked–maybe the lack of jobs has something to do with it? I don’t know about other government workers, but when I last checked a number of years ago, the teacher pay scale was goldplated and way out of line with the actual cost of living. (My husband and I lived high on the hog in one of the best Pittsburgh neighborhoods on our graduate stipends.) I’m sure MH is better informed than me, but I’m thinking Pittsburgh suffers from having a champagne government and a beer business sector (if that makes sense). Also, a good friend and long-time Pittsburgh resident says that the city government is very corrupt.

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39. The discussion has gone way beyond this comment, but what I’ve been thinking in response to the original post is just this: that I survive on a single income, in a high cost area of California. I pay for my daycare, and my daughter’s clothes, and our rent and food — also we fly to Canada a lot where my husband lives (and pays, with his single income, for his rent etc.). We get on okay. It can be done. We just don’t spend a lot on extras.
    I admit that my income is fairly good. But it’s not extraordinary. I’m sure it’s not much higher than the income of all the people who are claiming it’s absolutely impossible to live on a single income.
    As Elinor Dashwood says: one person’s competence may be another person’s wealth.

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40. Oonae, I think you highlight exactly why the problem is so intractable: people have such wildly different ideas about what it means to “get by”, or even have a reasonably nice standard of living.
    At the blog Bitch Phd there was a huge blowup when the author’s sister came by to say that after paying for their three-bedroom house, private school for their one child, horse (!), and late-model Prius, there was hardly anything left, and isn’t this proof that the middle class just can’t get by in America?
    Yeah. The ensuing conversation didn’t go as she had planned.

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41. Siobhan,
    I’m not letting my hopes get up, but I’m hearing more Democrats saying they will vote for DeSantis. I would have gladly voted for Peduto, but when he dropped out of the primary, I really lost all faith in the “reform” Democrats. I mean, I know that there are plenty of Democrats who sincerely want to fix things, but I no longer have confidence that they can actual fix anything while running as a Democrat. I’d love to know what they offered Peduto to get him to drop. Probably the endorsement for the nomination after Luke’s turn is up.

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42. Why do you have a problem with women being prosperous?
    So far, I’ve been characterized as having knee-jerk reactions and as wishing poverty upon women. Ad hominem attacks will not go far in convincing me of the merits of your position.
    As a general rule, any government endeavor will operate inefficiently and will make many mistakes. Therefore, I want the government to stick to only the most essential services. I oppose many things our government does in its attempt engineer economic prosperity or to improve perceived social shortcomings. For example, I find ethanol subsidies, which are a sad political joke and will cause hunger or starvation among some people, to be nonessential. Proposals to expand government funding of childcare services, healthcare, pension funding, preschool, etc. are actually frightening to me, and emblematic of a way of life to which I am strongly opposed.

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43. “In fact, I know nothing about NCLB except that fact that the local teacher’s union opposes it. Which is enough to make me support NCLB.”
    You may be joking. But really, why would you say such an idiotic thing?
    The corruption inherent in one city has nothing to do with a party’s philosophy and policies. What bothers me is that you are saying you are moving to the right. That’s different from saying you’re voting Republican in order to counter the corruption of the establishment Democrats. Hell, if I lived in Rhode Island (I’m actually in SE Mass), I’d sure vote against some of the entrenched Democrats who perpetuated a lot of corruption (part of how Lincoln Chaffee was so popular for so long in a very blue state). In fact, I did vote for a Republican and against the Democratic state rep in my district in 2004. But I would never describe myself as moving to the right.
    If you want to vote Republican to send an anti-corruption message and clean house in Pittsburgh, you have my blessing (though of course you don’t care :).
    But if you are going to go around identifying yourself with Republican political philosophies because of the corruption in local Pittsburgh politics, well, I don’t now what to say. You seem to be reacting to political problems not with logical thinking but instead with some sort of irrational tribalism. Democrats baaaaad. So Republicans gooooood.
    And it’s that kind of messed-up thinking that has gotten us into the situation we’re in now, on the national level. People who don’t care enough to look at what the policies *really* say are instead identifying themselves with a party that doesn’t represent them for irrational reasons. And as you can tell, it’s upsetting me. I apologize after the act for any incendiary-ness in this reply, but it’s way nicer than the rant I just unleashed on my husband.

