It's very expensive to raise
a child in the US. I knew it was going to be
expensive, but I didn't know it was going to be that
expensive. The free market works well
in many different sectors, but child care is not one
of them. Sending an infant to
daycare in many places across the country is
actually more expensive than in-state public tuition to
send them to college. When we looked it up, it
turned out our daughter's daycare was more than
Stanford's tuition. We didn't really start to
dig into it until we had a baby and I was on maternity
leave. And then the numbers really
started to hit home and it was like, how are we going
to do this? Many Americans are
struggling to make ends meet. More than 12.5
million children in the U.S. live in poverty. Even
middle-class families are increasingly struggling to
pay for everyday expenses. We stopped saving any money
altogether. We were living paycheck to
paycheck every month to pay rent in the Bay Area and
pay for child care. In this country, we don't
have comprehensive policies and so that means we are
working with piecemeal programs to try to help
people make ends meet. I think the United States
has just been very reluctant, very
conservative, when it comes to these kind of family
policies. Improving the social safety
net, lowering the overall cost of raising children in
this country is both the right thing to do for
American families and the smart thing to do for our
entire American economy. The fundamental issue is not
that we don't know what to do. We know the children
need stability. The way to get to stability
is making sure families have sufficient resources and
sufficient time. If we know what to do, how
do we pay for it? Here's why it's so expensive
to raise kids in the U.S. and which policies could
help Americans. My name is Jeniece. I am a mother of two
children, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And we live right outside
San Francisco. I'm Darren Geeter. I'm a
producer for CNBC and recently just had my first
kid, my daughter Alma. Basically, I've been on
paternity leave for the last eight weeks, so I'm halfway
through. Everything is very expensive
in New Jersey. People always warn you
there's going to be a ton of stuff that you need to buy
for the baby, whether it comes with diapers or
wipes. And we didn't necessarily
understand how much we have to buy. If we had had two kids in
full time daycare, it would have been a lot more than
rent. So that's why it just
absolutely wasn't an option. And when we looked at the
numbers for full-time nannies in the San
Francisco area, they all charge about 80 grand a
year. We don't have concrete plans
of what we're going to do with child care because we
know that child care can range anywhere from $1,000
a month or some where it could be like paying a
double rent. The average family with at
least one child under the age of five typically
spends around 13% of the family's income on child
care, according to a September 2021 Treasury
Department report. That's about one out of
every $8. That's more than what the
average household spends on groceries and nearly double
what the government considers affordable for
low-income families. Even before the COVID-19
pandemic, the median black family with two kids was
spending roughly 56% of their annual income on
child care, a bigger share than any other racial
group. And of course, we know
during COVID, for all families, child care
centers, school closures were forcing parents to pay
for child care in ways that they never had had to
before. For over 20 years, the
Economic Policy Institute has produced something
called the Family Budget Calculator. And in that, we
look at basic expenses across the country:
housing, child care if you have kids, healthcare,
transportation, food, other incidentals, like household
items, and your taxes. One of the things we
noticed when we were doing this about four or five
years ago is that child care became more expensive than
rent in many places across the country. The most recent report
released by the Department of Agriculture in 2015
estimated that for a middle-income household
with two parents and two children, it would cost
more than $233,600 to raise a child from birth through
age 17. And that's in 2015 dollars. With inflation, that number
translates to almost $286,000 in 2022. The report calculated it
would cost the hypothetical family of four anywhere
from $9,330 to $23,380 per child in one year. This range depends on the
age of the child and income of the parents. Adjusting
for inflation, that range in 2022 would be between about
$11,400 and $28,600. But adjusting for inflation
may not be enough. Child care costs have
actually outpaced inflation. Child care prices surpassed
annual inflation by nearly 4 percentage points in
2020, and that was before the worst of the pandemic
inflation woes. And that data is based on
middle-class, two-parent households. Just think
about what that cost looks like when we're talking
about single parents, or if we're talking about
families of color on the struggling end of the
racial wealth gap in this country. I'd say we're middle class
for the area we're living in. I actually am not sure
how some people get by living in the Bay Area that
make less than my husband and I do. We cannot wait
until next year because one of our children is going to
public school next year and we might finally be able to
start saving some money again. Families that are right on
the poverty line on average, if they're white in this
country, have $18,000 of net worth. Families at the
poverty line, if they're black in this country, on
average have at or below $0 in net worth. Just think
about what that $18,000 difference means to parents
when their second-grader falls off the monkey bars
and they're facing unanticipated medical
costs. Policymakers acted very
swiftly in the pandemic and enacted policies that had
tangible positive results for workers and their
families. We do a lot of family
supports through the tax code, and the most
prominent example here is something called the Child
Tax Credit. The Child Tax Credit allows
parents to deduct a certain amount of money from their
taxes at the end of each year. That amount depends
on several factors: household income, how many
children someone has, and the age of the children. The Child Tax Credit,
enacted in 1997 with broad bipartisan support, was
enacted in response to slow wage growth, higher cost of
living, and a growing tax burden for average
households. It was enacted to help reduce the tax
burden on families with children. To help reduce
the cost of raising kids. Congress temporarily
expanded the policy during the pandemic. Bill, as amended, is passed. The tax credit was raised to
$3,000 a year for children between six and 17 years
old and jumped to $3,600 a year for children five and
under. And for at least half of the
year it was paid out monthly. So both a kind of
substantial boost in value and this monthly payment. So you're not waiting till
the end of when you file taxes the next year to get
it. And that provided a solid
safety net to try to help families really make ends
meet during those tough times. And it helped reduce
hunger in families, very tangible results of those
kinds of programs. In 2021 alone, the expanded
Child Tax Credit was estimated to lift 4.1
million children above the poverty line and to reduce
the number of children in poverty by more than 40%. People who have children,
