He is rich and has no reference for the price of everyday items
It’s one year of daycare, Michael. What could it cost? $5000?
Think of how many bananas you could buy with $5k.
“It’s raising a child for ~20 years, Michael. What could it cost? 5k?”
Like I’d take it if I’m planning on having a baby anyways. But yeah, it’s an absolutely pathetic amount. And childcare is only going to get more expensive with this fucking administration
It might be enough to cover the delivery hospital fees!
It’s not even gonna cover your ambulance ride to the hospital because your water broke while you were at work.
My experience is that an ambulance ride is in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands. Still terrible but not as terrible
Average ambulance trip in the US is between $950-1300.
Sounds like you got a deal.
Oh you sweet summer child
Are you telling me that hospitals actually charge you for delivering a child?
19000 dollars on average without insurance. Healthcare is a racket. A scam. Don’t trust any of those rat fucks. Get everything in documentation. Kaisers tried to charge me hundreds of dollars at random and when I called them out on it they basically just said “oh our bad”.
Damn fucking right your bad Kaiser. Stupid fucks.
lol, look at this person who doesn’t even US.
Seriously, though, yes. Tens of thousands of dollars. You also have to pay just to get a ride to the hospital (ambulance). You pay for everything.
Yep, quite a lot too. Once baby is out they start getting separate billing too. No, you aren’t reading that wrong. Since we don’t have single payer healthcare the doctors, nurses, drugs, etc are all to be paid for by the patient. Therefore health insurance but insurance wants to make money which means they don’t want to pay so unless you give them more money they have a pretty high limit before they cover things.
This is after improvements by Obama but he compromised too much so not nearly enough has gotten better.
There are some hospitals that charge for you holding your baby
It’s really not, and might not even cover your deductible.
Yeah childcare is gonna be more expensive, but they’ll loosen the regulations so that anybody can be a childcare provider, without any background checks or anything, so more people can charge more money. And no vaccine requirement, so more kids can go. It’s win/win/win. /s
Anybody but trans people you mean
“What could a childcare cost, ten dollars?”
In Canada, yes.
As of February 2025, eight provinces and territories are delivering regulated early learning and child care for an average of $10-a-day or less, and all other jurisdictions have reduced parent fees by at least 50%.l
My friends are paying $1400 a month, I don’t think this is working in Ontario.
Ontario has been extremely stingy on paying out their share of the fees (Program is part funded by federal, rest by provincial), leading to most daycare centres still not registering for the full reduction to $10/day. But most are still reducing their prices from what they were at previously.
Wow way to rub THAT in XD
Just kidding, I love that for y’all. Every parent should have that (or better!)
That’s the goal. Maybe I’m in an exceptional area, but I’m not aware of any parents who are effectively paying $10/day unless their income is low enough to trigger additional benefits.
Still HUGE improvement over the last few years though. I think we had an option for 18$/day if we packed our kid a lunch. Our daycare would feed them for an additional 3$/day. I think overall average care costs have practically halved in the last few years so even if it’s not perfectly universal and perfectly $10, it’s HELLA better. Strong improvement. Honestly a MAJOR factor in trying to figure out the feasibility of having more kids for us.
Just use all that stimulus money we got! When was that? Like 2 or 3 times… 5 years ago… Uh. The poor! They’re stealing all your money!
To be fair, I did have a baby in 2020 and it felt like every other week they sent an extra check for having a baby. 10/10 would recommend.
What’s a baby cost? $5,000?
I can get you one for $4k. No take backs though.
Well, most of a baby. Do you want the front half or
I’ll buy the orange baby man for 4k.
What’s stopping communal childcare from becoming a thing again? This is how working parents did it for thousands of years.
I imagine a mix of the already diminished size of extended family units, and the liability implications if it’s outside your own family unit.
You’re essentially just describing an unlicensed daycare if it’s not a family member, and those exist.
Gotta rebuild our community support networks. There are obstacles but it seems solvable.
Nothing. You can find communities online (I don’t have one to recommend.)
Just remember, for most of history your neighbors were at least distant relatives.
Technically speaking they still are because everyone is a relative.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
The grandparents who would have been available to watch the children are still working at 65 because they can’t afford to retire.
Well luckily this won’t be a problem since we won’t have the money, space of career stability to have kids until we’re 40 anyway. By then they’ll have no choice but to retire.
A lack of communities. Communal child care works great when you live in a village and you know everyone and most people around you are related to you.
We don’t have that anymore. People live in suburbs where they don’t even want to talk to their neighbours. Their relatives live far away, potentially in other provinces/states or even other countries.
Heck, a lot of people don’t even like their own relatives!
Decades of distractions and propaganda to ensure you never speak to your neighbors.
True. Gotta break out of that habit. My friends are starting quarterly block parties in our neighborhood. We can get back to it but we probably need to stop using social media so much.
Also zoning laws helping to destroy walkable “third places.”
Orphan boom.
Orphan to foster care to homeless to prison to free labor pipeline.
How the fuck much are they making that it is still worth it after taking $40k off the top?
