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I'll say one thing, this is a beautiful example of how modern "conservativism" has completely erased itself in pursuit of nonsense cultural war grievances and virtue signaling. They're taking already appropriated money set aside for working parents meant to encourage them to be productive members of society and putting it into doing the exact opposite and promoting welfare dependency. Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches? That's crazy. But of course, socialist welfare thought is the default now, we can all just coast off the rich if we ban trade, nationalize their companies, give infinite subsidies (especially to the old), and keep ramping up on debt.
But ok maybe birthrates would be worth it, but this is a policy that is very unlikely to actually promote any new childbirths, given the failure of similar ideas wherever they've been tried.
So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?
If Alice is paid less than the cost of daycare for working, would do a better job than the daycare, and would prefer spending time with her own children to spending time at work, then working that job is not economically efficient. Subsidizing paid childcare is thus an obvious example of creating economic inefficiency, and the stay-at-home parents who get screwed by their exclusion have understandably been complaining. (Subsidizing childcare in general isn't necessarily inefficient because the average person creates net-positive externalities which parents aren't paid for because it's illegal and impractical to sell your children into slavery or take out loans against their future earnings. Thus the job of creating people suffers from underinvestment.)
Now, it is possible that subsidizing daycare but not stay-at-home parents served a beneficial purpose despite the obvious economic inefficiency. The average first-world person has net-positive externalities but lots of people do not. I assume that is what some of the backlash against "welfare-queen"-enabling policies was, not just enabling people to be net-negative to societal productivity but paying them to create more people who will likely also be net-negative in a fashion that is obviously unsustainable because somebody has to actually pay taxes. Proposals to increase the fertility rate often take the form of reducing taxes rather than direct payments for this reason. However the new proposal would require that the spouse be working 35+ hours a week, which might be sufficient to make it net-positive despite it cutting out at higher income levels.
Daycares actually take care of multiple children at once. I know, quite surprising isn't it?
Even for the youngest infants in my state of NC it's a 5x efficiency gain. Past 2 years old it's 10x. Maybe you don't think it's worth it, but framing it as cancelling out is incorrect. The entire premise of your comment falls into pieces with that basic fact.
We have a much better way of measuring whether it cancels out than the number of children per carer: the number of dollars. If some of the dollars instead go to "the construction workers who built the daycare building" and "the daycare administrators who handle the legal issues and overhead of taking care of other people's children" that doesn't represent an increase in efficiency. If anything having a lower carer to child ratio will on average correspond to lower quality (not to mention differences like how on average carers care less than parents do), so if daycare costs more than Alice's job pays she is paying more for lower quality. Rather than deciding on Alice's behalf that daycare must be more efficient because it has more children, we can let her compare her wages to the cost of daycare (not to mention other factors like how much she likes her job) and decide for herself. Except that, by subsidizing paid childcare, we distort this comparison and end up paying her to take the economically less efficient option. Equally subsidizing childcare whether she does it herself or pays a daycare to do it removes this distortion, letting her once again decide for herself based on her individual situation which is the best option.
Like a lot of pricing issues in the US, a lot of the costs are from unnecessary regulations, like the rather famous example of food preparation extending so far it might even cover peeling a banana.
An argument of economic inefficiency because of regulation isn't a rebuttal at all, the answer is clear and obvious to stop driving up costs. Construction especially is well proven to not have to be nearly as expensive as it. It's the same logic behind saying Mamdani's grocery store might be better than the private alternatives cause they won't deal with taxes and other costs but also duh yeah if the private alternatives are being handicapped then it's not a fair fight to begin with.
If the problem is government, you can't argue the only solution is more government. And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.
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Not to mention how many of the daycare dollars are "wasted" because the child is sick and thus forced to stay home to avoid spreading the infection, which is usually not reimbursed despite the child not being cared for by the daycare.
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They're taking money already appropriated set aside, and sending it to their supporters instead of their opponents.
I don't see the problem. Sure, I'd like to cut the appropriation, but that's not on the table, so between the options 1) do nothing and 2) do this, I'll take 2.
Republican supporters are jobless leeches, and democrat supporters are working parents? Interesting claim but perhaps.
I suspect the median recipient is a nonvoter.
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Assuming you arent being sarcastic - Cmon, SAHP aren't leeches. Having and raising a child in a loving marriage to adulthood is a worthy and valid contribution. You cant have people working if there are no people to start with. How are stay at home moms/dads not "contributing"?
Being paid welfare by the government to stay at home instead of working is the literal definition of a leech here.
This is almost certainly not driving anyone out of the workforce- the amount is simply too low.
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What if you're being paid by the government to increase tax revenue in future years? Leech or nah?
They're not paying for people to have kids in general, they're paying people to stay home and not work. If you wanna go down that route, then we should question why have requirements for any welfare parents of a child receive.
