Despite the decline in inflation since last year, families with young children still face sharp increases in one of their biggest expenses—child care. The national average price of daycare and preschool services rose 6% in July from a year before, the Labor Department reported recently. That was nearly double the overall inflation rate of 3.2%.
This is ridiculous. Why does the Journal insist on printing nonsense like this? Here is what the cost of preschool looks like:
Yes, there was a brief spike in preschool costs at the beginning of the year, but price growth has been flat since April—in fact, down 0.2% compared to an increase of 0.5% for overall inflation. And since 2019 preschool costs have increased considerably less than overall inflation (up only 16.7% compared to 20.4% for CPI). That represents a real price change of -3.1%.
There is no preschool crisis.
Right, but the "rate" is the slopes in your chart above. Eyeballing it, the slope of daycare looks steeper than the slope of the CPI.
But I'm not sure of the comfort that people paying their bills are supposed to draw from being told that the cost of a very important service they need has gone up less than the costs for everything has gone up. In my work I of course adjust time-series data to account for CPI-U. But if I'm staring at my rent bill that's gone up 20% in the past two-years, and daycare bill that's gone up 15% in a year, while my paycheck went up 4%, the "real" impact feels more like the nominal.
People think the costs for childcare are way too high. That's why universal pre-K is wanted everywhere.
The WSJ is not trying to put the price of child care into perspective. If people don't like something, feed that anger--then blame Biden.
How else to let people know that Biden hates families and kids??
I guess it depends on where you live and what school you go to. If my son in San Diego experiences a big increase in daycare costs this year, it doesn't really matter what those charts say if my reality differs.
My mom had a 17% increase in assisted living cost this year, on top of about 10% per year for the past 2 years. These increases are compounded and permanent, for people who are most likely on a fixed income (but for SSI COLA). Are these increases fully justified or mostly profiteering? Who knows?
So lemme get this straight....
Kevin is telling us that large price increases for individual items aren't actually price increases if you adjust for how much overall prices have increased?
That's some pretzelly logic and literally nobody should accept this kind of reasoning.
Try telling parents (or anyone) that prices for individual items aren't actually increasing because prices for many items are also increasing.
Seriously. I mean that's basically what inflation is...an increase in prices. Not sure why an increase in one thing should be ignored (or the idea that it increased flat out rejected) just because other stuff might have gone up more.
$200 a week is $200 a week source: my kid just finished pre-school
Preschool and day care are not the same thing.
Preschool is an actual school with a small group of students and a teacher, a curriculum and materials. Day care is a kindly woman watching your kids play, giving them lunch and keeping them safe, either individually or with a small group of other kids. Day care includes babies and todders. Preschool is for older kids who will go to kindergarten next year. There is different certification required, different limits on the number of kids, different facilities. Day care tends to occur in your home or someone else's home. Preschool is a school building. Day care involves a provider who runs her business. Preschool has an administrator and employees. The goal of preschool is learning. The goal of day care is minding kids in the place of working parents.
Because of these differences, costs will be different. Lumping them together may cause confusion.
Yes, preschool costs are up, 16.7% from four and a half years ago. And prices overall are up 20.4%. How much have your wages gone up in the same time period? I think that's the rub. Prices up, wages not so much. Corporate profits, dividends and executive bonuses, though, are way up. But they only help a few.
Doesn't really mean much unless you look at how hard it is to get your kid into one. Cheap means nothing if you can't get it. Also, the actual quantity of interest would be percent of income, not just percent. Expensive is not just a function of the dollar value.
I wonder how much is driven by increasing public pre-k, I just got my 4 year old in to start pre-k at a public option and with the public after school my cost dropped to like 10% of what I was paying since he was 2 years 9 months. I know in my area that the number of public slots for 3 and 4 years olds has increased pretty dramatically so it's a shift from a 100% privatized cost to roughly 90% public cost for a substantial portion of families.