Other People Paying for What is Described as Unaffordable
In a comment to this post of mine from yesterday in which I used the phrase “affordable daycare,” reader Eric377 posted this comment:
Eric377/October 18, 2015 7:50 am
Leaves I understand as policy. Affordable daycare a whole lot less. Affordable daycare is not what is meant here. States could change regulations to allow lower cost daycare. Is that what is meant? That would be “no”. It gets affordable by roping in other people to pay what is described as unaffordable. There is a price point where providers and customers and regulators are seemingly in full agreement that the service shouldn’t be offered; won’t be profitable; and won’t be purchased. This is a non-problem.
To which I responded:
Okay, Eric, I’m gonna risk a copyright lawsuit by the New York Times and reprint here without permission Gail Collins’s entire column in yesterday’s Times, titled “What Happened to Working Women?”.
….
That’s the full column. I’m going to add this: The purported justification for federal subsidies to industries such as the oil and gas industry and agriculture is that it has a significant positive effect on the economy. Agree or not with those policies, that is the stated justification for it.
Just as that is the stated justification for a slew of other policies that the American taxpayer is forced to pay for. Such as highway and bridge construction and maintenance, before the Tea Party gained control of Congress.
I understand that it requires abstract reasoning to understand this. And that people who incessantly rage about the American taxpayer having to pay for this or that don’t DO abstract reasoning. But really, some things are interconnected. The health of the economy and government subsidies for daycare are two of those things.
Seems there’s an actual difference between what is unaffordable for individuals and families and what is unaffordable for, say, the national government. In other countries as well as ours. The public in other countries has figured this out.
Just wanted y’all to know.
I guess I’ll copy my comment over to this thread, too!
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“Japan’s birthrate has crashed. 54 weeks of maternity leave might be available, but fewer and fewer people are taking it.
“Western civilization and Japan, which has adopted much of that culture, is dying out, and the primary driver behind that is women’s choosing career over children.”
============================================
Japan has more than ten times the population density of the US, which made me skeptical about the claim that they were dying out any time soon. Japan currently has 128 million people in a country about the size of California. The fastest decline rate I could find was -0.2%. I wrote a little 10-line ruby program to run the numbers.
At this rate of decline, their population will dip below 100 million for the first time three centuries from now in 2139. In 6 centuries (2612), Japan’s population will drop to just below that of the current population of the state of California (38.8 million.)
As California isn’t having drastic problems due to lack of population, Japan probably has a while before they need to worry about dying out.
” I’m going to add this: The purported justification for federal subsidies to industries such as the oil and gas industry and agriculture is that it has a significant positive effect on the economy. Agree or not with those policies, that is the stated justification for it.” Beverly Mann
That is really all that need be said in regards to any program that may require the support of all the people. And such support is accomplished by providing federal subsidies for such programs. Conservative Republicans have been getting away with a double standard for what is a justifiable government expense. Listen to them chatter like monkeys in a zoo. One wants to cut Social Security, another wants to gut that same program. They never find the money or see the value in better educational support. And health care is fine if its a huge profit industry. They never have seen a corporate welfare program that isn’t justified.
If you think that supporting working people of both sexes and for many justified reasons then you’re either blind to reality or too wealthy to care about others.
Japan like Italy does face a demographic crisis due to an aging population. Populations whose aged members are so committed to protecting Italian and Japanese culture that they have adopted strict anti-immigration policies. Either country could adapt by simply opening up the borders in a systematic way. But at a cultural cost that many conservatives (in the older sense) find unacceptable.
You see this in the Social Security debate in the U.S. “Crisis” is presented as fundamentally demographic, shifts in mortality will inevitably move worker-retiree ratios. Yet the immigration assumptions under Intermediate Cost assume that it will stay steady in nominal terms and decline in relative terms over the next decades. That is to a large degree Social Security “crisis” assumes that the percentage of multi-generation born Americans will increase compared to first and second generation. This makes no sense on any level and substituting realistic immigration numbers resolves a significant portion of the actuarial gap.
“Where are we going to get night nurses to take care of aging Boomers? Where are we going to get construction laborers to replace aging white workers in the trades?” Such are the question posed by the Social Security doomsayers. To which I reply “Hmm, every fucking nursing school in the Philippines teaches in English and you a can get every God damn cement guy you ever wanted by recruiting in Ghana and El Salvador”.
Pardon my Tagalog here. If Japan has an problem with worker-retiree ratio (as oppose to a population drop as such) then they have an unlimited recruitment pool in East and Southeast Asia. That just happens to be unacceptable to major sectors of the Japanese population. Well tough.
