Maybe it's not wise to comment on this while living in Germany and never having been to SF.
But my first thought was: Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare? Or the staff? How would the staff afford housing in SF on a "normal" salary? Where would they build the required buildings when land costs an arm and a leg?
> Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare?
The city itself is tiny, this is not the metropolitan area of San Francisco, its just the city limits, so yeah people in suburbs will commute into the city to work there, just like most other people working in San Francisco.
There's also great (by American standards) public transit into/through the city. Caltrain and BART can get you into SF quickly from quite a large area nearby.
"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...
I don’t understand the boosters saying BART and Caltrain are good systems. When I lived there, and part of the reason I left, those systems were frequently delayed, full of drug addicts, and they lacked comprehensive service throughout SF, requiring dependence on Muni, which is worse than the other 2. I don’t think those who say this is a great system have been exposed to how other places in the world handle these things.
1. I live and work around BART stations so it works well for me
2. I just ignore the drug addicts
3. The delays are there but it all works well enough to be very useful
The last time was in 2018. I caught a Muni bus, the drive drove past someone at a stop who was in a wheelchair and was signalling to be picked up, another passenger challenged the driver, and the driver shouted something like "I don't want no cripple pee pee-ing on my bus"
When I first read it I thought wait, 3% of 6 is 0.18, but then I realized no I'm a dork because 6 is the age of the kid, whereas the number 100 is written as a word hundred, hence I decided to write "HN poster responds:" with quotes around my first non-coffee aided thought because I thought it was funny. I guess I should have just made that full statement, but I do have a tendency to rather oblique communication strategies.
on edit: basically because I thought hah, this is the kind of mistake I always see poor tired folks make on HN and making the dumb comment and here I am making it!! This is a classic moment!
Whatever happened to just firing up a calculator app that's already on the device you were using? Or bashing "100/3" into the search box in your OS or browser?
Do you ask ChatGPT how long to cook spaghetti instead of reading it off the package you just took the spaghetti out of? Honest question.
San Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income.
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
We have 30 hours of free childcare in the UK (for nursery, schooling in older years is free) if both parents are working and neither earn more than £100k. It has the interesting impact that a salary of £99.9k is worth more to me than £130k, give or take some extra contributions to pension.
It’s interesting to me that the threshold is so much higher in San Francisco given that SF is only 8.7% more expensive than London, at least according to numbeo.
Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
The £100k threshold is such an economically illiterate policy for society. The GPs and lawyers I know are working ~3 days a week to avoid it, so much economic output and taxes missed out on.
I am pessimistic that the reason it is so high is because someone making $220k per year said "yea but what about me, I have to pay for childcare too..." The number should be significantly lower. Anyone making a combined $200k a year has other options and opportunities, the immigrant family making $60k combined does not. This feels like a policy designed to "help" the poor but also benefit the rich..
A combined threshold of £200k (or whatever this converts to) would be great for me in London since my partner earns roughly the median salary (which is a lot lower).
In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west.
Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
My guess would be that in developed countries, people are having kids older and older, so the grandparents are accordingly also older and more tired. That combined with multi-generational households being all but gone so now you're picking up and leaving off and all the kind of cooking and general housekeeping is also doubled.
there is also the sentiment of people in their 50s that they are done with taking care of kids. they want to enjoy their freedom now. it's just an anecdote, but for example my dad tried to marry again, but was unable to find a partner willing to marry someone with kids. i don't know if that translates to taking care of grand kids, but i think it is related.
in developing countries there are no pensions for many people and the young parents provide the support the grandparents need, taking care of the grandkids is one way to ensure that this support keeps coming.
If your parents had you at 25 and you have kids at 25 then your parents are 50 when you have a kid. Nowhere close to retirement age. People who are still working can't watch the kids five days a week.
FWIW the average age of first-time mothers in San Francisco is 33.6. It seems that still speaks against my theory. Maybe it's more that previous generations of women were less likely to have full-time employment at all?
Is it common for women to work in those countries?
What I'm seeing here in Europe is that mothers are working, so when they have grandchildren they are either still working or retired.
If they're working, they don't have time to do childcare.
If they're retired, they are either worn out and don't have the energy/physical ability to do childcare, or they just want to enjoy the few years of freedom they have.
So grandparents can do some childcare, during weekends or holidays mostly, but they are not the one who would take care of the children during the parent's 9-to-5.
On the other hand, I know some families where the mother staid at home to raise her children and she naturally assumed the same role for her grandchildren. But the chain is broken because their mother is working and will not stop working to do childcare for her grandchildren.
My brother's two boys both had kids. One of them, his wife, was going to go back to work after giving birth but had horrible feelings and cried when she took the baby to daycare after maternity leave. She quit and now stays home taking care of her baby.
The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortunate that grandma retired from her job about the same time and now takes care of baby during the day.
Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
Sure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.
Two factors.
1. In an institution there are more kids/adult.
2. Child care is valued below average by society.
Combine these and it makes a lot of sense to trade a few below average valued workers for the release of many above average valued workers into the economy.
Capitalist dystopia summed up. "Mommy cannot see you say your first words because having mommy shove papers around is slightly more beneficial economically".
i’m about to have my first child soon. My mother died in June. She loved little kids so it’s pretty tragic that she won’t get to experience being a grandmother. My dad is still around but he will likely be useless as a support system.
The man can barely cook anything and tends to make a mess. i also expect he’ll have a tough time changing diapers or holding a delicate baby, one of his hands has lots of numbness from a past stroke.
