OK, I admit that this is pretty amusing:
Q: What specific legislation will you commit to to make child care affordable?
Trump: Well, I would do that and we're sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about… pic.twitter.com/v8gqLUHS2v
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 5, 2024
Trump is genuinely incoherent here. You really have to listen to understand how bad it is. As best I can make out, he's saying he'll raise so much money from tariffs that the federal deficit will go away and there will still be such vast sums left over that fixing child care will be trivial.
Sure. Ironically, the better answer is one that's political suicide:
There was a period in the '90s and aughts when the cost of child care really was rising faster than wages, but that hasn't been the case for over a decade. Since the end of the Great Recession, wages have risen considerably more than the cost of child care.
Nor is there a shortage of child care. The number of child care workers is higher than in 2019 and way higher than in 2012 (1.1 million vs. 850,000). Ditto for child care revenue ($16 billion compared to $11 billion, after adjusting for inflation). All while the number of children under ten has shrunk by 4%.
I'm all in favor of making child care easier and more affordable for families, but there's no crisis here. Trump could have said this if he'd known it. But needless to say, he doesn't have a clue.
It is coherent enough to suggests that Ivanka got him to sit with her and Rubio and discuss child care, and he remembers that it happened, but nothing of the actual discussion.
trump's only clear memory is the last time he had sex with melania fifteen years ago
after that he's got nuthin'
15 years ago? Barron just started college. More like 19 years ago.
trump should get his brain trust going on the crisis in the availability of good cheap beer; the downfall of america clearly started with the $15 six of corona which is clearly skunky overpriced under-hopped bud in a different bottle
Ugh. I'm more of a 'breakfast beer woman' myself. Porter.
On Edit: Not that I drink beer for breakfast!
What is the actual cost of childcare? It doesn't matter if wages outpacing the cost of childcare if the actual cost is still cripplingly, eye-poppingly high. "Just hang in there, it'll finally become affordable in three decades! Your grandkids will be able to take advantage of it!"
Cool. What are these people paid? Do they make enough to afford to live dignified lives and start families themselves?
The cost of childcare was so high by 2010 that it started to become mathematically impossible for it to keep rising faster than wages.
Good thing Drum isn't a trauma surgeon: "well, the multiple gunshot woulds you have are not pleasant, but they don't really constitute a crisis. The rate of new holes forming in your body has dropped to zero, and even the rate of blood loss is starting to even out!"
I think you can mathematically show that over the last year or two, there's been a heavy increase in Kevin Drum posts that boil down to "People are complaining about a problem and they're wrong to do so". This is why former marketing execs for software companies make bad politicians.
yes.
I think you can mathematically show that over the last year or two, there’s been a heavy increase in comments that boil down to “I don’t agree with what Kevin demonstrated but can’t be bothered to engage with the facts because criticizing Kevin is more fulfilling.”
"The cost of childcare was so high by 2010 that it started to become mathematically impossible for it to keep rising faster than wages."
I'm not even sure what that means. What's keeping it from rising faster than wages? And if so, isn't that the very definition of it becoming more affordable?
Look, it's fine if you see something wrong with Kevin's analysis, but if you're going to quibble with it, at least make sense. And show your work.
"What's keeping it from rising faster than wages? And if so, isn't that the very definition of it becoming more affordable?
Look, it's fine if you see something wrong with Kevin's analysis, but if you're going to quibble with it, at least make sense. And show your work."
Wages are obviously the limiting factor on costs. At least until we have a long term loan or financing method for day care. Parents almost always pay for these costs out of their wages and then stop consuming the product when cost far outstrips wages.
Logically this story makes perfect sense. Readers could provide precise data and support, but Kevin chose this topic, not readers. Readers arent really responsible for updating a poorly assembled article with precise data and linked support.
No one mentioned a "crisis," Kevin.
Also, childcare costs increasing less than wages doesn't mean it is not still expensive and burdensome for lots of families who end up working jobs where their take home pay is in large part going to covering childcare needed while at that job.
My "quibble" with Kevin is how often he elides from the Average to the Whole. For instance, I can easily imagine a situation where the variation in cost of daycare is far smaller than the variation in income. Those with income in the lower quintiles would get clobbered by childcare costs while those in the upper half of the distribution would complain about costs over glasses of wine.
My imagined situation has zero data to back it up but my criticism stands. Comparing two averages without examining the consequence of any difference in the standard deviations of the two data sets is lazy and uninformative.
