I do not mean to single out Kamala Harris, as many Democrats have the same position when they say we need to have better paying jobs AND affordable child care. I just wonder how is this possible?
I don’t know much about careers in child care or any of the many occupations that allow others to have a career outside the home, but I would certainly include child care workers, house cleaners, landscape workers, and all the rest to be included in the “better paying jobs” part and I know that most of these jobs do not pay well at all. In the least, they do not pay well enough for one to afford housing and general living expenses in the areas where these services are requested.
I’ll limit this to child care, as our example, but it could apply to many other occupations, as mentioned above.
The only information I have is anecdotal. A co-worker of mine at the food market where we look after the produce tells me that she’s making a lot more than she did when she was looking after other people’s children as a child care worker. In fact, she tells me that all her co-workers there were on Mass Health as their wages were quite low and their employer offered no benefits. I also know of a fairly well-to-do couple who, at one time had two children in day care to the tune of $50,000 annually.
How can we pay child care workers well enough to support themselves and their family, save for retirement, have medical care, and have a rainy day fund while at the same time, keeping child care affordable for the couple with a median household income of $77,000?
I know that by law, for children at a certain age, child care workers are limited to four children at a time. Just doing some short cut math, if that child care worker is to make $38,500 plus medical care (assuming spouse or partner makes the same), the four households that pay the child care worker have to pony up $9,625 each just to cover wages, to say nothing of medical insurance, vacation time, sick days, and not to forget the costs of the day care center itself, taxes, utilities, administration, insurance, and the rest. I’m going to add a very low estimate of $2,375 just for easy math.
For the record, the average pay for a Child Care / Day Care Worker is $9.73 per hour. In order to make $38,500 per hour, that translates to $18.50 per hour, or in this case, an increase of 90%.
If a couple has two kids in daycare and has a household income of $77,000, how do they afford $24,000 for daycare? If their wages go up thanks to the good Democrats, the wages of the day care workers go up as well and to me, it looks like we’re back where we started.
Okay, I’ll leave it at that. How do Democrats propose affordable child care, and house cleaning, and lawn maintenance, and so on for the two parent family where both parents are working while at the same time pushing for batter pay for these same occupations?
I don’t see any connection between child care (in your thread-starter) and health care.
I think health care should be provided by the government in much the same way that public education is provided by the government. I think that participation by every American must be compulsory and paid for by increased taxes. I think the precise mix of local, state, and federal taxes must be worked out, and I think the brunt of the increased tax burden should fall on employers, at least at first. The resulting increased tax burden should be significantly lower than the health insurance burden that responsible and honorable employers now pay.
I think we should thus insist that publicly-funded single-payer government-sponsored health care is done whatever else happens.
Regarding child care, your example demonstrates the dilemma of relying only on wages to address these issues. I think we need a Universal Base Income (UBI), funded by the dramatic increases in taxes on the very wealthy that I’ve described elsewhere. I think an aspect of that UBI could a portfolio of company equity taken by eminent domain from our largest corporations as I’ve also described elsewhere.
I think that such a UBI takes some of the pressure off wages and families. I also think that for most families whose children do not have profound developmental or learning disabilities, the entire family (and especially the children) will be better off if one parent can be home with the children full time from infancy through kindergarten and part time through grade school until the children are old enough to stay by themselves in the afternoon.
Another aspect of this that can work for many families is to arrange so that whatever work the parent(s) do is performed within an easy walking distance of home, so that the children experience that parent at work as well as at home. In such circumstances, pooled child care can also work.
In my view, a takeaway from all this is that the classic paradigm of Dad driving away each morning, commuting 3o-50 miles each way, working with people who don’t know his family and who his family doesn’t know, and driving back home each night is toxic at all sorts of levels. It is toxic to the environment. It is toxic to the worker. It destroys communities. It destroys marriages. It destroys children. It doesn’t work for men who make $40,000 per year, and it doesn’t work for men who make $400,000 per year.
I think that we MUST do single-payer government-sponsored health care whatever else we do. The ACA is a stop-gap tourniquet that slows the bleeding of health-care dollars, but has terrible long-term consequences. We MUST have single-payer government-sponsored health care.
I think that the promise of “good jobs”, especially for men and women without college degrees (and especially without high school degrees) are the Democratic Party’s equivalent to the GOP lies about all the marvelous things that are supposed to happen after massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Those “good jobs” that we’re talking about are gone and are not coming back. The GOP won’t bring them back, the Democrats won’t bring them back. Bernie Sanders won’t do it, Elizabeth Warren won’t do it — it’s not going to happen.
I think we need to find new paradigms that allow us to allocate the enormous wealth that our economy generates in ways that are consistent with our Democratic values and priorities.
Had to edit the post Tom, sorry for the confusion, Guess I had health care on my mind, I meant to say higher wages and affordable CHILD care.