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44. I’m not identifying with Republicans nationally merely because the local Democrats are corrupt. In the first place, with one or two exceptions, none of the current office holders have been charged with any crime. There has been great corruption in the past and I have no specific reason to believe it has declined, but I feel compelled to point out that I could be wrong. They could just be really incompetent. Or they could just be very successful at a goal I don’t support. If your metric of success is the number of public sector jobs per population, the Pittsburgh Democrats are brilliant.
    But, I’m not voting Republican across the board because the local Democrats are bad. You missed the intermediate step in my argument. I’m identifying Republican across the board because the local Democrats have, inadvertently, convinced me that the Republicans are closer to correct on the big issues. I watched a city go “bankrupt” because of its pension plan. (“Bankrupt” is in quotes because PA cities cannot legally go bankrupt. Instead, the state came in with Act 47 and an oversight board.) And there was no change in that pension because the government cannot cross the unions on which it depends for re-election. It’s not just that they kept paying at the same rate to those who have already retired. The new hires are still getting the same terms as those hired in the past, a fixed pension that is much more expensive than the city can afford.
    The city basically dumped hundreds of millions (several thousand of which come from my family) into a leaky bucket without plugging the leak. This caused me to form strong opinions about the proper size of the public sector. You can call that tribalism if you like, but I’m going to call it rationally re-framing of the issue based on new data.
    The public schools in Pittsburgh spend over $16k per pupil per year. Despite all of the talk about “the children”, the teachers only seem to get excited about three things: salary, paying as little as possible for health insurance, and not being required to live in the district they serve. They have been remarkable successful at all three goals, but, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, the drop-out rate is 30% and enrollment is dropping. I think that deciding to support whatever they oppose is a reasonable heuristic to use in an area that I don’t have time to examine closely. The state is going to wind-up taking control of the district sooner or later, with or without NCLB.
    However, despite rising taxes and crumbling infrastructure, the machine still wins nearly every election. I say nearly because sometime an ‘unendorsed Democrat’ will win. The usual tally for mayoral races is a 75/25 split for the Democrats, which is why I am opposed to “irrational tribalism” in politics and why I associate that tribalism with the Democratic Party. After all that I have seen, my main domestic political concern is that the federal government not get so big that those who are net recipients of government money can outvote those who are net contributors to the government. I have seen that it is far easier to stop a new entitlement from being enacted than it is to end one that is already enacted.
    P.S. My apologies to your husband for my part in starting a rant. This is why I never discuss politics with my wife’s friends.
    P.P.S. My rant of the month is “I’d support a carbon tax if I wasn’t so convinced that global warming is being used as an excuse by people who want to increase taxes anyway.” Order now, copies are limited.

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45. “Oonae, I think you highlight exactly why the problem is so intractable: people have such wildly different ideas about what it means to “get by”, or even have a reasonably nice standard of living.
    At the blog Bitch Phd there was a huge blowup when the author’s sister came by to say that after paying for their three-bedroom house, private school for their one child, horse (!), and late-model Prius, there was hardly anything left, and isn’t this proof that the middle class just can’t get by in America?”
    This is very interesting. Glancing over my family’s budget, there are a lot of things that are non-negotiable: rent, life insurance, renter’s insurance, car payment for our Ford Taurus, car insurance, electricity (over $400 for August in Texas with the thermostat mostly at 80 degrees in an older home), land line, a small contribution to a 401(k), dental and medical copays, clothes (they actually do wear out), Sallie Mae, old credit card debt, natural gas, water (the foundation needs to be regularly watered to keep the house in one piece), garbage bill, gasoline, groceries and incidentals like paper towels, cleaning supplies, and light bulbs. Those basic expenses add up to quite a lot. Next comes a grey area for things like private tuition ($400 a month), internet, cell phones, haircuts (if I were more on the ball, I’d learn to cut hair, at least for my son and husband), and charity. Last come the things that would be first to go in case of financial difficulty: Netflix, housecleaning, babysitting (not for work purposes), and seasonal landscaping help (probably once in the fall, once in the spring). The non-negotiable category is really the monster. The last two are large, but I don’t feel oppressed by them, since I realize that we have elbow-room there and flexibility. I can cut the housecleaning in half and stop hiring a babysitter and nothing much will happen except a bit more grime and stress, but if I stop paying the rent, the electricity, or the gas bill, I’m going to develop a whole new appreciation for country music. Our budget as it stands covers a number of monthly expenses that are non-essentials, but it doesn’t have any room for spending sprees or retail therapy. It’s also true that private school, good internet service at home, cell phones, and Netflix are habit forming. Once you get used to them, it’s hard to give them up, and they become part of your image of what a comfortable life entails.