Thank god i have the BEST in-laws, who are also in great health. I can’t imagine what someone would do in my situation with bad in-laws.
There's a health and capacity angle. A lot of today's grandparents are still working, dealing with their own medical issues, or simply don't have the energy to provide full-time childcare
My observations include a wholesale generational problem, where the group that would be responsible for this (boomers) tend to be highly narcissistic and focused on their own pleasures, instead of being a part of their grandchildren’s lives. They simply don’t want to be involved. There are exceptions to this rule but I’d say it’s very common in the US and more so than the rest of the world.
very true! Mine are still working and after all are unable and unwilling to dedicate the whole time. They have plans or want to relax. Children are tiring. The west seems to be not only aging but also getting a bit lazy sometimes
1. People have kids later, and older grandparents are less likely to be able to care for them
2. Kids moved away and left their parents in the suburbs, so they're not exactly around anyway. Also, a lot of Boomers sold their homes during Covid to cash in and moved elsewhere and/or downsized. So they might not be living in a place where you can just drop the kids off for a weekend.
3. Generally, only one of the grandparents in the Boomer generation is realistically capable of providing childcare, and that's the mom. If she's not alive anymore, you're not getting anything from your dad.
Income cliffs, even phased, are generally stupid. See Britain's 100k cliff for free childcare. If both parents make 99k, you get it. If one earns 101k and the other earns zero, you don't get it. The workaround (pension stuffing) is widely known and actually means the govt comes off worse than if they'd just given the childcare away.
There are all kinds of other perverse effects like people turning down promotions or dropping down to working 4 days a week. It's a government-sanctioned ceiling on ambition for high earners. Genius.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
So it is just the right wing neoliberal playbook then. Protect the rich and put everyone else against each other so we don’t focus on them. I want this to stop.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy.
And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often create regressive tax regimes despite knowing they aren't very good systems.
It’s easy to understand, but not easy to live under. If the worst case is I lose 25% of every “extra” dollar in some range, I have to think about it way less than if I lose the entire benefit for being 1 unit of currency over a limit.
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
First off, the following is not meant to combative but I think this confuses me. If there was no cliff there was nothing to do administratively on that front, no new checking at all. We already have progressive tax systems in many countries. Adding 1% at the top end can’t be that difficult. My health insurance (in Germany) raises prices every year and most people don’t have a choice there either. Property taxes increase all the time. If we had a wealth tax and a higher (at the top) progressive capital gains tax it seems to me that the pitch would be politically even simpler: there are 5% that will pay a little more percentage wise from now on while retaining vast amounts of wealth and 95% that will pay less or much less. Genuinely I have heard that we can’t raise taxes on rich people because they will evade them but it also sounds like a lie repeated so often that we just take it as the truth. Didn’t a lot of countries or US states have higher marginal tax rates without seeing mass exodus of millionaires? Can’t lawmakers focus on plugging the loopholes rich people use? I mean our government is currently trying to go out of its way to make sure that unemployment benefits are only paid out to people who „really deserve them“ by tightening the rules around that and the political debates I see put incredible amounts of emphasis on „fairness“ and that we „have to do something about those who just profit off the system without contributing“ when it’s about that topic. The fervour is clearly not applied symmetrically.
the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah
One thing I've become obsessed with is people trying to solve problems in the wrong domain.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.
If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.
You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.
I suspect that the policy is popular with the 90% of voters in the UK who earn less than £80k and that politicians are not very concerned with the ambitions of the rest of us (frustrating as that is when paying London rent).
I don't really think people understand it, it's quite hard to explain and on paper it just sounds like the person is wrong.
The maths for one child for me works out at ~£10k childcare bill without the free childcare vs ~£4000 with free childcare + tax free childcare (for three days a week). Even that doesn't sound too bad but it's the combination of that, the loss of personal allowance and the fact I still have a student loan that means the actual number of how much I have to earn to break even on losing it is something like £30k more than the actual cut off.
To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.
To be fair to the conversatives in the UK who have engineered this situation, some have recently said that the £100k threshold is too low. I detest them but I have to give them this.
One option would be implement as a income graded fee. Zero up to 230, and increasing fee above. Allowing all walks of life to access the same gov't services should be a more widely deployed pattern.
Right in the middle of this now. I have another two years of stuffing pension and making a few choice charity donations (like buying a National Trust Lifetime Membership - a gift aidable donation) and then out of that phase.
And then I'll probably be able to retire 10 years earlier too.
The whole membership, gift-aided charity donations count as reducing your adjusted net income by the amount for childcare purposes.
There are some quite specific rules about whether things are gift-aidable or not (and as a result a lot of memberships to charities e.g. English Heritage are not gift aidable) but if they are then you add them to your tax return and you also get 25% back. National Trust is, so you pay ~£3k for a family membership (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/membership/life-membership), get ~£750 back, and the charity gets £3750 in total.
In this case, it strikes me as a bad idea because there are advantages to having people - both parents and children - mix across income-levels. It fosters empathy, increases cultural knowledge, broadens social networks.
Kind of OT, but I heard an interesting thing on a radio program talking about childcare: the US almost got free universal child care in the early 1970s via the Comprehensive Child Development Act.
At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.
There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.
But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.
Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.
Housing is expensive because of lack of housing supply and because of high housing demand because of both soft (non-finance-driven) desirability conditions and a sufficient concentration of very-high-income, price insensitive buyers on prices.
Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices.
Increasing housing supply can mitigate the problem somewhat, but the other drivers of cost will still remain, and I Think most people would agree you don't actually want to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem softly by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
Just because of supply/demand alone?
If sitting in a comfy office pays as well as it does, why would people take care of children or build houses for way less?
I think this is just Baumols cost disease in action: you really cant have amazingly well paying jobs (like in SF generally) AND super low paid laborers without some kind of class system/feudalism/etc.
Childcare is fundamentally expensive because it fundamentally involves a large portion of a person's labor and this labor needs to be local to you. One person can only watch so many infants (and we have reasonable regulations limiting the number people are allowed to watch).
Even if you eliminate all other overhead costs (rent, admin, materials, insurance, etc) you are still paying for a large portion of somebody's salary.
The reason childcare feels expensive is because society has spent generations undervaluing childrearing as labor.
Does anyone else feel like we are moving in the wrong direction?
Like every discussion I’ve seen about childcare takes the 1950s as the baseline for some reason. Like being a housewife in the 1950s sucked and it was unfair that the women had to do it and the men didn’t have to. Like people don’t explicitly say this, but this is what it boils down to.
And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?
It sucked (and still does) because of the breakdown of the extended clan. A long time ago there would be a ton of family very close by to mutually spread the load.
So why did clan breakdown happen, and can we reverse that instead of pushing further and further into more and more atomization? I don’t really see that being discussed, it’s just like “1950s house wifing bad” and the analysis stops there.
One thing people are going to say is that family members are too different from each other now, or that they have economic incentives to scatter. Well, can we make them stop becoming so different? Can we delete the economic incentives? Etc.
It sucked because society back then (and currently in some cultures) was structured in such a way that women were de facto forced into marriage and motherhood, even if they didn't want to do these things. Women couldn't open bank accounts or buy cars easily without their husbands present; consequently, leaving bad marriages was considered very risky, to say nothing of the social ostricization that would ensure.
Marriage is made up though, it’s a tool for structuring human groups that are a big jumble of individuals. In a clan structure you wouldn’t need marriage, necessarily, and “motherhood” would look entirely different from how it does today.
My point is that lots of women do reject what exists today for those, and the conservative reaction to this may be wrong. But just because the reaction is wrong doesn’t mean the “progress” is correct. We may be doing the wrong kind of progress, and the “conservatives” may be trying to conserve an overly recent and short lived model. They should instead be trying to conserve (or restore, really) a much older model, one that would resonate better with women and humans in general. IMO anyway.
And replies to me are all stuck in the modern progressive/conservative dialectic, which is not useful or interesting to discuss. We need to break out of that structure.
I have no clue how your response relates to what I said. Either I’m not understanding you or you’re not understanding me. Since my comment is much longer I’m going to wager the latter.
So now making 231k makes you worse off than someone making 230k? Why even have that threshold when it doesn't even exclude that many people, it just causes weird incentives.
The article also mentions a 50% subsidy up to $310,000. The details aren’t spelled out, but subsidies like this often phase out gradually to avoid a cliff at the threshold.
Stepwise phaseouts often create more cliffs rather than avoiding cliffs. It is possible to do continuous phase out without cliffs (with or without bend points), the easiest way being to simply give a flat, income-insensitive benefit based on non-income qualifications, and then do the clawback through increases to marginal income tax rates, but if you are committed to clawback internal to the program you can do it through a fixed or tiered marginal clawback rate, instead of having a single or tiered set of benefit cliffs. But programs rarely do that, for a variety of reasons.
You make it sound like a problem, but if you can make 311k, I'd say it shouldn't too hard to make 310k instead if that's better for you? Unless some companies have minimum salaries that high?
Probably because in order to get it passed they had to have some cutoff because there was some people who would argue against it being free for everyone.
What? Bread lines are a response to poverty caused by a failure of the market and typically involve institutions giving out free bread using other people's money.
That sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce.
I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).
Free childcare could free those households up to decide which parent(s) work when. Instead, by capping it below a common dual income, it incentivizes the least earning parent to continue to stay out of the workforce.
Threshold based benefits decreases numbers of parents who work though, why have that threshold when its that high? If a couple can get free childcare by the wife working part time instead of full time they absolutely will, that is the effect the threshold gives you.
I was specifically referring to the cap. It's doing the opposite of what the policy is presumably intended to if both parents are capable of earning 6 figures.
I don't follow. Wouldn't the high cost of childcare make couples less likely to have 2 incomes, because the lower-earning spouse is working for lower marginal pay, just to pay someone ELSE to provide child care?
I think he is talking about the threshold effects. E.g if one partner earns 200k then it could make more sense for the other to stay at home than to work and earn say 50k or 70k. The 50% subsidy above 230k reduces that issue but I would rather see no cap.
You framed this issue in a certain way, but your position could be described as „lower earning families need to pay for childcare, so higher earning families keep producing two incomes”. Not so attractive anymore.
> I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).
When described that way ... aren't they right about the wife's job?
Letting someone make free life choices is good. Disincentivizing not working isn't. It's a reasonable choice for one adult in a family to not work, especially if their earnings don't exceed the costs incurred by having both adults at work. We shouldn't set up our societies in a way to forces people to work even if it makes no financial sense.
Maybe it's not wise to comment on this while living in Germany and never having been to SF.
