San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

> 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.

The staff in my baby’s London nursery all live outside of London.

Edit: or are very young and live with their parents.

HN poster responds: "You have 0.18 kids under 6! That seems unlikely!"

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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'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

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

Wouldn't that be nice. mine are too busy watching pawn stars reruns for the hundredth time

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 reduced my hours at job, working only 4 days just to not hit it.

This is a whole family threshold rather than individual parent threshold, making the combined total lower.

> 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

I chuckled

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.

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.

That’s generally how good governments work yes.

We'll get the super wealthy in California, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to pay for it. Oh wait, they just left.

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/...

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?

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.

So basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975?

Sound the alarms.

> 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?

The subheading says "Officials to offer 50% subsidy up to $310,000" which hopefully addresses your point there.