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46. MH said that Pittsburgh’s per student spending is $16K a year. That sounded really out of line, since Pittsburgh is a really low cost area, and $16K per student per year could buy you the sun, moon, and stars in southwestern PA. But I looked it up, and lo and behold, MH is correct. No wonder he’s mad–with that level of spending, Pittsburgh should be able to afford tutors for everybody.

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47. For comparison, city-data.com says that the median household income in Pittsburgh was just above $30K in 2005. A town with that level of income can’t afford to spend $16K per student.

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48. Amy P, to go back to your comment about Pittsburgh, another of our large problems is the immense non-profit — therefore, non-taxable! — base. In between UPitt, La Roche, Point Park University, Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne, Carlow College, Robert Morris, and Chatham College, Pittsburgh is quite a college town for its size; all those institutions are within the city proper. Factor in UPMC, the huge, wildly rich yet technically non-profit hospital chain/insurance company/research complex, and our fairly tiny city has a distressing little amount of area left for tax-paying businesses.

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49. “Despite all of the talk about “the children”, the teachers only seem to get excited about three things: salary, paying as little as possible for health insurance, and not being required to live in the district they serve.”
    Do you ever talk to teachers? Or do you only pay attention to what the *union reps* are saying/doing, which are basically the only things that ever get reported about what teachers do.
    I have to say, I’m really offended by what you’re saying here. A lot of teachers trust union reps (or in my case, faculty reps) to go out there and do the boring stuff we don’t care about, like ensure that our salaries are fair and that our benefits are stable. To do so, they have to be constantly in the faces of the decision makers.
    Meanwhile, behind the scenes the teachers are TEACHING. Or doing the best we can with what we’re given.

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50. MH, I think you’re reading too much into Peduto’s departure; trust me, I was volunteering for the campaign. He dropped out because he had an embarrassing lack of real support this time around, by which I mean money — people were still too burnt out from losing the primary against O’Connor, I think. He dropped out to avoid embarrassment and keep the door open for future runs, but he certainly got no help from the machine which HATES him.

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51. Wendy,
    When MH talks about teachers, presumably he means teachers as an organized group acting in concert. Presumably he is correct that teachers as a group strike over things like pensions, benefits, and pay rather than curriculum and pedagogy.
    Siobhan,
    That’s quite right. I loved my four years in Pittsburgh (it’s exactly the sort of slightly gritty ethnic town that I like) and still miss it, but Pittsburgh’s private sector just isn’t big enough to carry all of the institutions that you mentioned.

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52. Amy, isn’t it kind of underhanded to criticize an organization for not doing what no union has ever done? Unions are collective bargaining units, not arbiters of pedagogy.

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53. Wendy, I’m actually glad that they don’t, because it’s unlikely that I’d think much of the pedagogy that would be struck for.

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54. Siobhan,
    I’m glad to hear that. I lost my connection to Peduto gossip after the race with O’Connor when two of my friends left the area.
    Wendy,
    I don’t talk to many Pittsburgh public school teachers. I know many teachers, including my mother, but only one of the teachers I know works for the Pittsburgh Schools. I’m not from around here and my social circle is limited. So, I do get my information about the teachers from the union reps quoted in the paper. I’m sure most of the teachers are dedicated enough. But that doesn’t change the fact that by objective measures, the only thing that has improved in the district in the past 20 years is teacher compensation and the teacher/student ratio. The teachers could vote for union reps who focused on other things, but they apparently don’t.
    The base problem is that every year, fewer people are left to pay for the same schools and city government, thus higher taxes. This means even more people leave and fewer jobs are created. Which means pressure for higher taxes because it is very difficult to cut anything. Pittsburgh is already at half of its peak population and still dropping, yet the unions (teacher and city government) fight any sort of efficiency or accountability or economizing. There are neighboring smaller towns that were hit harder by de-industrialization than Pittsburgh that were basically killed by this cycle. You can go a couple of miles from where I live and find a town with a property tax rate of 6%. Once you get to that point, you’ve basically chased the middle class out.

