Marc Thiessen has a list today of the ten worst things Joe Biden did this year. Here's the first:
10. He made the child-care crisis worse. As my Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg and I pointed out in September, child-care costs have been rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation. We proposed expanding the State Department’s au pair program, making this lower-cost option available to more families. Instead, the Biden administration put forward a plan that would double the cost of hiring an au pair by tying compensation to state and local laws on minimum wage, which will effectively put the program out of reach for many working families.
Where's an editor when you need one? Wasn't someone around to warn Thiessen that, um, not too many working class families can afford an au pair in the first place? Come on, man.
But there's more! As it happens, the cost of childcare isn't in crisis and hasn't been rising at twice the rate of inflation. It's been rising at less than the rate of inflation:
Thiessen's mistake was relying on a Wall Street Journal article from August that used year-over-year inflation and just happened to catch a brief dip from a year earlier. As usual, this was enough to get the Journal's alarms blaring, but within a couple of months the illusory rise was gone. As you can see, when you take a broader view there's nothing there. Childcare costs have risen about evenly with inflation over the past year and are below inflation since 2020.
Without bad faith…..
Republicans would have no arguments at all
You can say that again. It is amazing what Republicans say.
Krugman had it right -- Rs learned long ago to work the refs. "Shape of Earth - Views Differ"
Make $280 per hour. Getting a job is not easy. In any case, you have fd10 access to a wealth of resources to help you with your work style. Become motivated to promote hundreds of jobs through job boards and vx05 career websites.
Take a look at this............................. https://paymoney35.blogspot.com/
As usual, the donor class response to America’s ills is cheap foreign labor.
If this were a just world, thugs like Thiessen would be working the graveyard janitorial shift at a meatpacking plant.
The cost of caviar has soared. This is an outrage that the working man will not stand for. We shall not rest until Biden's policies have stopped this inflation that hits the bottom line of the middle class.
/S
Just because it's rising with inflation doesn't mean childcare isn't too expensive you childless robot.
Um, you could have held a few of those splooshes, and then you wouldn't have childcare that's "too expensive".
I have 1 you drooling ruminant.
Like everything else, I'm sure Private Equity has gotten into that game as well. Which means that prices will skyrocket while quality of care drops because PROFIT!
Childcare costs are an issue for every working family. I don't know that there's a solve that doesn't involve cutting corners on what parents expect in terms of cleanliness and quality of staff.
My grandchildren are well into school-age, but I’m willing for my tax dollars to subsidize care as a public good.
And what have Republicans done to lower the cost of child care exactly?
(Interestingly, Thiessen seems to be arguing for MORE immigration! Well, more immigration of white French girls, anyway.
While I wouldn't mind a cute 20 year French girl in my house, I'd settle for reasonably priced reasonably staffed reasonably clean day care. Which I admit is one of those "pick 2 of those 3" things.
Also I never blamed Biden. I blamed Kevin for suggesting childcare costs are fine when they are not.
Kevin did not say that child care costs are fine, just that they are rising less than the rate of inflation, pointing out that Thiessen is broadcasting Republican lies to the contrary.
Child care will always seem too expensive to many - after all, you have to PAY people to watch kids, and if you want decent facilities, good security, etc, those things won't come cheap. So I doubt child care costs will ever be "fine." (unless, of course, they are heavily subsidized as is often the case in Europe).
Yeah, you bet it's "too expensive", incel. Not like you'd know, either. But here's the really funny part: the workers who do child care get paid next to nothing and work extra uncompensated hours -- that is, wage theft.
So where's all the money going, if not to the provider staff? And do you approve?
It's really awful that being poor is basically an unpardonable sin in America. Expectations are crafted around a level of wealth that very few people have, hence tone-deaf statements like Thiessen's, and it wouldn't be difficult to find dozens of others like it.
Not having the funds to do ... anything, really ... is seen as personal failure. "I/We can't afford it" might be the most underused statement in the country, and probably that is why so many people have really serious debt trouble.
Diamond tiara and Faberge egg prices are through the roof! Man, what's a poor maintenance mechanic to do?
… not a mistake. He counts on readers not fact-checking his BS. Nor recognizing the foolishness of treating an au pair as affordable child care; as he is pitching this crap at upper-class twits like himself.
👍👍👍👍👍
Ah, but the au pair comes with other er, ah, "advantages" to the Man of the House. Capiche?
Everybody Ought To Have A Maid!
https://youtu.be/Ahqu1nd3Zu8?si=j5T9zWoPumjaykuc
Child care is very expensive and top on the list of things people with kids will complain about--so blame Biden!
To get a spot on the list for a good daycare/pre-school, you better sign up NOW--fill in the conception date later...all Biden's fault!
Just wait until Kevin needs live-in help to cope with the cats. Then it will be a different story.
It's something for the inept who want to think they're clever by voting for Republicans but can't think of a serious seeming reason, 'So that's something I can complain about! Childcare!'
I was amused to see in the news today that a congressperson was complaining about the cost of apples:
Rep. Jerry Carl: "Two apples in DC were $5.72 for those two apples. Now, I don't know when the last time Joe Biden has been grocery shopping ... "
You will recall we commented on this type of thing a few days ago. So this guy probably goes into an expensive grocery store and sees apples for $3.99 and buys a couple of large ones and pays $5.72 and blames Biden. But the likely reality is he bought a new variety of Apple that didn’t even exist 10 years ago like Sugar Bee or Cosmic Crisp. In the same way another Trumper complained about the high price of turkey and showed a Turkey with a very high price. But the turkey he showed was a Diestel which is an ultra premium brand.