But my first thought was: Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare? Or the staff? How would the staff afford housing in SF on a "normal" salary? Where would they build the required buildings when land costs an arm and a leg?
> Are they gonna shuttle the kids in and out of the city in order to provide said childcare?
The city itself is tiny, this is not the metropolitan area of San Francisco, its just the city limits, so yeah people in suburbs will commute into the city to work there, just like most other people working in San Francisco.
There's also great (by American standards) public transit into/through the city. Caltrain and BART can get you into SF quickly from quite a large area nearby.
"by American standards" is doing a lot of lifting. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give SF about a 4 compared to cities like Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Seoul, Singapore, ...
I don’t understand the boosters saying BART and Caltrain are good systems. When I lived there, and part of the reason I left, those systems were frequently delayed, full of drug addicts, and they lacked comprehensive service throughout SF, requiring dependence on Muni, which is worse than the other 2. I don’t think those who say this is a great system have been exposed to how other places in the world handle these things.
I've never experienced any of these on Caltrain in the last ~10 years, for what it's worth.
Really? You haven't seen frequent delays in the last decade?
Not even for the (sadly) semi-regular pedestrian fatalities that happen once or twice a month? Those usually delay trains for over an hour.
Caltrain's own reports say there are hundreds of late trains every month.
1. I live and work around BART stations so it works well for me 2. I just ignore the drug addicts 3. The delays are there but it all works well enough to be very useful
Caltrain is no slouch - punctual, clean, safe, really good wifi, electric.
That is the baseline, not a high bar.
It also doesn’t get you around the city (and isn’t near any significant number of schools).
It is good for getting in and out, assuming you already have a way of getting to the Caltrain station which isn’t exactly in the center of the city.
Eventually Caltrain will go to Salesforce tower
I've been to San Francisco twice with work.
The last time was in 2018. I caught a Muni bus, the drive drove past someone at a stop who was in a wheelchair and was signalling to be picked up, another passenger challenged the driver, and the driver shouted something like "I don't want no cripple pee pee-ing on my bus"
>great (by American standards)
The staff in my baby’s London nursery all live outside of London.
Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.
this won't cost the city too much, there's only like a hundred kids under 6 in this city and 3% of them are mine.
When people say "there are barely any kids," they're often describing the outcome of past policy choices, not a reason to avoid changing them
HN poster responds: "You have 0.18 kids under 6! That seems unlikely!"
Am i missing the joke? ChatGPT tells me 3% of 100 is 3, not 0.18.
When I first read it I thought wait, 3% of 6 is 0.18, but then I realized no I'm a dork because 6 is the age of the kid, whereas the number 100 is written as a word hundred, hence I decided to write "HN poster responds:" with quotes around my first non-coffee aided thought because I thought it was funny. I guess I should have just made that full statement, but I do have a tendency to rather oblique communication strategies.
on edit: basically because I thought hah, this is the kind of mistake I always see poor tired folks make on HN and making the dumb comment and here I am making it!! This is a classic moment!
I gave your reply the most generous interpretation and read it in the ironic way as you point out in the edit
thanks!
.18 is 3% of 6. This might mean something, but I don't know what.
10 months out of six years is 0.14 so it isn't quite prenatal benefits.
What happens if an unborn baby has rights to go to preschool, but the birthing parent can't?
Is an unborn child a US citizen yet?
the next number in the sequence 3, 6, 18 is 72, but I doubt it means anything.
Off topic: what are you trying to signal by saying chatgpt helped you with arithmetic here?
Is it supposed to give more weight to what you are saying?
I read it as a side joke about how people overuse chtgpt for trivial tasks
I hope that's the case!
>ChatGPT tells me 3% of 100 is 3
Sweet baby Jesus in his high chair.
Whatever happened to just firing up a calculator app that's already on the device you were using? Or bashing "100/3" into the search box in your OS or browser?
Do you ask ChatGPT how long to cook spaghetti instead of reading it off the package you just took the spaghetti out of? Honest question.
I think the joke is people trying to figure out why 0.18. I, personally, enjoy it.
You’re missing something if you asked ChatGPT that.
No, they have their irony fully deployed, not missing anything.
Hard to be sure on HN
nah, it just means you get 18% of childcare costs paid.
San Francisco’s measure will make childcare free for a family of four making less than $230,000 a year, or 150% of the area median income, and offer a 50% subsidy to families earning less than $310,000 a year, or 200% of the area median income. Previously, free childcare was available to families earning less than 110% of the area median income.
But.. why not flip that on its head. Make it free for people UNDER $50,000, and a sliding scale up from there. I get that it's San Francisco, one of the most expensiv4e places in the country to live, but $230k is much, much too high. I get it: You make $200k a year and have four kids and you have expenses, and daycare is expensive, etc. but this should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
I'm all for free child care but the parameters and numbers of this are insulting.
This should be for the MASSIVELY OUTNUMBERED of parents who don't make, nor can ever hope to make, anywhere near $230k.
Uh, it is for them. Why should it be only for them?
We have 30 hours of free childcare in the UK (for nursery, schooling in older years is free) if both parents are working and neither earn more than £100k. It has the interesting impact that a salary of £99.9k is worth more to me than £130k, give or take some extra contributions to pension.
It’s interesting to me that the threshold is so much higher in San Francisco given that SF is only 8.7% more expensive than London, at least according to numbeo.
Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
The £100k threshold is such an economically illiterate policy for society. The GPs and lawyers I know are working ~3 days a week to avoid it, so much economic output and taxes missed out on.