And that's all assuming it works, which there is scarce evidence it does.
Doesn't the policy very specifically pay people to stay home and take care of kids? Isn't the specific policy about paying some people to take care of kids instead of other people?
I'm not sure that I actually like the actual policy (because among other things means-testing these programs create serious welfare traps that I think are bad) but I think I can see some important practical and in-principle differences from paying people to stay home and not work.
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Do you use this description for any other category of people being paid welfare by the government to sit at home not working? Or only married mothers?
The phrase "not working" is doing a lot of work here, pun not intended. Taking care of children below a certain age is work.
It's work, of course. But it's not bringing external money into the family unit, so it functions as avoidance of consumption (external child care providers) rather than income. Perhaps we should impute the income of the SAHM and tax them on it, then we can call it work in the external sense. (I kid, I kid)
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Yes of course, if they're being paid money to sit at home and not work then they are literally leeches. Heck this program is extra leech since it's being funded by taking from one currently going to working parents.
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The money is being redirected from working parents.
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SAHM are productive members of society. Working in corporate and making line go up is not the only productive use of a human, and raising children is in the top percentage of non-fake jobs one can have.
If, for any given woman, being a SAHM is more productive than what she would be doing working then society ought to be willing to compensate her such that she should prefer being a SAHM to working. Pretty rarely see any proposal like this in practice, though.
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Sitting at home watching soap operas and scrolling tiktok while helicopter parenting your children away from learning basic responsibilities and competence is not productive.
Parents already spend more time with their children now. So much that in many ways it's to the detriment of the kids! My parents used to go out and play when they were young, now children can't even walk to a nearby pond in gated communities. I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!
We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college!
It's a lose lose lose. This welfare society drains money from productive members, encourages welfare leeching, and cripples the growth of our youth even more.
This is absurdly uncharitable. I'm sure you can find women who are shirking responsibility and ruining their kids, but there are far more women who would do right by their kids given the chance to do so. Besides that, someone has to raise the kids, and their parents are going to do a much better job, on average, than daycare operators or teachers.
We already do spend more time with our kids than previous generations. The very basis that current parents aren't "given the chance to do so" is factually wrong.
Am I supposed to believe that the silent gen/baby boomer/Gen x parents were all just unloving and bad? No, I don't think that's the case.
What we do see however is overparenting. Helicopter parents who won't even let their tweens go to another aisle in a grocery store, who simply wouldn't let their teenagers out of sight in a mall even if malls were still a thing, people who show up and do their kids laundry in university! I had a great 25-26 year old intern fresh graduate who still had her mother trying to butt in once when something happened at my work. She's lucky I'm very forgiving and understanding of her situation and I know that she was embarrassed about it too (I even helped her find a better living situation) but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that.
If I was a typical boss and wasn't well aware of how helicopter parenting was harming children and their independence already I might not have been as kind to her as I was, and she might have been stuck unable to free herself for even longer as she lost job after job because she got stuck with a crazy mother. This shit is getting far more common. Kids need more freedom and independence so they can grow and thrive, not even more time being dependent on their mommies and daddies.
Which is about children under eighteen and explicitly controls for children under five. Helicopter parenting a 16 year old and taking care of a 2 year old are not the same thing, even if they both are literally "spend time with kids".
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I'm not talking about people not spending time with their kids, and I have no idea why you are going on that road. I'm saying that someone has to be around to keep an eye on little kids. You need to change diapers if they are young enough, make them some food for lunch, etc. None of this requires the type of helicopter parenting you are bringing up out of nowhere. But it does require someone to be home, and many parents feel that they can't afford to have only one income in the household.
How do you think that sort of thing can be measured besides time spent with the children?
Yeah, I'm a parent myself I'm well aware of this. Both me and my wife even took extended leave off for our children so we could spend the first year or so which we are fortunate enough to have saved up enough to do. But even then we still had daycare and stuff for them! Even at that very young age it is good for the children to have time away from us learning to navigate the world of other adults and their peers.
My kids are far more dependable and mature than many of the other children in parents groups I've taken a part in and that's because we are not coddling. And our kids are still less independent than what my own parents experienced in their youth, in part because we don't have the freedom to send them on errands and such. There needs to be less parenting among many of these families, not more.
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This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society? This argument is so lacking I can't help but feel you are actually setting up a strawman argument in favor of the $9K SAHM subsidy.
No, and I'm doubting your reading ability here that you think I'm giving her as an example of welfare leeching and not as an example of how society is coddling children through demands of overparenting given the surrounding context of my paragraph about that exact topic. Only the youngest of children need a 24/7 helicopter watch team over them, and yet we're extending it out to tweens not even going to other aisles in a grocery store.
This "parenting" is the exact opposite of productive, and we need less of it.
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