You're doing it again.
Never divine a policy from Trump's incoherence; always make him explain his incoherence. Make him take a solid position rather than create a permissive structure for Trump to pick and choose from or walk away with the excuse, "I never said that."
Don't put words in his mouth to make him out as half-intelligent.
And there is such a simple answer to the question as well... Child Tax Credits.
Harris could have been on to the next question after three words.
How has the fraction of children under ten in or seeking childcare changed? Or if you prefer, the percentage of households with children under ten where all the adults work and so would seek childcare?
This is just more blathering from a man who has no intention on helping anyone but himself. The fact that he still has no idea how tarrifs work is besides the point.
Trump is an idiot, but Kevin is not. So why does Kevin go out of his way to make these posts and refuse to include meaningful data. Like actual costs, or costs as a % of income for a median family.
Median wages for all non-supervisory workers may be increasing slightly faster than childcare costs over the last few years, but this tells us absolutely nothing about the current situation for parents of young children.
Kevin isnt misleading his readers because hes an idiot that doesnt know any better, so whats the goal here?
The number of child care workers is higher than in 2019 and way higher than in 2012 (1.1 million vs. 850,000).
Like housing construction and jobs and everything else: the distribution matters. If all 250,000 of the new child care workers are in the 40 least populous states, that doesn’t help a good half or more of American parents who live in the other 10 states. You can’t buy child care on a daily basis in Seattle from Idaho or even from Spokane. The child care you need has to also be in metro Seattle. (I swear Kevin is the type of egghead who looks at overall numbers of children going down and then number of school classrooms remaining the same and asks “why are certain school districts overcrowded and desperately passing bonds to build more schools? Can’t the excess kids showing up in, say, Texas or Florida simply use the abandoned classrooms in Michigan or Maine?” No they can’t! The distribution matters!)
Ditto for child care revenue ($16 billion compared to $11 billion, after adjusting for inflation).
This also demonstrates nothing about the supply of daycare. If all daycare facilities in Seattle doubled their prices at the same time - perhaps say, during a recent nationwide labor shortage - but kept the exact same number of daycare workers on their payrolls (per the distribution issue mentioned above), their profits would soar even as actual spots in daycare facilities (aka “supply of daycare”) remained exactly the same.
Trump's lazy answer to all questions, probably the only one he he is capable of remembering, is that tariffs will bring in so much money - like nobody's seen before™ - that all the nation's problems will be solved.
Tariffs! Who but The Donald would have realised that the federal budget could be balanced with this one weird trick?
I look forward to him promising all kinds of free socialistic programs to Americans, funded by the tsunami of gold coming from the Tariff Money Machine.
The charts are fair, but what everyone always points out is that rising "wages" varies widely between areas of the country and even economic segments of the US.
So all it would take for this to be a "crisis" is for (a) the cost to rise at or above the chart percentage, (b) the young families in question being already stretched thin, and (c) wages FOR THAT FAMILY TO NOT rise per the "average."
Its not like, with something like "child care" or "healthcare" that two things could be true: the chart could be correct but millions of people could really be affected.
Other Kevin charts might not be as obviously wide of the mark, but any chart comparing "average wages" to [something which is more of a necessity than an optional spend -- like childcare or healthcare or education] is not persuasive.
Which is why many of the posters are not persuaded.
It MIGHT be "amusing" if this addled, ignorant, narcissistic swindler didn't stand a good chance of being elected PRESIDENT and bringing an entire army of Heritage Foundation Nazis into power with him.
Could we PLEASE care about the "substance" of what he said as LITTLE as he does? Could we PLEASE focus on, y'know, the ACTUAL STAKES of the election?
Oy ...
Kudos to the Harris campaign, which has built no small part of its messaging around the idea that it can play recordings of the opposition team simply talking, add no rebuttal or comment, and the effect is devastating. Trump and Vance cannot help but reveal themselves to be idiots and creeps.
It was a simple question about policy. A softball, really. The stuff that pols and campaigns should be expected to address day in, day out. What do you got, Donald? Nothing. Ask him the first four letters of the alphabet, spot him the A, B, and C, and he’d still be lost. He’d ramble for two minutes about using the greatest letters, whine about Biden (or whoever he is running against now) using all the bad ones, but for all the tea in China he could never come up with a D.
