“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
Wow way to rub THAT in XD
Just kidding, I love that for y’all. Every parent should have that (or better!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why they’re getting rid of child labor laws. Make them kids earn their way!
Yes, we’re aware. But they can’t even do that right. They’re still too greedy to properly implement their own plans
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
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
It might be enough to cover the delivery hospital fees!
Oh you sweet summer child
Are you telling me that hospitals actually charge you for delivering a child?
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.
There are some hospitals that charge for you holding your baby
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.
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.
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.
Guess so.
FWIW the delivery of each of my children cost roughly $1800. We had no complications and I have pretty good insurance. That said, 3 days after my first was born we had to take him in for UV treatment. That cost $7000 for the pleasure of sitting under a UV light for 2 days.
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
easyto 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…
When you have 3+ kids that are young.
Oh there will be a boom of… abandoned babies for the fostercare system.
See: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania
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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.
It costs $40k/year for daycare. Start handing out $5k to moms, daycare now costs $45k/year.
It blows my mind that so many people don’t understand this concept.
They already hand out 3k a year for kids, up to 6k, as well as up to 5k in credits available based on how much you spend and your income level. And I live in Jersey, where everything is expensive, and we were ranked fifth most expensive place to have kids in daycare, and even with two kids in I didn’t pay 40k. Not sure we even cracked 30k, but it was probably close.
EDIT: Info is dated, good thing I have an accountant. Looks like it’s 2k per kid, and the 3/6k is for dependent care credits, which applies from 35% to 20% based on your tax bracket (goes down the more you make).
In Germany the parents (and later, the children themselves) receive a little over 250€ per month until the child is 25 or finished an apprenticeship or uni.
Germany has a very low birth rate.
Edit: copy of a text where I laid out the benefits we get in a similar discussion:
In Germany we have protection of pregnant people from when their doctor deems them unfit for work until delivery – continued payment of full wages. Two months after delivery with 70% wages and 12 months to split between both parents, which can be taken together and stretched by taking half the money for twice as long. Until your child is six you may (with some exceptions) take unpaid leave for parenting. Your employer has to keep your position for you. Childcare from 1 till school is affordable (ca. 250€/M). Healthcare is paid as a percentage from your income (ca. 15%) and has very little extra cost. You get 250€ per child per month just for having a child. Tax credits. If you are still struggling: Assistance for rent, school materials, clothing and more.
We have (compared to the US) pretty solid workers protection laws. We have a (not great but you won’t starve) state pension. We have unemployment benefits, that don’t run out (conditions apply). We don’t have the weird Japanese shut-in young men on a scale that’s worth a mention.
We also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Yes, the oppressiveness of a capitalist society is a factor – Germany is far from free of that, and getting worse. But compared to the US we should be popping out babies like crazy. But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education, that afaik are the most decisive influences of a low birth rate.
But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education
Hey, so, funny story about what MAGA is working hard to eliminate…
I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.
Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.
Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.
Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.
I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.
I don’t think you need to own your own place to call it a home. Having grown up in East Germany, most kids I went to school with didn’t grow up in a house their parents owned. It’s different in the countryside, but in the city I grew up in easily >90% rented.
It would be nicer though, for sure. For me it’s also not on my financial horizon to ever own a house or flat.
I’m with you on everything else. The question remains: leave for where? Everywhere is going to shit.
I apologize, I think we’re getting tripped up on terminology.
Where ever you live, you are correct in believing you should strive to make that a home. Make a community, make a place of comfort and security and artistic energy etc. But that’s not what I mean.
Owning your place allows you the freedom to make your home better in a way that renting it doesn’t. How many people with they could add AC to their flat but can’t because the landlord doesn’t want them to? How many people wish they could add solar panels to their roof but can’t because the landlord doesn’t pay the electricity bill and therefore doesn’t care if it’s inefficient? How many people want to renovate a bathroom, tear down a wall, install permanent fixtures or shelves, etc etc but can’t because they don’t have permission or the rights to the place they live in?
