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Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 child care seats for low-income families after voters approved a historic property tax increasein 2022. The referendum raised the budget of the program seven-fold — from $3 million to $21 million a year for 20 years. Because Louisiana’s early childhood fund matches money raised locally for child care, the city gets an additional $21 million to help families find care.
New Orleans is part of a growing trend of communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million for child care and children’s mental health to the county’s annual budget. A marijuana sales tax approved last year by voters in Anchorage, Alaska, will generate more than $5 million for early childhood programs.
The state of Texas has taken a somewhat different tack. In November, voters approved a state constitutional amendment that allows tax relief for qualifying child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties can choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or some of its property taxes. Dallas was among the first city-and-county combo in Texas to provide the tax break.
Cue the people saying, “why should I have to pay this tax when I don’t have children?”
And not just Republicans either.
“It gives the parents an opportunity to have kids in a society that otherwise puts emphasis on employment first, and family second… and we’ll need some of those kids to take care of you and wipe yo’ ass at the retirement home when you’ll be older.”
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They think they can say “look at all I did for you and be grateful” just like Boomers do today.
They’ll hust do what my racist grandpa did and marry a Philippino woman he met online and move her to the country to care for him since all his children hated his guts.
Why should my Tax Dollars go to OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS when there’s perfectly fine BILLIONAIRES who can use it to buy a new Yacht instead?
-Republicans trying to Save The Children!
And then complaining that Americans (only certain ones of course) are not having enough children.
Better nose pickers than death squads I suppose
Same people who complain of high property taxes but consistently vote “No” when the request for multifamily housing is proposed
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The people who make poor decisions impact you. They and their kids exist in your community. If you go to a store, do you want the cashier to know how to count? Do you want the person taking your order at a restaurant to know how to write?
More importantly, jobs are the best way to stop crime. Way better than police. Education is the best way to get people better jobs. Early childhood day care and kindergarten is the best education, as it starts children off early.
I can’t connect the dots any clearer for you. If you need help understanding this, maybe you could have benefitted from early childhood education yourself.
And how much money is going to the educators to support them? Or will it all funnel into the owners pockets at tax payer expenses?
Educators receive some of the lowest median wages of all industries and are struggling to hire workers due to shortages because it is an unsustainable and grueling profit driven industry when for-profit centres are involved. Many educators already have to supply their own resources, they can’t afford more children enrolled.
And if you want high quality education and care for these children, you need to retain staff who have institutional and professional knowledge.
- Full-time teachers are paid $14 per hour on average, and real wages have actually dropped by 6.5 percent during the seven years since the first survey was conducted.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/still-underpaid-and-unequal/
The report revealed that while 12.3 million children required childcare services in 2022, only 8.7 million slots were available in licensed childcare centers, resulting in a notablegap of 3.6 million spots.1
ECE experts are noticing a decrease in the number of high-quality child care workers, which has only been made worse since the pandemic compelling numerous competent caregivers to leave the profession, citing health concerns, insufficient support and inadequate compensation.
Why You Can’t Find Child Care: 100,000 Workers Are Missing
Where did they go? To better-paying jobs stocking shelves, cleaning offices or doing anything that pays more than $15 an hour.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/child-care-worker-shortage.html
The learning centers are nuts. The one my son went to started at $2600/month three years ago. It’s more now, of course. Each teacher was responsible for up to four infants. Over $10k per month per teacher. Guess how much they made? The senior teacher made $25/hr and the junior one made $20/hr (barely above minimum). So $3900/month went to the infant teachers. One year olds got a cost break down to $2400/month and each teacher could watch five. There is no reason for a teacher to go there instead of just doing nannying where two kids would make them $35-40/hr.
Insurance, licensing, physical building and maintenance, FICA, health insurance, PTO, additional coverage for workers who are constantly sick from kids being sick, administrative assistant, building security, accounting, attorneys, and so on.
I understand that labor costs are not the only costs. But over $10k per teacher is the low end and also numbers from three years ago. When we left a year ago, his tuition was $2300 after a 10% discount from my work. That was a classroom with 6 kids per teacher so likely over $14k revenue per teacher per month who still averages $3600/month. They did not do a great job with extra teachers since I recall him having to stay home a dozen times because of a lack of teachers. They were not even close to the most expensive. Bright Horizons charged about $3200 per infant three years ago. They definitely make healthy profit while paying their teachers very little in a high cost of living city.
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First a lot more administrative tasks are added to the educators. More paperwork, more reports, more bureaucracy, permits, rules. Then more people are hired to handle the paperwork and stuff. In the end, more money disappears into bureaucracy.