I agree that a universal basic income might be workable, It’s having success in Alaska,
I’ll need to correct you on that. The wages had little or nothing to do with the jobs and all to do with political power. Today’s working class has no voice in the Republican Party and just a whisper in the Democratic Party.
I appreciate the clarification.
In my view, the loss of these “good jobs” that we’re talking about was brought about by technology and economics. Our economy is structured so that the owners of technology accumulate the wealth generated by that technology. Former workers are discarded — they are, literally, nothing more than “marginal costs” that are removed by the new technology. The “reduction” of those “marginal costs” are, in fact, a fundamental driver of the new technology.
We have a wage-driven consumer economy. As the very wealthy starve that economy by holding onto the new wealth being generated, the consumers in that consumer economy have no money to spend on consumption. Saving rates have been plummeting for decades, and consumer loan ratios have been skyrocketing — both clear symptoms of a consumer economy in life-threatening distress. Similarly, the household formation rate among graduating seniors has been in steep decline for decades.
Young people are moving back in with their parents. The market for new houses is now dominated by older families buying “up” as they have children and by speculators. For new graduates, the door to a new house is closed, shuttered, and tightly locked down.
We now have a consumer economy that produces orders of magnitude more goods and services than it did a few decades ago, while simultaneously having little or no disposable wealth or income to spend on those goods and services.
That’s just concrete reality. We can argue about the role that political power played or did not play in that — the fact remains that those “good jobs” are gone and are not coming back.
A UBI, combined with high-quality government-funded health care, may at least provide a foundation for our least fortunate. It is worth remembering that those “good jobs” of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that we recall with such fondness were pretty much limited to white men during that era.
Any political party that promises to “restore” those “good jobs” is lying.
So are you just giving up on the idea that everyone can have a “good” job in the sense that it pays the bills?
@ just giving up: I’m saying that it’s the unfortunate reality we live in.
We are in the end stages of a massive game of musical chairs. Only a few players will have a chair at all, and those will be among our most highly educated and most aggressive job seekers.
I’m not saying I like it, I’m saying that like it or not, this is the reality that we’ve created.
As it relates to the working class, yes, but the chairs that are in control are not even remotely concerned with education or aggressiveness in seeking a job. To that class, “jobs” are for suckers, hoi polloi, the great unwashed that creates the wealth that affords them them chairs.
Do you really think that Don Trump Jr, Ivanka, Chelsea Clinton, Betsy DeVos and the rest are where they are because of their stellar education and aggressive job seeking?
I don’t think that those in the Trump orbit are representative of the economy at large.
There will always be outliers. The fact that somebody’s great grandfather smoked three packs a day and lived to 107 does not mean that cigarettes don’t cause cancer.
The few remaining chairs will be taken by those who:
– Have 4.0+ GPAs in high school
– Attend prestigious high schools in prestigious communities
– Have at least a master’s degree in their chosen field
– Have deep connections in their chosen field by the time they graduate
– Come from a social class that allows them the luxury of doing unpaid internships in their chosen field for years while in college
– Work their tails off before, during, and after college
I don’t think anybody in Donald Trump’s orbit plays that game, because those people already have their wealth.
And unless we address that, we’re playing musical chairs for an ever diminishing set of chairs.
@ we’re playing musical chairs for an ever diminishing set of chairs:
That IS the essence of the game. The number of chairs has been diminishing for decades, and will continue to do so. We are talking about the actual demographics of wealth and power.
So long as we allow the fiction of the “great hand of the free market” to dominate our process of wealth allocation, the “game” will continue. Our wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer. They become more and more wealthy, and each generation removes more chairs from the game.
There will always be some jobs that don’t require and won’t be desired by those with the level of and success in education that you describe.
@ There will always be …:
The point remains that there will be an increasing number of people seeking a decreasing number of jobs.
The promise of “good jobs for everyone who wants them” is a lie.
I guess I’m just more optimistic than you are on that point.
I have to disagree with your notion that good paying jobs are the product of technology. Yes, with economics, but again, economic policy is deeply embedded in politics.
Funny you mention that young people are moving back with their parents. Our youngest son just moved back for a while, to save for a down payment on a house. He is a well qualified engineer, graduated with high honors from a prestigious university a few years ago. I contrast that with my personal experience. At his age, with a liberal arts degree and a poor academic record, I was making enough to put down a deposit on a house. Of course, back then CEO/worker wage ratio was not even close to what it is today – and technology had nothing to do with that.
As they say in Arkansas, if you find a turtle on a fence post, you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody put it there. Our wage/wealth gap is the way it is not because of technology or education or level of skills. It is the way it is because of the political power of the very, very rich and their ability to convince even smart people like you Tom, that they are just cogs in the wheel of the machine and they are not in control.