He’s the kid who never did his homework. That was clear since his first debate in Aug 2015. He’s gotten away with it mostly. This time, though, let’s see it all come crashing down on hiim, because either he loses or we do. God, what an idiot.
That such an idiot appeals to as many Americans as he does just proves we have a lot of idiots in this country.
Making child care easier and more affordable for families sounds like a wonderful idea and it is! So of course democrats are for it just on principle. But... it turns out it's not really necessary and no one will be rewarded for implementing some policy. It often seems like democrats invent a policy solution then pretend there is an actual problem being solved. 45 million americans lacked health insurance in 2008 and democrats fixed it! Then, apparently, none of them voted for democrats... ever.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/45-million-americans-now-lack-health-insurance/story?id=9355452
So don't bother. It's not a crisis... or even a problem.
I’d like to ask the applauding members of the Economic Club of NY just exactly what it was that they were applauding.
I wonder how many Republicans support the proposition that child care should be paid for by the government. Because that seems to be what he is saying there.
My favorite part of that clip of his rambling blabbering 100% incoherent answer that went on for close to 2 minutes is that quite a few people who heard it thought it was good enough to applaud it. Jesus
Kevin, if childcare costs were the only cost a family had to pay, then you'd have a point about how wages have been going up at a faster rate.
However, since childcare costs are not the only costs a family has to cover, that means that the 7% gap you mention (with all the caveats and limitations others have pointed out) has to cover everything else that has increased. That's why people ask about how to make this and other things more affordable, because when all added up, those cost increases surpass most families income even if income has gone up at a faster pace than each individual expense.
You are infinitely more coherent than Trump, but you aren't coming across as particularly that more thoughtful or smart on this issue. Just saying.
Who cares about averages? If you live in NYC and none of the daycares around you has openings you're not going to send your kid to a daycare in Iowa. Plenty of places were you need to get in waitlists early in the pregnancy in order to get a spot by the time your leave runs out, and good luck if your child's birth doesn't line up nicely with school years.
Also, looking at the number of kids on it's own is kind of insufficient if you don't look at how many households are dual-income and therefore NEED full-time childcare, which I guess has NOT dropped in the same period.
It sure sounds a lot like he's talking about universal government funded pre-K. Like what those SOCIALIST (in the modern not owning the means of production way) countries in Europe often have. Like we have in the Horrible Crime Ridden Marxist City of New York.
It doesn't matter if it's some kind of tax breaks and deductions etc. or just taxpayer funded, it's the same thing - an expense that society pays for as a whole, fully or in part, not just the users of the service.
Definitely Soshulizm.
I wonder if it isn’t cost, but simply exposure. It sure seems that when I was a kid circa 1980, it was much more common for grandma or Aunt Jody to be a low-cost caregiver than it is today.
Aunt Jody is working her ass off in the latest in a series of start-ups that will probably fail, & Grandma is a mass of disabling interlocking and conflicting auto-immune diseases who is only alive because they cannot agree which one will do her in.
A lot of families now live farther away from both grandmas & Aunt Jody.
wasn't this very blog agitating for joebiden to resign the presidency in july fir reported incoherence that wasn't even this bad?
where are the calls for trump to decline the gop nomination?
I nearly posted the same - but there aren't any appalled Republican celebrities who want to appear righteous* by posting an op-ed in an influential newspaper to publicly embarrass trump.
* or who know an editor miffed by trump's refusal to be interviewed for his/her paper
In fairness, there are barely any Republican celebrities. When your "celebrity" team is made up of Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, Rob Schneider, Kevin Sorbo, and Ted Nugent, you are really scraping the bottom of the Q-list barrel.
Weird old senile fool.
Kevin says:
"Nor is there a shortage of child care. The number of child care workers is higher than in 2019 and way higher than in 2012 (1.1 million vs. 850,000). Ditto for child care revenue ($16 billion compared to $11 billion, after adjusting for inflation). All while the number of children under ten has shrunk by 4%."
-------
Hmm....
Are the child care costs shown in the chart the same 'total child care revenue/expenses" that are referenced in the text? The chart shows a 47% increase in the 'cost of child care', which implies the cost per child. But in the copied text (directly above), he tells us that total child care revenue is up by roughly the same 47%.
Obviously, total child care costs and average cost per child are very different statistics.
Meanwhile, at Kevin’s old blogging grounds: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/trump-vance-child-care-plan/
not only is it a crisis, it is one of America’s biggest…