Bruce you shouldn’t be so pithy. I think this blog should get back to the real issues and not to get caught up in the off point weeds of trying to always being politically correct. My point being that the wealth disparity and its underlying powers in this country needs to be reigned in. It is governments job to provide for the checks and balances of abuses of power in our society and they are not doing their job. They are actually becoming more part of the problem. We need greater counter measures from the new elected leaders to check the abusive powers of China’s one way trade, Wall St’s predatory capitalism ( the fire sector)and the out of control, too big to fail policies and spending of too big government. When I read Trumps tax plan it will cost the tax payer another $10T over 10 years. Will the economy we actually grow more than this from the tax breaks benefits?
James – You need to work on that ruby program.
Japan’s population is anticipated to fall to 100m in 2060, 45 years from now. A bit different that your “three centuries from now”.
From Japan Times re population. (note the goal is to keep population from falling below 100m. The risk is that will fall faster. Note also the push to divert SS benefits from older wealthy Japanese to support child care.)
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/06/21/editorials/fertility-rate-dips/#.ViT-6aSCm2w
In 2014 Japan’s population fell by 215,000. California’s grew by 370,000.
How much of that California growth was from immigration?
It’s funny how hard and how long the libertarians and republicans complain about “making other people pay” when there’s a good chance that minorities will benefit from more than a tiny fraction of the spending. I don’t believe that they actually care about anything other than keeping “those people” in their rightful place – at the bottom.
Unfortunately, the fact that society as a whole benefits greatly from these types of subsidies, and they boost both government and corporate income by a significant multiplier, is totally irrelevant. They see people they don’t like “getting free stuff” and they are enraged.
Slight error in my comment above, corrected as follows:
If you think that supporting working people of both sexes and for many justified reasons [is not a justified government expense] then you’re either blind to reality or too wealthy to care about others.
I look at it the other way, Bob. Considering that Republicans are more likely to contribute time, money, and blood to charity than liberals are, it is the liberal policies that are designed to keep minorities dependent on the government, so that they will continue to vote for democrats.
Warren:
Neat little 2015 study which goes pages beyond a magazine articles and replete with references. There is nothing to support your contention Repubs donate more than Dems.
1. “We begin by testing the public goods view by asking whether Republicans are more generous in their charitable giving than Democrats. This hypothesis is intuitive: conservatives oppose government redistribution out of efficiency concerns, and so favor private redistribution more than liberals. However, using the proper statistical approach, we find little support for this claim. After adjusting for differences in income and church attendance, liberals and conservatives do not differ in their levels of overall giving.
2. Finding no differences in levels of giving, we next test the social pressure view by asking if liberals and conservatives differ in the types of charitable causes they give to. We find that giving decisions match the religious gap currently found in politics: conservatives, who are more likely to identify with organized faiths and attend church, donate to religious organizations, while liberals, who are more likely to be secular or only moderately religious, donate their money to secular organizations.
3. Finally, we ask if the external political environment influences giving behavior. Using a panel survey bracketing the 2012 election, we test whether biased economic perceptions affect charitable giving as well. Although we replicate previous findings showing the effect of political control on consumption behaviors, this effect does not extend to charitable giving. This finding supports our interpretation of charitable giving as driven by fixed social identities, rather than transitory economic perceptions.” http://www.michelemargolis.com/uploads/2/0/2/0/20207607/giving.pdf
Take a look at the graphs at the end.
But what I’m saying is different, and charity has nothing to do with it. Not having universally affordable health care imposes costs on society as a whole, in the form of lost productivity, and on corporations as well, in the form of unnecessary absenteeism. Not having universally affordable child care imposes many of the same costs, some of them arguably higher. Additionally, the demand for relatively unskilled child-care workers could be filled by the unemployed and those on welfare, which would impose little to no inflationary pressure.
My point is that the net gain to both societal and corporate income – in cash- is greater than the outlay of the dollars we would spend to have the government provide those services. Because the income and GDP-producing benefits flow more to society as a whole, it is fairest to have society as a whole pay for them.
Living down here in the Deep South, I hear the things that are non-verbal in this sort of conversation. It may well be that the commenters here are being honest and unemotional in your opinion. Most people would be shocked to hear the level of venom that is present in the voices of people when they talk about
“minorities dependent on government” and “voting democrat” and “giving away free stuff”. It’s honestly scary, and I’m very concerned about what might happen if another democrat wins the White house in 2016.
“Considering that Republicans are more likely to contribute time, money, and blood to charity than liberals are”
Not if you discount donations to their own churches.
https://philanthropy.com/article/FaithGiving/156239
Jack, here’s another error in your comment: Some of the GOP are against corporate welfare…see the Ex-Im Bank fight. However Democrats and Chamber of Commerce GOPers are still pushing hard to revive this dinosaur of corporate welfare.
Bob-Let’s see some numbers.
You’re not reading that correctly, Arne:
“People in the Northeast give the most, providing 1.4 percent of their discretionary income to secular charities, compared with those in the South, who give 0.9 percent.”