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55. Returning late to this conversation, but wanted to follow up on the “who makes more contribution to society?” can of worms.
    My point in the illustration was not merely to accuse Tex of having a jerking knee.
    The lesson I take away from the thought experiment posed is that, even if we think we’ve found two clear poles of a continuum (the purse designer versus the neurosurgeon), there’s plenty of room for debate — not only about what counts as a valuable societal contribution, but also (and as importantly) how such contributions ought to be weighed against personal liberty, human flourishing, and the needs of our children and loved ones.
    And that’s just at the apparently uncontentious poles: how do we meaningfully rank the contributions of everyone else along the continuum (bankers, designers, casual labourers, academics, tradespeople, engineers, cosmetic surgeons, cardiac surgeons, stay at home moms, stay at home dads, independently wealthy stay at home moms and dads and dads and dads and …, independently impoverished but content surfer bums, etc, etc)?
    Given this mess, the libertarian has a (too) easy answer: leave people alone to work things out. But that ignores the likelihood that we could help people work things out in ways that actually improved the quality of everone’s freedoms. Suppose we could find policies (i.e. regulating employment practices, and regulating and even subsidizing daycares with ECE trained personnel) that better let people work things out in ways that not only give them and their families happiness (and skills, and wealth), but also arguably contribute to the public good?
    After the age of one or two, it’s arguable that children would benefit more from several hours each day of (carefully supervised and structured) interaction with other kids, compared to full-time care by one parent. Not that the latter isn’t desirable and admirable – of course it is. But if the parents both have flexible and rewarding jobs, then children get the benefits of early socialization with other children, under ECE-trained supervision; they see their parents working in the world in satisfying and productive ways; and they learn that there are multiple sources of authority in the world, and that sometimes these multiple authority figures can each have some wisdom, and may all be looking out for the child’s interests (compare this to the advice a senior scientist at MIT once gave junior faculty and postdocs about how to balance motherhood and a career in science: you should get a nanny if you can, the advice went, so that your kids can see that you’re in charge, and that the nanny follows your orders. At a daycare, by contrast, they see a teacher who has independent authority, and who might chide you for being late picking up your kids … proof, perhaps, that the highest-achieving scientists can have pretty fucked up views about how to treat others, and of what society ought to look like).
    Affluent and well-educated parents already enjoy this sort of flexibility in both employment and childcare. They can have a fulfilling career, early education for their children, and still have plenty of meaningful time with their kids. Often this flexibility is furthered by a strong support system of extended family and close friends.
    Which brings me to the second response to the can of worms I mentioned, which is to note that, at the high end of the income scale (neurosurgeons and financial analysts), a mother or father pondering staying at home fulltime for several years with the kids (versus continuing to practice their gift for neurosurgery, say) has considerable resources to find a flexible solution, that lets them spend meaningful time with their children, practice their (financially rewarding) gift, and have their kids benefit from high quality ECE-based daycare after a flexible parental leave for up to a year, say (at least, that’s here in Canada – US? not so much, but more likely for the academic or neurosurgeon than the struggling single mom holding down two shitty jobs to make ends meet).
    But if we could use government to give more women the sort of flexibility and quality childcare that is available to the neurosurgeon-mom, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
    The neurosurgeon-mom has the resources to balance career and family in ways that pretty much benefit everyone involved – her, her children, her patients and students. Surely if we could structure employment and childcare to allow more such flexibility for more people, then more people could develop talents in ways that benefit others, including their own children.
    I’d see that as a good thing.

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56. There’s a lot to be said for financial security and what I call “security of having a reputation with your employer” when both parents have careers. I’m not sure why families that “choose to make it on one income” are suddenly the virtuous oppressed. One thing that bugs me is the lack of real interest in what happens to the stay at home partner and family if the marriage ends due to death or divorce, or the wage earner is disabled. When my partner was temporarily disabled, I became very grateful that I had a job where I had proven myself, and thus my employer was willing to give me a break during the crisis. Around that time we hired a woman who had stayed home with her children for the past 6 years. Her husband had been killed in a car accident, and even with a generous life insurance package she had to get a job in order to get health insurance (pre existing conditions made converting to an individual policy too expensive). I felt sad watching her struggle; at the very time when she needed a break from her employer she had to knock herself out to prove herself. Some women who had held jobs when raising their children were especially reluctant to give her much leeway; they felt she had taken the easy way out the past 6 years and now could “suck it up.”