The relationship between landlord and renter is one whose major purpose is to drain money from the poor to the wealthy. I don’t really wanna turn this into a rant against landlords, but they should be outlawed or taxed out of existence. Landlords are deincentivized to improve their properties, they are deincentivized to help you make your house a home, they are deincentivized to charge you the cost of that housing. The system should be abolished.
Going back to your ancedote, relativity is not a good measurement of objective truth. The fact that most people didn’t own their homes where you grew up doesn’t change the fact that that meant they were losing money every year, that they weren’t building wealth every year. Things should be improved based on and towards objective truths/metrics - not comparatively to bad examples. The US has worse public transit - does that means we shouldn’t strive for better train networks and services? It’s illegal to be a homosexual in Singapore - does that mean we should allowed gay rights to worsen simply because they’ll still have it better than other countries?
I make this point because this argument of relativity often hinders progress. Humans are creatures of relativity and if we allow our systems to be judged relative to others we will make progress slower than is possible (and arguably necessary).
You should be able to own a home. You should be able to own a home within the first 5 years of working at least and it shouldn’t cost you a loan that’ll last a lifetime. Housing shouldn’t be an ever growing cost. We can make this the reality if we vote correctly and hold our politicians accountable (and our neighbors).
If the CDU/SPD/AFD remain in power there will be plenty of countries that are at a similar quality of life and that are improving or worsening at a slower rate. Some country will eventually crack the code of taxing the wealthy and banning landlords and focusing on the working class (the 99%). It’s only a matter of time. The goal is just to avoid needing a WW to get us there.
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You can have practically free housing. Just buy this for 18500 euros.
https://www.rumah123.com/properti/batam/hos19254242/?price-unit-type=metersquare
Or do you want… free stuff while also having people invest capital in your area?
I don’t think it works that way.
Best we can do is tax your labour and redistribute it.
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Your great grandfather lived in a place worse than the house I showed you. Batam in Indonesia is a pretty nice place. Been there, liked it quite a lot.
It’s not really housing material that is expensive. It’s labour, taxes and the land to build on.
The building land in my and my brother’s portfolio is valued at 400k euros. Just a piece of land. Good investment right? Belgium’s economy could have gone to utter shit the past few decades and it would be a worthless piece of land.
Can you force us to sell it? Perhaps. It’s used as a garden.
Imagine we put an apartment on it and have economic immigrants rent in it. Then randomly these economic immigrants would own the place?
Well, aight. Then I go to Switzerland and go rent a place and own it as well. I don’t think it will work out well. Basically it would halt globalisation and migration would no longer be viable.
Which sucks, because nobody here wants to have kids anymore.
You’re saying extremist things so you need to think them through.
Aight. Renting is outlawed. You can’t speculate on building land anymore. What happens now?
Developments halt because these people have a lower amount of capital. Lower amount of capital means lower economies of scale. Lower quality buildings. Worse for energy usage. Bad usage of space.
Orphan boom.
Orphan to foster care to homeless to prison to free labor pipeline.
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.
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.
I don’t see a clear association in saying a baby is worth $5,000 when existing tax law says a baby is worth $2,000 off your taxes. It’s an incentive, not a bill of sale.
Drops back down to $1000 for 2025 unless the increase is extended. A $5000 payout is actually less of a payout than just extending the current CTC.
First you need to take out taxes, then you can budget with what’s leftover.
No one making $80k a year has $80k to spend unless they’re a drug dealer.
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.
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?
Similarly, I went out to eat and offered them a crisp dollar bill. Surprise! They didn’t serve me.
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 tell people to not get pregnant too early. One read:
A child costs you 160.000 € until its 18th birthdayShithole state Americans: “One hundred sixty dollars? I’ll take four!”
Thats a very low estimate, although maybe its different in a country with ant semblencr of public healthcare. I’ve always heard $1,000,000
it’s? Maybe its? Or their?
Probably neither, seeing as it was most likely not written in English but OP translated it for your benefit.
How the fuck much are they making that it is still worth it after taking $40k off the top?
It’s probably in NYC or San Fran if that’s for one kid. Both parents could reasonably make 100-200k around there.
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.
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