{"id":3580,"date":"2024-09-09T02:30:55","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T02:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/?p=3580"},"modified":"2024-09-09T02:31:07","modified_gmt":"2024-09-09T02:31:07","slug":"you-do-have-to-have-child-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/2024\/09\/09\/you-do-have-to-have-child-care\/","title":{"rendered":"You do have to have child care"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Political speak” drives me crazy. I am interested in specific policy issues and what candidates have to say about these issues seems relevant and important. Too often the stand taken is vague and sometimes outright weird. A reporter at a meeting of the Economic Club of New York asked Trump a straightforward question about the cost of childcare<\/a> and the response makes a good example. The President began by stating the obvious – people need child care and child care is expensive. This, of course, was basically restating the policy question and not an answer. The policy response as far as I can tell was that other countries were going to be “taxed” amounting to trillions of dollars on goods imported by Americans and this was much more than the cost of child care. That was it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I compare many of Trump’s position statements to something I covered when I taught Introduction to Psychology – the Rorschach Test<\/a>. This projective assessment technique involved asking subjects what they saw in an ambiguous figure. In other words, the figure was not a depiction of anything and personal biases and prejudices projected on this figure would be helpful to the psychologist trying to understand the individual subjected to the request. In other words, the babble produced in response to the direct question communicated very little but it allowed viewers to read in their own interpretations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My guess is that what Trump called taxes are what most of us would call tariffs. As I understand a tariff, a fee is added on top of the price of the producer of an imported good to make the price the item is sold at higher. Consumers in the country importing the item would have to pay more possibly making the item less attractive in comparison to locally produced goods. The government gets the tariff. Who pays the tax in this case is an interesting question. If I pay $20 for an item I could have purchased for $15 without the tariff, I might conclude that I have paid $5 to the government. Of course, the goal is to get citizens to buy local, but that might mean what they purchase will cost more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the connection between the tariff tax and childcare? Again, one must speculate. I assume that some of the money collected by the government might then be allocated in some unspecified way to cover childcare costs. I would suggest that Harris’s child tax credit would have been a much more specific and direct response and would not have involved increasing the cost of goods purchased from other countries and then finding some way for the government to allocate this tax to the parents who need the help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is so challenging to work your way through the vagueness of political positions. Are candidates vague to avoid having to be specific and offer something specific for voters to consider? I understand that Republicans are against big government. I understand that this is about unnecessary regulations and unnecessary programs. However, the specific regulations that are to be rescinded and the specific programs that are to be abandoned are seldom mentioned. I assume that the military is a defensible expense. What about childcare? Trump did not really say if the government should intervene to cover some of the cost. Should childcare providers be regulated? Should training be necessary and should the number of children each provider can take be specified? If a provider could have a group of say 25-30 3-year olds much like a kindergarten teacher involved with 5-year olds, the cost to parents would be much lower. The specifics matter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Political speak” drives me crazy. I am interested in specific policy issues and what candidates have to say about these issues seems relevant and important. Too often the stand taken is vague and sometimes outright weird. A reporter at a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federate","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3581,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions\/3581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningaloud.com\/curmudgeonspeaks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}