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 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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