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Notes -
Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.
Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not? The payment is certainly not ideal, perhaps an argument could be made for support working parents as well. But I think this is at least on the right track. We hear people complain about the cost of raising children all the time, (though I suspect this isnt a genuine complaint for most - many who are saying this probably wouldn't have children even if the cost were $0) but I think this may encourage the few who do actually think like this to go through and continue with more.
My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.
I think that if anything, this is even underestimated. For instance the cost for educating students in K-12 system ranges for $12k in Mississippi to $32k in New York per year. So in a sense if some family does homeschooling with children having regular retesting, they should get the same support - as in such a case the family literally saves tens of thousands of dollars for taxpayer. And I'd like to see the tests having the same standards as let's say lower quartile in public schools. By the way with the current results of let's say New York public schools, 40%+ of students would fail if they were homeschooled.
Now we live in an insane system where we need dual income family, where the salary of a women with three children does not even cover the cost of their preschool or K-12 education, and the result is that there is almost 50/50 chance that they will score well belove the required grade level. The efficiency is horrendous. I think this proposal goes well in hand with age old starve the beast proposals.
Something like 6% of Americans are homeschooled now. 30% of moms are stay-at-home. Assuming all homeschoolers have one of those moms, that’s still only 1 in 5 who are getting out of the public school system. Incentivizing more births will mostly add more kids to public schools.
Now, I think this is going to incentivize stay-at-home parents before it actually incentivizes more kids, since the money is coming from subsidies for working parents. So out of every 5 parents it takes out of the workforce, maybe 1 of them will put in the effort to homeschool.
On the gripping hand, a flat payout is regressive. Do you think homeschooling is more popular amongst high-powered corporate types or part-time convenience-store clerks?
You are arguing the current situation. If you are a family with two or three children, the cost is $24k-$96k per year for schooling for a taxpayer just for K-12 system. You are forced to work, but one parent is working entirely to pay just the official schooling costs. If you decided to homeschool, now you have worst of the both worlds: you pay taxes and you forego one income in the family. Of course only some people can afford it, mostly driven how terrible the school is. Moving children out of that system makes homeschooling more advantageous on the margin, which actually saves taxpayer money.
Of course there is more in it. If you have stay at home mum, you save on other costs such as cooking and delivery, cleaning plus the person can still do some gig or part-time work, especially via unofficial channels such as bartering. On top of that you have other advantages: my wife researched discounts, she researched obscure government dotation schemes not even related to kids. It takes time and effort to do that and in fact saved us a lot of money. The whole system is incredibly perverse.
Yes, the current system is messy and perverse. Elizabeth Warren was right about some stuff.
I’m saying that this kind of subsidy for single-income families will not get them to pull their kids out of public school. They will mostly take the payout and keep collecting the $24k of public daycare.
Worse, the proposed funding source is currently earmarked for two-income families. Some of them will lose benefits, quit their jobs, pay less in taxes, and keep their kids in public school. Lose-lose.
If the Republicans conditioned this payout on homeschooling, and combined it with sweeping cuts to make public school even less appealing, you would get more people out of the system. But they aren’t doing that. The President has approximately zero incentive to court the small government faction, which is why he’s bombing Iran and subsidizing his cronies.
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IME homeschooling is fairly middle class- the poorer people trying it tend to be pushed into the public school system or charters as a cheaper alternative, while the wealthy tend to bail out by paying lots of money for private schools that fit their particular educational philosophy. And make no mistake- the vast majority of homeschoolers are not doing this out of a commitment to 'education freedom' or 'children's rights' or even really opposition to systems.
Of course it is, as I argued above it is because it is worse from the both systems. You still pay taxes for public schools but opt out for every single benefit starting from free lunch to free babysitting basically. For lower middle class or poor there is no real choice, they either put their children into public schools or lose half of their dual income including taxes that is there to support the necessities.
The proposal is there to at least partially offset this. How insane it is to have $20k taxpayer money per year to educate 6-10 year old children on basic things, while the school system fails to teach them anything. You can pay $10k to parents, have them organize pods and the rest and check if the results are at least comparable to public schools. Government saves half the costs on taxes and children stay with their mothers and pods.
By the way there is also another alternative for more business savvy people. Just fund one of the famous "learing centers". Rake in money from public funding, give parents some kickback and just profit not only from "education" but also from free lunches and the rest of it. That is the no-brainer arbitrage of the current insane system. People are up in arms and disgusted when they find such a fraudulent schemes by Somalis or other communities in Minnesota who do that under veneer of leftist blind eye policy. But this is literally what is right now happening in the public school system such as New York: just huge money siphoning scheme where teachers, teacher pensioners and various contractors extract money while not teaching kids reading or math and not even giving any kickback to parents. That is the true travesty.
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