you know, that's work that families are doing and it's
work that they're doing on behalf of all of us. So this is a way to try to
support families doing that work that allows them to
choose for themselves how best to spend the money to
invest in their children. The pandemic's expanded
legislation expired in 2021. As of 2022, the tax credit
is back to its pre-pandemic levels, which maxes out at
$2,000 per child with the parents of younger children
receiving a larger subsidy. It's kind of a way to
subsidize or support parents, but it typically
has not included very low income parents. We've
excluded parents who don't have earnings, parents with
disabilities or, for other reasons that aren't in the
labor force. From the time it was enacted
until last year's temporary expansion, the Child Tax
Credit was actually not made available in full to 50% of
black children and families because their family's
income were too low. It's important to me, I
think, that we have a Child Tax Credit that is not
connected to a work requirement. To me, the
Child Tax Credit is paying for the work of being a
parent, which is work that benefits us all. To attach additional work
requirements to that, sort of undermines this intent
of helping families in a way that makes sense for them. There are two other policies
that economists and other experts advocate for when
it comes to helping families: subsidized child
care and paid family leave. These policies go hand in
hand because paid family leave means parents can
stay home and take care of their children themselves. The U.S. is the only OECD
country that does not have a federal paid leave program. Less than a quarter of U.S. workers have access to paid
family leave by their employer. There is a law on the books
at the federal level that requires employers to allow
parents to take unpaid leave up to 12 weeks as long as
the private employer has 50 or more employees. When it's unpaid, it's not
really an option. It's not really a choice
that many families can take across this country. And it's not just
low-income families. There are many
middle-income families that are living paycheck to
paycheck that simply can't afford to take leave how it
is now. What we see is that black
families, Latino families, Native American families,
workers are less likely to be able to afford unpaid
leave from work than white workers, again reflecting
and enhancing racial economic disparities across
the board. There are some states and
localities that have passed paid family and medical
leave, and that provides for paid parental leave as one
component of that, to make sure that workers actually
have the option to take that leave. Each state with paid family
and medical leave sets its laws up differently. But
typically, the law requires employers to provide
workers with up to 12 weeks of fully or partially paid
leave per year. The programs are often
funded by payroll taxes from workers, with some states
also requiring employers to contribute. Paternity leave, for me, was
16 weeks and that's full 100% salary. I wouldn't be able to do
what we're doing without any kind of leave. One of the issues with
childcare in the U.S. is it's a patchwork system. We have programs that fully
subsidize for eligible children at child care
programs like Head Start and some state preschool. We have tax credits that
subsidize a portion of child care costs for higher
income families. And when we also have block
grants to states to help them expand access. And the problem with all of
these systems is that with this multitude of
approaches, we're not getting close to
universality or affordability, we're not
helping the workers in these sectors, and we're not
doing enough on quality. There's a lot of value in
having states move forward and do these kind of
programs, but ultimately to have it be something that's
available to everybody everywhere, you need the
federal government to be willing to make these kind
of investments in care infrastructures. There are so many moments
that I would have missed if it was back in the day
where fathers would get like two weeks. And those are
some things that I will cherish for the rest of my
life. Now we get a break. President Biden tried to
address all of these policies at the federal
level with his Build Back Better infrastructure bill
that he proposed even before he entered the White House. The president doesn't talk a
lot about the Build Back Better bill, but that was
his proposal that included things like an expanded
Child Tax Credit, like a near universal child care
program that would have capped the amount of income
people had to pay toward child care. It included a
paid leave type program, really included these big
building blocks of a better family support program that
ran into opposition from one key Democrat, Senator Joe
Manchin, in West Virginia. One of the things that I
think is important is that we think about rebalancing
our investments toward children because it pays
for itself. If we were to rebalance
federal investments away from senior citizens and
toward children, not only would raising a child be
more affordable in the U.S., but the children would have
sufficient resources, their parents would be better
able to think about how they want to spend their time,
whether it's that extra hour at work or an extra hour
playing with their kids. All of those things become
possible if we rebalance federal spending toward
kids. We know that investing in
our children has a multiplier effect. What it means for those
children's families, what it means for those children in
adulthood, and what it means for the entire economy just
have incredible ripple effects. And so investing
in children actually impacts Americans of all ages in
addition to our entire economy.
Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalismⒶ☭
⚠ Announcements: ⚠
Any post that makes a claim must have a RELIABLE source or explanation in the comments by OP. All screenshots must have the original source (whether article, Tweet, TikTok, video or any other social media) linked in the comments by OP immediately. Breaking this rule will result in a temporary ban. See this post for more info.
NEW POSTING GUIDELINES! Help us by reporting bad posts
Help us keep this subreddit alive and improve its content by reporting posts that violate our rules and guidelines.
Subscribe to our new partner subreddits!
Check out r/WhereAreTheChildren
Please remember that LSC is a SAFE SPACE for socialist discussion.
LSC is run by communists. We welcome socialist/anti-capitalist news, memes, links, and discussion. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
This subreddit is a safe space; we have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. We also automatically filter out posts containing certain words and phrases that some users may find offensive. Please respect the safe space, and don't try to slip banned words or phrases past the filter.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Single, childless dude here that got a vasectomy. 10/10 Would recommend.
Capitalism is a failed system.
Step 1. Dont have kids. Step 2. Profit
Maybe once the upper class starts running out of cheap labor to exploit they'll do something about it being too expensive to have kids.
J/k, they'll just bring back serfdom or something.
And yet, child care centers pay their workers like crap. Often minimum or close to it.