Childcare Reform Act (Debating)

[Cranberry]

Thank you for offering numbers with this, looking swfitly over it, they do make sense and seem at place in my opinion. Regarding the bill as a whole, I believe this to be a sensible reform and am prepared to fully support this.

[Cranberry]

Well, gut feeling and a look on your calculations make them seem plausible for me, but if anyone else ha any further input here, I would gladly welcome it.

I'm also thinking whether we could just not keep the percentage numbers as proposed originally, 90% and 50% instead of 50/25. This service would greatly help many low income families in quite an easy way (say, for example single mums), and the costs would I guess rise not that much, I doubt we would have to spend more than 8/9 billion...

[Cranberry]

6,3 billions per week indeed is much. Maybe we could leave a part of the final sum for the regions?

[Cranberry]

Yes indeed, 75b is not going to be the sum we will have to pay. Giving a rough estimation without any proof to it, I don't expect the sum to be sustainably higher than 40 Billions, maybe 45 Billions.

Tax credits have their merits, sure, but I imagine many families would fall into this scheme that don't even pay taxes in the first place, or such a low number that the percentage that we would designate for this tax cut would nearly not be felt at all and definitely too less to pay for what the supervision of the child in independent child care institutes would cost.

Really, we have the facilities, we have the personnel, we will be able to scrap the means to paying for this. I definitely think we should be going down that road.

[Cranberry]

This indeed is an issue I care much about, so I would like to see this passed more than any other bill currently in debate.

[Cranberry]

NAY

I think that we should be more cautious. No Atlasian child should grow up in poverty, but we have a basic income for that. As long as social programs are sufficient to guarantee that Atlasian families are materially secure, why should we want all parents to work?

Of course it's easy to characterize the assumptions behind this question as backwards and sexist, but that's not the sense in which I ask  it. Whether it is mothers who fathers who choose to stay at home, that's not the point. What concerns me is the implicit assumption behind this legislation, i.e. the assumption that every functioning adult should hold a job and that failing to commodify one's labor is deviant behavior and somehow less respectable than other forms of work, like caring for one's own children.

I fear that a debate on these issues would to an extent break the mould of debate for such a bill. One could make a point that questions like these are more philosophical in nature than rather just plain political, and I am extremely weary of passing anything dealing with, yes, I dare call them, one of the "big issues" of our time, without a major, public discussion. Such questions deal with us as a society significantly more than just your given bill, and in order for the Senate to reach a reasonable judgement on any of those, the one you mention being just one of quite a few, I hold the opinion that massive and substantive input and argumentation. I don't know if anyone can follow my logic and more my wording and my usage of the English language on this, but, I believe this question you pose is not one to be debated just with one plain bill, but openly and massively in public. 

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I could arguably support provision on the lines of this, but we must be very careful that subsidies like these are not exploited or wrongly used. Clearly, such benefits should expire once a certain level of income or wealth is reached, and should only be paid if the parent indeed cares for their children on their own and not uses it for hiring nannies or something on the lines of that.

[Cranberry]

I might be misunderstanding your post, Cranberry, but I strongly disagree with the idea that debates about values are inappropriate for the Senate. Every bill of importance that we discuss here involves value judgments. We don't elect Senators to be "neutral" makers of policy, nor can they be. Whether this bill fails, succeeds, or passes in some other form, the Senate will be making an implicit statement about what a family ought to be.

This might be the case, but only to an extent I imagine. My intent was not to state that any discussion about values should be completely shut out of Senate debate, not at all. I simply affirmed by belief that I think that discussions about values should include the public to a far bigger extent than the public involvement a normal bill sees. In real life, such discussions and, as you say, statements about what things ought to be, spur massive public interest and involvement, and rightly so, as it are those values that shape our society to the core. In Atlasia, we need to mirror this to the closest extent possible, as just the same as in real life applies here as well. In the end, we are going to (re)shape a part of what makes Atlasia Atlasia, and I want the public to be heavily involved in this process.

[Cranberry]

People are seriously pandering about which Kindergarten is better for their kiddoes?

But to come back to topic, bore does make the most sensible and important point here: We are not subsidising parents to send their children to a childcare facility of their choice, let's say the one at the local country club; but we are offering every child a place at the logistically cheapest, nearest facility. There is a difference between that and college loans, and it is precisely this difference that generated the problems associated with college loans, and thus, this programme will not entail the same problems. 

[Cranberry]

People are seriously pandering about which Kindergarten is better for their kiddoes?

But to come back to topic, bore does make the most sensible and important point here: We are not subsidising parents to send their children to a childcare facility of their choice, let's say the one at the local country club; but we are offering every child a place at the logistically cheapest, nearest facility. There is a difference between that and college loans, and it is precisely this difference that generated the problems associated with college loans, and thus, this programme will not entail the same problems.  

Yes, but are you resting all of that on the words "Reasonably local"? I also don't see anything about cheapest in the text, but maybe I am missing it somewhere.

No, you are right about that. Considering this though, those facilities should, if private, meet some criteria, as they will basically be funded for the major part by federal spending if those reforms are passed - so to say not to through out money for the last dump traceable.

[Cranberry]

Yankee does have a point with that, yes. I guess if we included provisions that state they should search the logistically cheapest, which however must fulfil xyz criteria, that wouldn't be the dumbest thing to do.