(11-16-2021, 05:41 PM)jagibelieve Wrote:

(11-16-2021, 01:47 PM)mikesez Wrote: Most parents don't want to stay home with their kids. The economy is more productive when more people work outside of the home.
In a more productive economy, more people can afford to live the lifestyle they choose, whether that means staying home with their kids or going out and working.
I don't think anybody can dispute these facts.
Perhaps in the late sixties, most mothers preferred to stay home, but that is not the case today.
The only question is whether or not more subsidies for daycare will create a virtuous cycle of more workers and more productivity, or if it will simply inflate the cost of the things subsidized, as most subsidies do.
Considering the daycares are looking at the same labor shortages as everybody else, even though most of them offer free or reduced cost care for the children of their own workers, new subsidies for daycares at this point are unlikely to do any good, and likely to do harm.
Considering the actual strains that families today face, especially considering that almost all abortions are performed on women who are actively raising children already, a much better policy would be continuing and even expanding the new child tax credit, and let the families decide what to do with the money.

Can you back up the part in bold?  Because I know that my wife and I preferred for her to be home with our children.  Also, we never used daycare, at the very most we hired a babysitter on occasion.  Our children were our responsibility, not anyone else's.

I think that the "lifestyle" that far too many people want and pursue is high speed internet, the latest and greatest smart phones for everyone in the home and late model automobiles.  Rather than sweep the floor or monitor the washing machine they want a "robot" to do it for them and a "smart app" to tell them that the washing machine is done with their clothes.

As far as gas prices or fuel prices in general, it impacts a lot of people particularly those in rural communities and in mid-america.  For us personally we have to make a 15 mile trip just to get to a grocery store and a much longer trip to get to other stores.  We require diesel fuel to run the tractors that we use on our farm.  That impacts the little bit of income we make from our small operation.  Expand that to farmers in Iowa, Kansas, etc. who travel miles just to get from one field to another.