It’s Not the Technology
We’ve been arguing about this for years, another round is unlikely to change anybody’s mind.
It is not an either-or. Of course it’s deeply embedded with politics. Wealth and power have always been intertwined, and that’s unlikely to change. I’ve not said that anybody is just a cog in the wheel. Technology is one of the tools used by the very wealthy to enrich themselves and increase their power over the rest of us.
Nevertheless, the good paying job that you and I got with an undergraduate degree in the mid-1970s is not available to your children or mine today. It might feel better to blame Democrats, but that blame game isn’t going to solve anything.
In order to solve this issue, we MUST claw back wealth from the very wealthy. Blathering about “good jobs” only distracts from that political reality.
.
Why not?
Fewer jobs being chased by more people.
We are at 96% employment,
There are many, many jobs. You can’t drive down Route 9 in Westboro without seeing a “help wanted” or “apply now” at virtually every business
No, the reason you and I got with an undergraduate degree in the mid-1970s and that is not available to your children or mine today is that the people in charge, the people on Beacon Hill and Washington D.C. have set the rules of distribution for the wealth that our societies create – and those rules support the wealthy class.
The wealthiest man in the USA gets a tax break from the state of NY so if he agrees to do business there? How many of the people who move there to work for him will get a tax break? I’ll give you a hint: zero.
Law makers in Massachusetts were falling over themselves to get casinos and other businesses into the state but not once did these legislators ever ask or demand that these enterprises paid a wage that would sustain a family on one income.
We are where we are because 100% of the Republican Party is in the pocket of the wealthy class and 95% of the Democratic Party is, including our last nominee for the presidency.
Yadetty-yadetty, the horse you’re beating is long dead.
You know as well as I do (I think you’ve even written about it here) that the “many” jobs that are posted do not pay at levels that will support a family and are not comparable to those that were offered even a decade ago, never mind three or four decades ago. The technical term is “underemployment“.
Even if you waved a magic wand and made your proposals the law of the land tomorrow morning, nothing will change unless and until we:
1. Clawback the accumulated WEALTH (not income) from the very wealthy and distribute it among the rest of us
2. Provide a UBI for everyone
Those two items are the only things that will make a difference. Everything else is distracting noise.
In JTM’s defense, he has long advocated that our wage laws be such that said jobs DO pay enough to support a family.
@ JTM’s defense:
I’m quite familiar with his proposals.
In the thread-starter, he cites $77,000 (median family income) as the number. In the above comment, he demands that this be for one income (“not once did these legislators ever ask or demand that these enterprises paid a wage that would sustain a family on one income”).
That corresponds to a minimum wage of $38.50/hr for a man or woman who works 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week.
As JTM points out, NO legislators have proposed that, nor will they — the most aggressive numbers being proposed for a minimum wage are in the neighborhood of $22/hr.
Even if they were, it wouldn’t make even a measurable difference in wealth concentration, and that’s why the continued focus on wages is a delusion.
One final observation — you cavalierly dismiss the GOP and finish your comment with yet another attack on Ms. Clinton.
Do you seriously think Ms. Clinton would have shut down the government a few weeks ago?
Since we are discussing working class men and women, there are current about EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND federal workers either laid off or working without pay, with median wages of something like $30,000/yr.
The Trumpists are, at this very moment, taking about TWO AND HALF BILLION dollars per year out of the pockets of those laid-off workers.
“Our last nominee for the presidency” most certainly would NOT have hit those workers with this outrageous theft. Although you are eager to conflate the two parties and miss no opportunity to attack Ms. Clinton, plain facts like this are worth remembering.
The Trumpists and the GOP are plundering working-class federal employees as we speak. That is the exclusive act of Mr. Trump and his Collaborators. It is most certainly NOT the behavior of “95% of the Democratic Party”.
I’m not here to try and sway the Republican Party. As for Hillary Clinton, no, I doubt she would shut down the government. Nor do I think she would do anything to raise wages for working class Americans. That’s not here style and it was not the style of her husband. But that’s history.
And people are only “underemployed” because our economic system, as designed by both parties, refuses to equitably distribute the bounty of our labor. It’s not about what they do, it’s about how they are compensated when a person is “underemployed”.
While nearly a million working men and women are suffering from having their paychecks suddenly stop — with many of them still being forced to work while going without pay — you say you’re “not here to try and sway the Republican Party” and continue to whine about Hillary Clinton.
That’s not history, that’s here and now. I wonder if any of those furloughed federal workers think you’re any friend to them.
More whataboutism.
@ more whataboutism
More reality.
Please stop the personal attacks.
This is the second time I’ve asked you to do so in recent weeks.
I’m going to have to put you in “time out” for a week. No relies from me regarding your posts until January 9th
I see no “personal attack” there. Happy New Year.