So it’s same thing with child care. Childcare is too expensive!!! and the example he gives is the high cost of an au pair.
Whatever happened to just going outside and picking apples off a tree before the horses or the wild monkeys got them? That was good enough when we were kids, and that was only like five years ago! Five years ago, the Golden Age of when we were great, Before Barbie.
Blame Biden! They'd never have made that movie if Trump were
kin . . .--President!I have an apple tree in what used to be an apple growing region and you literally can't give them away. Maybe Rep. Carl should become the new "Johnny Appleseed" and start planting them everywhere so people can have free apples.
From Wikipedia:
Author Michael Pollan believes that since Chapman was against grafting, his apples were not of an edible variety and could be used only for cider: "Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus."
So, I suppose if Carl wants to be popular becoming a new Johnny Appleseed would be the way to go.
The fact that Greg Sargent is leaving while a hack like Thiessen still has a job says all you need to know about the Post these days.
Childcare is a disaster. Kevin has been trying to assure us that everything is fine if you focus only on rates of change during a narrow window of time post pandemic when demand for childcare collapsed.
The linked WSJ complaint about Au Pairs is silly, but Kevins take on this one isnt much better.
Biden has done some things to address the high cost of childcare.
If Republicans cared about child care, they wouldn't have let the child tax credit expansion expire. What they care about is keeping taxes on the ultra wealthy low.
+10!
In many ways the problems with childcare in the US stem from the low wages that are paid in the industry. My wife works in the business and it is hard to find decent staffing at the wages they can pay.
But then, if the childcare industry offers higher wages, they would have to charge more and a lot of working families might not be able to afford the service and one of the parents might drop out of the workforce to take care of the kid(s).
Almost like a Government solution might be useful here...
The problem is crying out for a national solution where we ALL chip in to cover the costs of quality childcare for families as it benefits us all for in the end.
Yes!
Oh, I *know*! It's so hard to find good people these days...
All kidding aside, though, childcare is a fundamental necessity in today's economy and it really does dominate a lot of kitchen table conversations when it comes to paying the bills. I don't know if it's possible to craft a policy at the federal level to address it (e.g. waiving payroll taxes for childcare workers to bring costs down), but a lot of states and cities might make themselves more attractive to businesses and younger couples by offering subsidized after-school or childcare.
Not to deny that childcare costs are a huge problem, but the whining from California Republicans about Pizza Hut firing all their delivery drivers and fast food franchises raising prices in advance of the new minimum wage rules is nothing short of breathtaking. Oh, the humanity of having to pay more for fast food so that someone can afford to live on their salary!
Their ability to blame a Democrat governor and/or president instead of corporate shareholders is astonishing.
Crap that people shouldn't be eating anyway.
My favorite part is that apparently people have a right to cheap fast food and cheap pizza delivery, corporations have a right to the highest possible profits, but apparently workers don't have a right to a living wage.
Enjoy your tofu and kale.
Hey, the corporations put a lot of money and effort into convincing the public that it’s taxes, not shareholder/management greed, that’s the reason their take-home has stagnated.
Seems to me the Democratic Party had a partial solution in the increased Child Tax Credit. Which was killed by the Repubics. And Au Pairs are one of the easier forms of illegal immigration, visa overstays. So the Repubics cut money people may have for child care and want in increase illegal immigration of Au Pairs.
Or as someone in Palm Beach says, "win, win, win."
s/ (The error is deliberate. If they can say Democrat Party, I can say.......)
That Florida thruple, head of the state Party and founder of Moms against Freedom, were most definitely "Repubics".
Swingnuts.
+2023 to the both of you!
Happy New Year!
It's funny though: The working class is very much to be pitied when the prices rise for a service that they couldn't afford anyway. Especially when the higher price is caused by raising working class wages...
by tying compensation to state and local laws on minimum wage,
The Horror!
One trend you may well see in child care is local school districts (one near where I live has already done this) taking up pre-4K child care. Call it the "public option" when it comes to child care. While parents still have to pay for it, the costs are much lower than a private child care and the employees are compensated through the school district itself and its a source of revenue for the district. So if the private model continues its collapse because the costs are too much and there's not enough workers for it, then I think a lot of child care will go back to either school districts, or perhaps even churches, rather than a private business run out of someone's home.
+1
The answer to rising child care costs is to socialize child care. However, you can be sure that hiring well-qualified, educated staff will cost more. They'll unionize. And Thiessen, et al will say that public unions are ruining America. Except the police and fire departments. They're okay, because they don't vote for Democrats in a bloc, lol, and they're not mostly women.
So I'm all in favor of this, for both social and political reasons!
Thiessen can now complain that someone read the actual -words- in his column instead of feeling outraged.
Mr. Drum, please don't risk raising your blood pressure to report on the latest Thiessen outrage; he, Hewitt, Will, & a few others are not likely to be dropped by The Post, given its new managing editor's background. Better contributors than those - albeit Post staff, not syndicated pundits. - have taken the buyouts, & even some of the editorial cartoons are absurd. Glad to not be paying the full print-edition price plus monthly tips any more.
Kind of reminds me of the kerfuffle David Brooks caused a couple of months back, tweeting about the outrageous cost of his airport lunch (~$60). 2/3 of which was the double scotch he ordered, all of which was undoubtedly on his NYT expense account.
And despite Brooks being mocked all over the world for it, quite a few right-wingers have taken to social media with receipts or price tags of foods from very high-end retailers. Some guy had prime rib at $18.99/lb - people replied with price tags & receipts showing the same purchased for $6 - 8/lb.
I suppose in their echo chambers it has some positive effect for them.