I am pessimistic that the reason it is so high is because someone making $220k per year said "yea but what about me, I have to pay for childcare too..." The number should be significantly lower. Anyone making a combined $200k a year has other options and opportunities, the immigrant family making $60k combined does not. This feels like a policy designed to "help" the poor but also benefit the rich..
This is a whole family threshold rather than individual parent threshold, making the combined total lower.
A combined threshold of £200k (or whatever this converts to) would be great for me in London since my partner earns roughly the median salary (which is a lot lower).
I reduced my hours at job, working only 4 days just to not hit it.
> Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?
No, you’re missing the insane scale of Silicon Valley tech salaries. See levels.fyi and filter by 5 years of experience in San Francisco.
If the city made the threshold 100k or 110k, I bet there would be zero children in the city born to parents making less than that.
In a lot of 3rd world and less well off countries, childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers), I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west.
Here we have an aging population, so grandparent/grandchild ratio should be very high.
> I'm always surprised why this isn't true in the west
Nobody lives with their parents ‘in the west’, so the best bet is arranging two houses or apartments nearby.
That takes an extraordinary amount of resources for child-bearing age parents.
My guess would be that in developed countries, people are having kids older and older, so the grandparents are accordingly also older and more tired. That combined with multi-generational households being all but gone so now you're picking up and leaving off and all the kind of cooking and general housekeeping is also doubled.
there is also the sentiment of people in their 50s that they are done with taking care of kids. they want to enjoy their freedom now. it's just an anecdote, but for example my dad tried to marry again, but was unable to find a partner willing to marry someone with kids. i don't know if that translates to taking care of grand kids, but i think it is related.
in developing countries there are no pensions for many people and the young parents provide the support the grandparents need, taking care of the grandkids is one way to ensure that this support keeps coming.
If your parents had you at 25 and you have kids at 25 then your parents are 50 when you have a kid. Nowhere close to retirement age. People who are still working can't watch the kids five days a week.
FWIW the average age of first-time mothers in San Francisco is 33.6. It seems that still speaks against my theory. Maybe it's more that previous generations of women were less likely to have full-time employment at all?
and most don't live in the neighbourhood, city or even state (in tech anyways).
Is it common for women to work in those countries?
What I'm seeing here in Europe is that mothers are working, so when they have grandchildren they are either still working or retired. If they're working, they don't have time to do childcare. If they're retired, they are either worn out and don't have the energy/physical ability to do childcare, or they just want to enjoy the few years of freedom they have.
So grandparents can do some childcare, during weekends or holidays mostly, but they are not the one who would take care of the children during the parent's 9-to-5.
On the other hand, I know some families where the mother staid at home to raise her children and she naturally assumed the same role for her grandchildren. But the chain is broken because their mother is working and will not stop working to do childcare for her grandchildren.
My brother's two boys both had kids. One of them, his wife, was going to go back to work after giving birth but had horrible feelings and cried when she took the baby to daycare after maternity leave. She quit and now stays home taking care of her baby.
The other boy, his wife, also cried and was torn between going back to a job she loved but felt incredibly guilty about leaving her newborn to daycare. She was fortunate that grandma retired from her job about the same time and now takes care of baby during the day.
Happy to report that everyone is very, very happy. This is normal. It's how I grew up.
Sure, it does happen but it’s not the normal model. Every mother feels horrible and cries when they institutionalize their kids, western society is based on most people doing this regardless. It is not scalable to educate women for 20 years just to have them become stay at home moms, just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens etc.
Not scalable?! Where have you been the last few thousands of years?
> just as a single farmer today has 40.000 chickens
But they eat the chickens and kill the male chicks
Two factors. 1. In an institution there are more kids/adult. 2. Child care is valued below average by society.
Combine these and it makes a lot of sense to trade a few below average valued workers for the release of many above average valued workers into the economy.
> Child care is valued below average by society.
Capitalist dystopia summed up. "Mommy cannot see you say your first words because having mommy shove papers around is slightly more beneficial economically".
> childcare is done by the grandparents(mostly grandmothers)
or the aunts, or siblings (mostly sisters), or neighbors (mostly women)
You get the idea
i’m about to have my first child soon. My mother died in June. She loved little kids so it’s pretty tragic that she won’t get to experience being a grandmother. My dad is still around but he will likely be useless as a support system.
The man can barely cook anything and tends to make a mess. i also expect he’ll have a tough time changing diapers or holding a delicate baby, one of his hands has lots of numbness from a past stroke.
Thank god i have the BEST in-laws, who are also in great health. I can’t imagine what someone would do in my situation with bad in-laws.
There's a health and capacity angle. A lot of today's grandparents are still working, dealing with their own medical issues, or simply don't have the energy to provide full-time childcare
My observations include a wholesale generational problem, where the group that would be responsible for this (boomers) tend to be highly narcissistic and focused on their own pleasures, instead of being a part of their grandchildren’s lives. They simply don’t want to be involved. There are exceptions to this rule but I’d say it’s very common in the US and more so than the rest of the world.
Wouldn't that be nice. mine are too busy watching pawn stars reruns for the hundredth time
very true! Mine are still working and after all are unable and unwilling to dedicate the whole time. They have plans or want to relax. Children are tiring. The west seems to be not only aging but also getting a bit lazy sometimes
A few factors that aren't "lol capitalism":
1. People have kids later, and older grandparents are less likely to be able to care for them
2. Kids moved away and left their parents in the suburbs, so they're not exactly around anyway. Also, a lot of Boomers sold their homes during Covid to cash in and moved elsewhere and/or downsized. So they might not be living in a place where you can just drop the kids off for a weekend.