They were not just taking out giving to churches, but giving to ALL religious charities. Such charities would be The Salvation Army, The Episcopal Relief Fund, church-run homeless shelters and food banks, Catholic Hospitals, religious private schools, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, mission trips to Haiti which rebuild schools and homes after the eartquake there, etc. If you give directly to Habitat for Humanity, that would count as “secular”, but if I gave to my church and they used that money to partner with Habitat for Humanity, it would not.
Sorry, not buying it.
“Not having universally affordable health care imposes costs on society as a whole, in the form of lost productivity, and on corporations as well, in the form of unnecessary absenteeism.”
Well, our productivity is higher than that of Canada, the UK, Germany, and France. In fact, in 2011, according to the BLS, only Norway and Ireland beat us on GDP per hour worked.
http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart04
And if it really hurt productivity, companies would offer health insurance. Oh, wait, they DO.
Only a portion offer ESI leaving a large percentage uninsured.
“Some of the GOP are against corporate welfare…see the Ex-Im Bank fight.”
Well, I’m no fan of “corporate welfare” (special tax break, outright subsidies, etc.), but I do not understand the opposition to the Export-Import Bank. It’s seems right in there with “Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….”
The program’s correct, as it agrees with 3 other programs that compute exponential growth. The article doesn’t show how they get their numbers, but they must be assuming a much greater exponent than current numbers, which range from -0.06% to -0.2%[
Good lord — you have to write a program to do simple math and you get it WRONG?!
OK — first, the current population of Japan is estimated to be 126,812,551 (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/), but let’s use 128M. At 0.2% annual decline, when will they reach 100M?
Divide 100 by 128, and get 0.78125. So we have to solve for n:
0.78125 = (1.000 – 0.002)^n
0.78125 = 0.998^n
log(0.78125) = log( 0.998^n )
log(0.78125) = n * log(0.998)
n = log(0.78125) / log(0.998)
n = -0.10721 / -8.6946
n = 123.31
Check the answer on your calculator: 0.998 x^y 123 * 128 = 100.06
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Now, the problem with that is the assumption that Japan’s population will continue to decline at that rate. But demographers know that as a population declines, the percentage of women of child-bearing age declines faster, because the population is aging. That is why they project that Japan’s population will drop below 100M by 2065: http://populationpyramid.net/japan/2050/
Japan’s birthrate is only 1.4 children per woman. “Replacement rate” (zero growth) is considered to be 2.1 per woman. At Japan’s rate, each generation is only 70% the size of the one before. In just two generations, they’ll have cut in half the number of women capable of bearing children.
Warren:
I would say you are high for Japan’s birthrate. “Typically, a couple has to produce about 2.1 children to replace themselves, allowing for death among the young. Even in traditionally Catholic countries in Europe, the birthrate has dropped to shockingly low levels in the last two generations: 1.3 in both Italy and Spain in 2005. In metropolitan Tokyo, the rate dropped to 0.98. In Hong Kong and Macau, it hit 0.96 and a hitherto unthinkable 0.84, respectively, the latter the lowest on record.” Then too, this is metropolitan Tokyo and this number was calculated in 2006 and reported by Joel Garreau in “300 Million and Counting.”
Sorry for the typo. The line
n = -0.10721 / -8.6946
should read
n = -0.10721 / -8.6946*10^(-4)
(Didn’t copy the exponent.)
James – It is not Japan Times that comes up with these projections. It is the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Follows their 2012 detailed estimates. Look at page 16.
http://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/ppfj2012.pdf
The head of this Agency was interview by the FT in June 2015:
“Based on our projections, the size of the
annual decline will keep getting bigger
before peaking somewhere between
2060 and 2070,” said Futoshi Ishii,
director of population dynamics at the
National Institute of Population and
Social Security Research.
The pace is projected to reach more
than 700,000 a year by 2025 and then
rise to more than 1m a year by 2060.”
You assume a static decline, not the case.
Still believe in your 300 year conclusion? Google, “Japan’s declining population” – There are 1,000s of articles that say you’re wrong.
The FT article:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/41aace5e-208f-11e5-aa5a-398b2169cf79.html#axzz3ep9J4CFC
“Sorry, not buying it.”
So perhaps you should do a little more research. After all, I did not claim there was a difference, you did.
Googling “charitable giving by political party” easily provides people discussing data in more detail than you get from National Review.
such as:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2148033
“At the individual level, the large bivariate relationship between giving and conservatism vanishes after adjusting for differences in income and religiosity.”
Hilarious! They actually think that religiosity and conservatism are INDEPENDENT VARIABLES!! That’s rich!
Run the numbers on any exponential growth calculator and they’ll agree with mine. Like I said, I’ve compared mine with three others and they agree. As for the articles disagreeing, they must be assuming greater rates as I pointed out earlier and as one person above also noted.