What the fuck is up with lack of school supplies? Every teacher that I have ever known has always spent at least a grand or two of their own money to provide basic school supplies.
The US expects parents to provide supplies for their children, but many can’t or don’t. This leaves the teacher in the hard place of having to use their own limited personal budget to buy supplies for those children or for them to have these kids in their classes without basics like notebooks and pencils. Teachers care about their students, so they sacrifice their own money to provide for these children.
I agree with you about educators, but educators are not involved in this case because it’s child care and not school. And while child care workers definitely need to be paid more as well, this is a good thing for a lot of poor people and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Professionals working in Early Childhood Education, that is 0-5 years, are called educators.
We teach children, that is our job. We are not simply minders while you work. We hold university degrees for teaching, we follow (where applicable) state regulations, we plan curriculum, and buy resources to teach with.
Children learn more in the first few years of life than they ever will at any other point. ECE is critical.
Okay, my apologies for not knowing the term. I would still say not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You do deserve to be paid more, but that doesn’t mean this is a bad thing.
This isn’t even good, there’s already a huge demand for a spot in a centre that cannot be met due to staff shortages, all this does is add to the number of children trying to be enrolled.
If you want to see more children attending, you need to get more educators, to get more educators you need to focus on their wages and working conditions.
Programs like this while potentially great for handful of low income families fuck over us low income workers.
apples and oranges dude. this article is about child care, not education. youre not wrong about education also taking a back seat, but this is an article about the critical nature of child care and a mild success in its implementation, not the also critically important child education.
Childcare is the colloquialism for Early Childhood Education.
So no, not apples and oranges, it’s bananas and nanas.
ahh i see, youre not capable of separating them despite our society being setup in very distinct compensatory categories. got it.
I work in the industry, we are educators.
And if you think teachers in schools are getting compensated well you’re also mistaken.
You don’t know what you’re on about, got it.
Boop beep I got delete.
I apologized for not knowing the correct terminology. What more do you want me to do?
Boop beep I got delete.
No worries, I understand the anger.
Having children doesn’t make sense in a capitalist society, because children cost money without producing anything. Parents have to compete with non-parents for housing, employment, energy, and transportation, while having less to bid on these items because they are paying to raise children. Extinction is inevitable because the future, neither the environment nor its inhabitants, have value in the marketplace.
It’s almost like people are illogical, emotional beings, and don’t think purely in terms of the most profitable course
But yeah, clearly this isn’t enough anymore and we as a society need to start making parenthood more appealing. It seems so obvious this is yet another long term disaster in the making that could be prevented with minor changes now, but we’ll blunder into it in half a century and surprise pikachu face when the impact is huge
I’d argue we’re already seeing the effects with lower birthrates in recent years.
You want crotch goblins, you can pay for it, leave the taxpayers out of this.
You idiot. Your entire society is based kids that eventually pay for your dumb ass in a nursing home. OH, you gonna make so much money that you can pay for your own retirement? OH? Are you going to pay for your own police services and fire services too? Or the roads you walk and drive on. Or the utilities you use or the stable society you live in?
It doesn’t matter if YOU have kids. The kids that you don’t have will eventually pay taxes that continues the standard of quality of your worthless life.
This type of mentality is a problem. You don’t personally use something therefore you don’t want to pay for it. You should be thinking about what is necessary for a working society to figure out what taxes should be used for. Kids are necessary even if you don’t have or want them.
I don’t have and will probably never have kids but I gladly pay for kids welfare. Doesn’t just help the kids. It also helps the family as a whole do better.
It also helps society. More healthy kids in safe, educational environments is a win for me.
I wonder who takes care of you when you’re old, or the people that maintain infrastructure, or insert literally anything else that makes society run or continue. It’s certainly not the fucks who are as old or older than you.
You must hate yourself and everything that helped you get to where you are today as equally as the kids. You were, after all, a “crotch goblin” that benefitted from much of the same shit yourself.
I’m a taxpayer who had kids, who are all now also taxpayers. But if free childcare had been available to me when they were little, we could have both worked, I could have gone to college faster and made more money and paid more taxes.
You are gonna pay taxes for something, the whole point is to use it for things that make society better.
No, the point of taxes is not to be an endless supply of money for your free shit.
Everyone pays taxes. It’s necessary for society to exist. It is reasonable for you, as a tax-paying part of society, to expect to get back some benefit for what you pay… and economies of scale would indicate that those benefits would be significant. “Free” in the tax-funded context means “inclusive of the taxes I pay” not “free as in beer.”
But you knew that. You just like to spread right-wing, ur-fascist misinformation, don’t you?