3. Generally, only one of the grandparents in the Boomer generation is realistically capable of providing childcare, and that's the mom. If she's not alive anymore, you're not getting anything from your dad.
Boomers broke the chain.
Income cliffs, even phased, are generally stupid. See Britain's 100k cliff for free childcare. If both parents make 99k, you get it. If one earns 101k and the other earns zero, you don't get it. The workaround (pension stuffing) is widely known and actually means the govt comes off worse than if they'd just given the childcare away.
There are all kinds of other perverse effects like people turning down promotions or dropping down to working 4 days a week. It's a government-sanctioned ceiling on ambition for high earners. Genius.
I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people to make up for it. Naively I would think that that’s significantly easier from and administrative point of view too.
> I am also confused by cliffs. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could explain why you would ever want them for something like this instead of just having higher progressive tax rates for well off people
Because middle-income clawback with sharp cliffs rather than gradual clawback starting or reaching into upper income ranges pits the middle-income segment of the working class against the poor in funding battles, helping to avoid political pressure to further increase benefits, and it also allows what can be marketed as a support system for the poor to also serve as an anchor that creates a progress wall just above the area where it provides net benefits, while minimizing the marginal impact on high-income earners.
Is this socially good? No. But it serves the interests of the people who politicians tend to see as their most important constituents, while creating a sharp division of interests between the poor and middle-income segments of the working class, obstructing the formation of working-class solidarity.
So it is just the right wing neoliberal playbook then. Protect the rich and put everyone else against each other so we don’t focus on them. I want this to stop.
It's because it's easy and administratively simple, and it's easy to figure out how much you have to earn before you can actually bear the cost. In reality, it leads to a grey area where in the short term you're better off earning less to get the benefit, but it's eminently fair and easy.
And in general, increasing taxes is not easy, and the richer people are, the more able they are to fight against it. So we often create regressive tax regimes despite knowing they aren't very good systems.
It’s easy to understand, but not easy to live under. If the worst case is I lose 25% of every “extra” dollar in some range, I have to think about it way less than if I lose the entire benefit for being 1 unit of currency over a limit.
In the former case, I can think/worry about it for 10 minutes per year; in the latter case, if I’m close I have to think/worry about it a lot more and carefully plan out and estimate things like tax-deferred savings and capital gains/dividends/capital gains distributions to make sure I don’t earn an extra dollar and pay $10-25K of marginal tax on that dollar.
First off, the following is not meant to combative but I think this confuses me. If there was no cliff there was nothing to do administratively on that front, no new checking at all. We already have progressive tax systems in many countries. Adding 1% at the top end can’t be that difficult. My health insurance (in Germany) raises prices every year and most people don’t have a choice there either. Property taxes increase all the time. If we had a wealth tax and a higher (at the top) progressive capital gains tax it seems to me that the pitch would be politically even simpler: there are 5% that will pay a little more percentage wise from now on while retaining vast amounts of wealth and 95% that will pay less or much less. Genuinely I have heard that we can’t raise taxes on rich people because they will evade them but it also sounds like a lie repeated so often that we just take it as the truth. Didn’t a lot of countries or US states have higher marginal tax rates without seeing mass exodus of millionaires? Can’t lawmakers focus on plugging the loopholes rich people use? I mean our government is currently trying to go out of its way to make sure that unemployment benefits are only paid out to people who „really deserve them“ by tightening the rules around that and the political debates I see put incredible amounts of emphasis on „fairness“ and that we „have to do something about those who just profit off the system without contributing“ when it’s about that topic. The fervour is clearly not applied symmetrically.
the media is not good at complexity. Social media even less so. "government raises taxes" or even "our tax rate number is high compared to historical" is a much worse signal for the government than "uh theres this weird condition that only applies if you have kids and also earn less than a certain amount unless blah blah blah
One thing I've become obsessed with is people trying to solve problems in the wrong domain.
I think these sorts of things are because people try to allocate resources according to the 'moral domain' instead of basic need.
Have read that in the 19th century there was constant attempts to means test welfare based on who was deserving. And it was basically full of fail and you'd spend more on enforcement than just paying out by need. You were paying able bodied people to go around and try and determine if the recipients were deserving.
It's one of the reasons everyone gets social security. You were a happy go lucky spendthrift and are now old and broke, here's your money. You were thrifty, wise and lucky enough you'll never need it, here's your money.
The issue of cliff is real and present for low income people. The loss or reduction of benefits takes a big bite out of marginal increases in income. Also the sudden loss for instance when someone goes back to work isn't great when usually they financially stressed and the new job comes with increased expenses.
On topic personally as a childless when I hear someone bitch about paying for someone else's kids I think yeah who's going to change my bedpan when I'm old, you? I doubt it.
That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.
If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.
You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.
I suspect that the policy is popular with the 90% of voters in the UK who earn less than £80k and that politicians are not very concerned with the ambitions of the rest of us (frustrating as that is when paying London rent).
I don't really think people understand it, it's quite hard to explain and on paper it just sounds like the person is wrong.
The maths for one child for me works out at ~£10k childcare bill without the free childcare vs ~£4000 with free childcare + tax free childcare (for three days a week). Even that doesn't sound too bad but it's the combination of that, the loss of personal allowance and the fact I still have a student loan that means the actual number of how much I have to earn to break even on losing it is something like £30k more than the actual cut off.
