As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit the workforce

Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by nonethewiser on Thursday November 02, 2023 @10:31AM (#38114016)

> any other

This hyperbole makes your point very easy to disprove. All it takes is one example and your statement is factually incorrect. Italy, South Korea, etc. Many definitions of "developed" basically boil down to income so you would basically need the USA to be the least developed of developed countries. But I will try and be charitable and assume you mean USA labor costs are on the low end of developed countries.

What metrics are you looking at? Wages in general in the USA are higher (higher median income). The 15$/hr example I used is higher than most minimum wages in Europe. For example the minimum wage in Germany is about 1600 euros a month or $10/hr for full-time work.

Regardless, even if US labor costs are low relative to developed countries (which doesnt seem to be the case), it doesnt change that its a major factor in daycare costs and that increasing wages would just make very high prices even higher.

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Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by grecy on Thursday November 02, 2023 @02:40PM (#38118104)

https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW

In 2022 the US had a lower minimum wage than every OECD country other than Romania, Croatia, Hungary and Czechia.

21 developed countries have more expensive labor than the US, and only 4 are less expensive.

Labor in the US is cheap among Developed countries.

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Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by kbelder on Thursday November 02, 2023 @03:23PM (#38118695)

Kind of corresponds to unemployment. 10 OECD countries have lower rates, 30 have higher.

https://www.oecd.org/employment/unemployment-rates-oecd-upda....

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Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by johnnyanmac on Friday November 03, 2023 @01:13AM (#38124792)

This is hard to compare because federal minimum wage is just that. a floor. The vast majority of states have higher minimum wages on top of that.

California, for example, would be at the very top in 2022 ($15/hr). a mid CoL state like Illinois being $12/hr in 2022.

This is definitely the case with other countries too, but the US's (relatively) weak federal government is a consequence of this. They leave the states a lot of autonomy in these matters but set a bare basic floor to prevent obvious abuse. As a result, the federal minimum wage hasn't increased since 2009. Wheras states tend to increase every year or 2 (calidornia increased to $15.50 this year).

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Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by grecy on Friday November 03, 2023 @01:37AM (#38124950)

> California, for example, would be at the very top in 2022 ($15/hr). a mid CoL state like Illinois being $12/hr in 2022.

According to the OECD, the US was at $15.08 in 2022... which means almost rock bottom for the OECD. So your example of Illinois at $12 is the actual rock bottom, cheapest labor in the entire OECD.

Thanks for making it so clear.

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Re:As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit t... by johnnyanmac on Friday November 03, 2023 @01:47AM (#38124993)

we must be reading different charts, or you misinterpreted my hourly salary for yearly: https://i.imgur.com/VMH2qi7.png

$15/hr is approximately $30k/year if you made the latter argument. US measures its minimum wage hourly so I used that site's own conversion function to save me some mental bandwidth. Which I unfortunately lost by having to reply to this. Oh well.

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