I mean anything more than like 60K is still technically making money. If they’re in a place where Childcare costs 40k it is likely they make at least 80k due to the high cost of living or they have more than one child. The poorer people in that area have to use family, friends, and less official care. Federally, parents only get 12wk of unpaid leave.
Child care costs are also tax deductible. Does help a bit.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-and-dependent-care-credit-information
For me, it would have to be at least 80k, otherwise you would effectively be earning less than your daycare provider. You could find one or two kids to watch with your own and effectively be making more money while being there with your child.
It’s probably in NYC or San Fran if that’s for one kid. Both parents could reasonably make 100-200k around there.
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
and of course to be wage slaves
sure, if you need to throw some 4chan jaron into the jumbo that’s fine.
The irony is that these conservatives often can’t afford large families without welfare, the exact things Republicans are cutting. Those give a lot more than onetime 5k payments.
That’s why they’re getting rid of child labor laws. Make them kids earn their way!
They have to ensure that the large families are also poor, thus flooding the armed forces with young people in need of a paycheck with no alternatives.
I wonder how much woke stuff we can get for the purpose of making babies.
Mandated paid maternity leave?
Child tax credit?
Maybe some universal medical coverage for the mothers and children?
What are you, a socialist?
Lmao anyone who thinks this is a lot of money has clearly never raised a child in the recent past. (Let’s say 10-15 years? idk)
$5k is gone, like that
Sadly, I could see this convincing people desperate enough for cash…
Those poor fucking kids.
That’s absolutely what this is for. Uneducated people have more kids; trump lives the uneducated. Those kids grow up to lick their oppressors boot, or end up in the prison system. Either way it’s a win for conservatives.
I saw ads before Christmas incentivizing people to refinance car loans and get cash in hand :<
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
Bay area and I’m sure NYC
When you have 3+ kids that are young.
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 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.
You are right, and my French is showing.
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?
I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!
I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over issues sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.
-
It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
-
Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.
-
That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.
-
After we had our first child we went to some institutions to fill required papers. In the waiting area, there were informational posters everywhere to inform (poor young) people to not get pregnant too early. One read:
A child costs you 160.000€ until it's 18th birthdayit’s? Maybe its? Or their?
Probably neither, seeing as it was most likely not written in English but OP translated it for your benefit.
Shithole state Americans: “One hundred sixty dollars? I’ll take four!”
In my country the government decided to give hundreds of euro each month for 6 years to who have a baby (my friend gets €400/month) but SURPRISE! Birth rate didn’t increase
In Germany it’s something like 260€ per month until the child turns 25 if still in education (university, apprenticeship) (26/27 if the child served one or two years as a soldier or in a social or climate project)
And yeah birth rates didn’t increase either AFAIK
It’s been in place in more or less its current form since 1975, have a graph. Colours are generally for 1-4th child if there’s a fifth one then that’s a tax deduction. Before that there were schemes but they would not kick in for the first child and generally speaking it was even more of a pittance. In primary school, in the 80s, our maths teacher actually did a run-down of how much that money didn’t pay for our new shoes.
That’s West Germany in the east they spent a lot on free daycare which seems to have had much better results. Plenty of states nowadays do have free daycare at least for poor parents, and generally make the fees income-dependent, but the level of service still isn’t anywhere like it was in the GDR where you could also offload school-age kids to the state when they had holidays, summer camps and stuff, but you didn’t. Which isn’t exactly rare kids get more holidays than workers.
Overall, the reason our birthrate is only stabilised at a low level instead of at a reasonable level is because conservatives care more about supporting family models few people want than about solving the issue. Nah not even “conservatives”, it’s specifically Catholic conservatives.
And, no, I’m not advocating for re-introducing the FDJ, blue scarves and everything. How about handing organisations like the Scouts some money so they can offer summer camps for pretty much the cost of food. It’d be mostly money to allow adults to not work while running those camps (that is, extend their holidays) as well as some materiel costs. Increased tent wear.
Accessible social programs for vacations and the like is something we definitely need, if only to stabilise the youth from turning criminal and/or radicalised.
As for your guess that the higher birth rates in the east are due to free child care, I think the fact that flats were handed out preferentially to families with kids was the more significant factor. And that seems to have become something of a normal lifemodel as I still this. Longer education and entry into a stable career is also a big factor.
Yep on second thought I don’t think it’s so much stable career or the availability of childcare as security overall, any way to answer “We can do this for 18 years no matter what” in the positive. And yes that’s where capitalism and CDU bashing of “lazy moochers” strikes hard. Having a different job every six months and occasionally none would be right up many people’s alley if it didn’t put you into all sorts of economic trouble.
And the “we can do this for 18 years no matter what” thing was easy in the GDR: Don’t do things the Stasi doesn’t like, done. The SED went to great lengths ensuring that if you kept your head down, and push come to shove are willing to fill a hole another is digging (because duty to work), you really didn’t have to worry.
Similarly, I went out to eat and offered them a crisp dollar bill. Surprise! They didn’t serve me.
That’s € 28 800 btw, to compare to Drumpf’s measly 5000.
Anyhow, same here and afaik it continues in some form or other until they’re 18?
#/media/Datei:Kindergeld_monatlich.png){kind=link}