To me it appears as though the success of the right wing politics everywhere is that they made socioeconomically disadvantaged people identify other socioeconomically disadvantaged people and the middle-class as the cause of their suffering while somehow becoming sympathetic to the uber rich in hopes to one day belong. And to me it’s clear that if we taxed wealth and high incomes fairly and removed the loopholes to level the playing field we would not even need these discussions to begin with because we simply had a well financed social society and the rich would still be rich, but maybe not so obscenely so.
To be fair to the conversatives in the UK who have engineered this situation, some have recently said that the £100k threshold is too low. I detest them but I have to give them this.
One option would be implement as a income graded fee. Zero up to 230, and increasing fee above. Allowing all walks of life to access the same gov't services should be a more widely deployed pattern.
Right in the middle of this now. I have another two years of stuffing pension and making a few choice charity donations (like buying a National Trust Lifetime Membership - a gift aidable donation) and then out of that phase.
And then I'll probably be able to retire 10 years earlier too.
I've got it all to come later this year, my first was born in the autumn
I haven't heard of the charity workaround, sounds really useful, how much does buying the membership reduce your income by?
The whole membership, gift-aided charity donations count as reducing your adjusted net income by the amount for childcare purposes.
There are some quite specific rules about whether things are gift-aidable or not (and as a result a lot of memberships to charities e.g. English Heritage are not gift aidable) but if they are then you add them to your tax return and you also get 25% back. National Trust is, so you pay ~£3k for a family membership (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/membership/life-membership), get ~£750 back, and the charity gets £3750 in total.
In this case, it strikes me as a bad idea because there are advantages to having people - both parents and children - mix across income-levels. It fosters empathy, increases cultural knowledge, broadens social networks.
> Income cliffs
This is because people do not understand continuous functions.
Kind of OT, but I heard an interesting thing on a radio program talking about childcare: the US almost got free universal child care in the early 1970s via the Comprehensive Child Development Act.
At first Nixon was for it and there was enough support in Congress to pass it.
There was a fair bit of opposition from the rightmost fraction of the Republican party for the expected reasons (too Communist; it would make it too easy for women to get jobs instead of staying home where the belonged; government funded daycare centers would turn into leftist indoctrination centers) but Nixon and others felt that there would be enough political good passing it to outweigh pissing off rightmost members of their own party. The far right back then was a minority within the party.
But at the same time Nixon wanted to open trade with China, which also was something the far right end of the party was very much against.
Nixon decided that he could not afford politically to anger the far right on two big issues so close together and so had to drop one. Childcare was the one he dropped, and with Nixon's support gone the bill died.
nice to see the city supporting the lower class.
Subsidizing childcare helps families stay, but it doesn't address why childcare, housing, and everything else are so expensive in the first place
Housing is expensive because of lack of housing supply and because of high housing demand because of both soft (non-finance-driven) desirability conditions and a sufficient concentration of very-high-income, price insensitive buyers on prices.
Everything else is so expensive because of the second of those reasons, plus everyone having higher salary demands because of high housing prices.
Increasing housing supply can mitigate the problem somewhat, but the other drivers of cost will still remain, and I Think most people would agree you don't actually want to deal with the other cost drivers to aggressively. I mean, even dealing with the high-income-earners-as-cost-drivers problem softly by raising high-end marginal tax rates somewhat is a a highly controversial position.
Housing is expensive because homeowners have weaponized zoning laws to make it illegal to build housing the city needs.
Sadly, in San Francisco, renters are bigger NIMBYs than homeowners because they think new housing near them will cause gentrification.
https://www.mhankinson.com/documents/renters_preprint.pdf
Just because of supply/demand alone? If sitting in a comfy office pays as well as it does, why would people take care of children or build houses for way less?
I think this is just Baumols cost disease in action: you really cant have amazingly well paying jobs (like in SF generally) AND super low paid laborers without some kind of class system/feudalism/etc.
Childcare is fundamentally expensive because it fundamentally involves a large portion of a person's labor and this labor needs to be local to you. One person can only watch so many infants (and we have reasonable regulations limiting the number people are allowed to watch).
Even if you eliminate all other overhead costs (rent, admin, materials, insurance, etc) you are still paying for a large portion of somebody's salary.
The reason childcare feels expensive is because society has spent generations undervaluing childrearing as labor.
Does anyone else feel like we are moving in the wrong direction?
Like every discussion I’ve seen about childcare takes the 1950s as the baseline for some reason. Like being a housewife in the 1950s sucked and it was unfair that the women had to do it and the men didn’t have to. Like people don’t explicitly say this, but this is what it boils down to.
And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?
It sucked (and still does) because of the breakdown of the extended clan. A long time ago there would be a ton of family very close by to mutually spread the load.
So why did clan breakdown happen, and can we reverse that instead of pushing further and further into more and more atomization? I don’t really see that being discussed, it’s just like “1950s house wifing bad” and the analysis stops there.
One thing people are going to say is that family members are too different from each other now, or that they have economic incentives to scatter. Well, can we make them stop becoming so different? Can we delete the economic incentives? Etc.
It sucked because society back then (and currently in some cultures) was structured in such a way that women were de facto forced into marriage and motherhood, even if they didn't want to do these things. Women couldn't open bank accounts or buy cars easily without their husbands present; consequently, leaving bad marriages was considered very risky, to say nothing of the social ostricization that would ensure.