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57. Death is actually the easy, cheap one–for just four or five hundred dollars a year, you can replace the lifetime earning power of your spouse. There is no excuse for a comfortably middle class family not to carry adequate life insurance. Disability is trickier, since you can only affordably get it to cover about 60% of earnings. It would be very disagreeable to have both small dependent children and a disabled spouse who needs constant care and expensive medical treatment while living on 60% of previous income (I don’t know if any government programs apply on top of disability insurance). I haven’t quite figured that one out.
    Divorce is actually simpler, at least in my opinion. To begin with, among educated upper middle class people, it’s actually not as common as people think. For one thing, educated upper middle class people have clued in to the fact that there is no faster road out of the middle class than through divorce court (see “The Two Income Trap”). A bankruptcy (or two) is just about inevitable. The miseries that divorce brings to children in low-conflict marriages are too numerous and well-known to name. And for the parents, total income stays the same, expenses skyrocket, children are difficult (you know how they act when daddy’s out of town for a week?), and there’s no one there to back you up. Ugh. For a couple in their right minds who can get through the day without ripping each others’ heads off, divorce should have no attractions.

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58. Amy P. you describe three categories of expenses: “non-negotiable,” “gray area,” and “first to go.”
    From your non-negotiable list, I do not pay for life insurance (beyond the pittance I get from work), renter’s insurance (if it goes it goes), car payment, car insurance, or gas (I don’t drive; it’s cheaper to walk and take taxis), 401K (is this a pension? I figure I’ll survive on my library card), garbage bill (not required where I live), light bulbs (I switched to the ones that never wear out), Sallie Mae or old credit card debt (I was similarly careful in the past).
    From your gray area I don’t pay for private tuition, internet (I dial up my work place) or cell phone (less necessary than one might think).
    And from your first to go list I only pay for babysitting.
    This leaves lots of money over for good wine and books.

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59. Oonae,
    I’m a non-drinker, so my savings go to iced mochas. Books, on the other hand, I already have more than enough of, and I’m in danger of having to devote a second room to them.
    We actually got our very first car this past summer, after moving to Texas. Up until then we’d lived much as you do with two kids in Washington, DC. Once we had two kids, though, our mobility really went down (installing a car seat into a taxi is a misery, plus you have to haul the thing around with you on outings–multiply that by two and you will never take a taxi with both kids except to the airport). There were over two years when I don’t think I ever left Georgetown with the two kids by myself. Now that we’re in Texas, my husband has a five minute walking commute to his office, and it’s about 9 blocks to the grocery story, so we get on very well with one car. There’s also the security issue in case of emergency evacuations (think of all those carless New Orleans residents). If there had been some major catastrophe while we lived in Georgetown, we would have been reduced to loading up a double jogging stroller with water bottles, juice boxes, crackers, diapers, and baby wipes and heading across the Key Bridge for Northern Virginia (which probably wouldn’t be much better). On the other hand, if you’ve got a car, you’ve always got a place to sleep.
    For things like insurance, my philosophy is “What could go wrong?” and “If something went wrong, how stupid would I feel?” The renter’s insurance is not for little stuff, but to cover replacing our possessions if the house burned down, flooded, one of the trees fell on it, or it got hit by a tornado (we had lightning blast chunks out of our front step a week ago–that could have been a lot worse). Life insurance is really essential for a young family with small children and limited savings, especially a one-income family like our own. As to the 401(k), it’s quite likely that the Social Security system will have collapsed years before it’s our turn to draw benefits, so we Americans need to make other arrangements.
    As to smaller things, I am a SAHM, so if I want internet at home, we need to pay for it. Also, if I were to get rid of phone service, it would be the landline that would go. We could probably live fine with just cell phones, but it feels more secure to have more options. With regard to my old student loans and our old credit cards, I ran those up when I was young and foolish, but on the bright side they should probably be paid off within the year.

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60. Didn’t realize you were a SAHM! So you can do what you do on a single income. That’s great. Sounds like your priorities are pretty straight. I agree that car seats in taxis are a bigger drag than one might think, and I will also buy a car once the daycare bill disappears. It’s a question of trade-offs.

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61. Booster seats are such a glorious liberation, even if the kids are supposed to stay in them until they’re 80 pounds or whatever.

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62. comment deleted due to excessive length

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63. Wow was that long.

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64. Siobhan,
    Since I see that you are still commenting here, I thought I’d drop a comment on this old thread to say that you were clearly right about Peduto. Everything that has happened since then indicates that I was wrong to assume Peduto cut a deal with the machine. Waiting until 2009 looks smarter and smarter. Assuming he runs, I’ll have to switch registration (for the one election) and may do something I’ve never done before, donate money to a politician.

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65. I’ve being researching about Child care and reading your blog, I found your post very helpful 🙂 . I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog!

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