Minister for the bravely coupled portfolios of women and finance wants the state to raise children:
If women’s workforce participation matched men, we would increase GDP by 8.7 per cent or $353 billion by 2050.” – Katy Gallagher
There is no other logical interpretation of this call to, effectively, phase out full-time motherhood.
My wife doesn’t want to work. She wants to stay at home with the kids.
How Marxist.
Notice how everything dear to the left doesn’t work – unless children are made to suffer?
How long before it occurs to the extremists that totally removing children from their parental influence makes them easier to manipulate?
CL has never heard of day care centres.
no-one is forced to use day care centres and most are private.
Non Mentis
CL has never heard of day care centres.
no-one is forced to use day care centres and most are private.
And they would be much less popular if they were not subsidised. Perhaps you could offer a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the child care system? Or would that tax the intellectual limits of a pre-school failure?
Personally, I have always been opposed to taxpayer subsidised child care.
The owners of child care centres must have dollar signs in their eyes
à la Scrooge McDuck, at the sight of governments literally throwing money at them.
Long day care is a curse for children and parents alike. Children catch every disease known to man and some yet to be discovered by science, they suffer badly from mental fatigue of a longer than working hours exposure to a non home environment.
Children with minimal exposure to long day care but a good traditional pre school and stable home environment do far better in the short and long term.
Out of school tutoring is done by commercial entities too, that doesn’t make that whole edifice a healthy one either.
If that happened, the birthrate would almost certainly decline fairly dramatically, thus giving the lie to her claim.
Anyone putting their kids in daycare needs to be arrested for child abuse.
It’s not possible to get a loan for a house on an average single adult’s wage.
There used to be cheap daycare available in various forms … larger households where grandma is available to keep an eye on the kids … daycare mums getting small money for having a few of the local kids over on a casual basis … part-time mums pairing up and sharing the kids while the other one works.
All of this has been messed up by government interferance … grandma is in a nursing home and can’t have visitors, the daycare industry is regulated up the whazoo and you need a PhD … in the UK mums have been busted for looking after each other’s children without a license.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216220/Mothers-banned-looking-children.html
Everything is screwed up by too much government.
So yeah, people are forced to use a service they don’t want when alternatives are made unavailable.
It takes a whole village to raise a communist.
Agreed Tel, I’d add another factor is the expectation that people complete extended tertiary study and securing a career before children, this means that by the time they have children, some of the traditional family options for childcare are not available, there has also been a significant trend toward grand parents not making themselves available for the kind of consistent duty required to support working parents.
The subsidy of child care has not resulted in cheaper care, it has resulted in mandated quotas to increase the number of workers. That has fixed precisely nothing.
How long before the recalcitrant fascist vegetables who want to be full-time mothers are packed off to reeducation camps to cure them? If they are in a heterosexual marriage they are living the one thing that now counts as a deviant pervert lifestyle.
There’s a very simple and effective way to “subsidise” children/childcare without artificially increasing the cost of outsourced providers (in their various forms) – the inevitable result of mismanaged government “assistance”.
You simply apply the tax-free threshold to families (instead of individuals); ie a family with a stay-at-home parent gets the tax-free component applied twice for the income earner – one for each of them. Maybe even a little extra per child.
Then, it is up to the family, which has an appreciably increased net income, to make its own cost-benefit decision on whether a second income makes sense after consideration of any childcare expenses that might apply.
Simples. No need for the government to setup monumental boondoggles to solve problems that they created. No need for the anguish of “underpaid” childcare workers and the torment of not enough PHD places so these highly qualified and undervalued members of society can change soiled nappies, and miseducate/mistreat them in the ways of gender fluidity.
But we all know, if there is $100 of income on the table, rather than take $15 and run the country as efficiently as possible (their actual job), leaving $85 for the family to take care of themselves in the pursuit of their best lives, liberty, and happiness, the cartel (aka gubbermint) would MUCH rather take $60 and give you back $30 dollars in “services” ($15-$20 you probably don’t need or want), and ensure they get “their cut” of course. $30 (probably a gross underestimate) just for being “better” than us – they’re worth it, you know.
Australia: a techno-kleptocracy with a population of sheep that cannot seem to shake of its obsequious, penal-colonial past. “Citizens” that prefer to outsource their thinking, liberty, and responsibility to the state – it’s just easier than all this freedom rubbish.
GDP is more of an indicator of growth rather than a measurement. For example. from 1933 to 1940 US GDP averaged 4.15 per cent a year and yet the capital stock still shrank. Arthur Lewis estimated that from 1929 to 1938 net capital formation plunged by minus 15.2 per cent. Professor Robert Higgs calculated that from 1930 to 1940 net private investment was minus $3.1 billion.
So while it is true that expanding the labour force does raise GDP it does nothing for capital formation, a fact of which the classical economists were fully aware, which is why they would have opposed mass immigration.
Terry, I can remember relatively generous tax breaks for wife and children back in the 80s – and I think it was even better in the 50s and 60s??
My wife didn’t work, we could afford a mortgage – even when the interest rates went to 18%, from memory – and life was simple but happy.
They really were the Good Old Days!
Yeap.
Lucky you. No, seriously.
It’s a good idea, but I think this will only work if applied to officially married couples. And that opens up another can of worms. Nobody in power will be able to even begin to think about this.