I thought that AskHistorians would have a more eloquent answer to your question. As expected, they do: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16xsyoi/in_m...
Marriage is made up though, it’s a tool for structuring human groups that are a big jumble of individuals. In a clan structure you wouldn’t need marriage, necessarily, and “motherhood” would look entirely different from how it does today.
My point is that lots of women do reject what exists today for those, and the conservative reaction to this may be wrong. But just because the reaction is wrong doesn’t mean the “progress” is correct. We may be doing the wrong kind of progress, and the “conservatives” may be trying to conserve an overly recent and short lived model. They should instead be trying to conserve (or restore, really) a much older model, one that would resonate better with women and humans in general. IMO anyway.
And replies to me are all stuck in the modern progressive/conservative dialectic, which is not useful or interesting to discuss. We need to break out of that structure.
There is probably a soup kitchen in your town. Nothing obligates you to use it. That doesn’t make it repressive on your diet.
It’s fair to reject state-provided childcare. It’s mean to deny that to everyone else.
I have no clue how your response relates to what I said. Either I’m not understanding you or you’re not understanding me. Since my comment is much longer I’m going to wager the latter.
Again this is benefiting wealthy people has a large amount of capital instead of workers.
a year, I assume
Okay now do everyone
So now making 231k makes you worse off than someone making 230k? Why even have that threshold when it doesn't even exclude that many people, it just causes weird incentives.
The article also mentions a 50% subsidy up to $310,000. The details aren’t spelled out, but subsidies like this often phase out gradually to avoid a cliff at the threshold.
Stepwise phaseouts often create more cliffs rather than avoiding cliffs. It is possible to do continuous phase out without cliffs (with or without bend points), the easiest way being to simply give a flat, income-insensitive benefit based on non-income qualifications, and then do the clawback through increases to marginal income tax rates, but if you are committed to clawback internal to the program you can do it through a fixed or tiered marginal clawback rate, instead of having a single or tiered set of benefit cliffs. But programs rarely do that, for a variety of reasons.
So now you are better off making 310k than 311k, is that much better? It doesn't matter how you read it you still get that effect.
You make it sound like a problem, but if you can make 311k, I'd say it shouldn't too hard to make 310k instead if that's better for you? Unless some companies have minimum salaries that high?
No at 310k you get $1 dollar at 311k you get $0. But you know like you have 999 more dollars than before. Assuming Post tax income.
Where did you read that? It says you get 50% up to $310k, that very clearly means if you make $310k you get 50% off.
> Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000
These subsidies can be implemented in a way where they taper off instead of imposing a hard cliff.
They can be, but the article says they aren't.
Probably because in order to get it passed they had to have some cutoff because there was some people who would argue against it being free for everyone.
“Free”. Presumably tax payer funded in actuality.
That’s generally how good governments work yes.
At some point you run out of other people’s money and have bread lines.
So far it looks like we're going to run out of people first.
But if you don’t spend money, you will also become a failed state because the infrastructure required to generate value has failed.
What? Bread lines are a response to poverty caused by a failure of the market and typically involve institutions giving out free bread using other people's money.
Could you expand more on how bread lines in Soviet Union were a failure of the market?
We'll get the super wealthy in California, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to pay for it. Oh wait, they just left.
That sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce.
I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).
Free childcare could free those households up to decide which parent(s) work when. Instead, by capping it below a common dual income, it incentivizes the least earning parent to continue to stay out of the workforce.
That's some convoluted logic. The data shows the opposite. Free/cheap childcare significantly increases the number of parents who work.
https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...
Threshold based benefits decreases numbers of parents who work though, why have that threshold when its that high? If a couple can get free childcare by the wife working part time instead of full time they absolutely will, that is the effect the threshold gives you.
I was specifically referring to the cap. It's doing the opposite of what the policy is presumably intended to if both parents are capable of earning 6 figures.
While I too disagree with the cap I think you are a bit blinded by working in tech. A lot of double income households do not reach 230k.
I don't follow. Wouldn't the high cost of childcare make couples less likely to have 2 incomes, because the lower-earning spouse is working for lower marginal pay, just to pay someone ELSE to provide child care?
I think he is talking about the threshold effects. E.g if one partner earns 200k then it could make more sense for the other to stay at home than to work and earn say 50k or 70k. The 50% subsidy above 230k reduces that issue but I would rather see no cap.
You framed this issue in a certain way, but your position could be described as „lower earning families need to pay for childcare, so higher earning families keep producing two incomes”. Not so attractive anymore.
I think they framing have the mother not working as a positive, as it tends to lead to better outcomes?
The subheading says "Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000" which hopefully addresses your point there.
> I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).
When described that way ... aren't they right about the wife's job?
So basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975?
Sound the alarms.
The people who wrote the policy presumably want both parents to be able to work. It's the main reason to make childcare free.
We also had slavery, no advanced medicine, no education for most people, and an average lifespan of about 30. Amazing how selective nostalgia can be.
Letting the other 50% of the population make the same life choices is a good idea in my opinion.
Letting someone make free life choices is good. Disincentivizing not working isn't. It's a reasonable choice for one adult in a family to not work, especially if their earnings don't exceed the costs incurred by having both adults at work. We shouldn't set up our societies in a way to forces people to work even if it makes no financial sense.
We can all go nomad and berry-picking anytime, then.