The twin costs of childcare and a reduction in parental work hours (often mom's) and as a result future career and income advancement potential can be substantial drag on a family's income. Each additional child just prolongs this drag.
Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen.
In addition to childcare, there's also health care and education to pay for. Middle class families get virtually no help on either front.
Except many grandparents are still working, especially to cover healthcare costs.
I think you generally pay about $1k-$2k per year in premiums in total for all parts. There are also deductibles and copays. For example, the deductible is about $1500 for hospital stays and copays for doctors visits is 20% of the medicare approved costs.
So it's lower than private insurance, but not negligible. It can get pretty expensive if you require lots of procedures or medications, as many people do at that age.
Here is an article claiming the average cost for A and B parts is almost $8k per year.
https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/02/05/heres-the-average...
The whole thing makes you want to kill yourself, which might be the objective.
The idea is probably to expand the current system to everyone, which is better than nothing, and then work on improving it.
I think the bigger issue is how the divide between the parties happens. People seem to demonize the other side based on a specific issue that is important to them and then extrapolate that view to all positions held by the party on the basis that "all [party] politicians are stupid because of their stance on [issue] so their ideas on other issues are stupid too".
For a generalized example, the divide is mostly urban vs rural (even in other countries). A major single-issue voting topic would be gun rights vs gun control. A rural person thinks a new gun control law is stupid because the law seeks to ban certain items that statistically don't cause many problems and they find utility in their gun rights (more likely to hunt, slow police response, etc). An urban person would think the new law is good because "why does anyone need that item" and they find little to no utility in those rights (less likely to own a gun, carry a gun, hunt, faster police response, more exposure to the negative news/affects just due to population density). Each side thinks the other is stupid on this subject. People then think, hey the urban person wants to take away my rights on guns on (what appears as) stupid reasoning, so I don't trust their proposal to federalize healthcare because their logic/brain must be deficient. Then urban people will say these dumb hicks "...are clinging to their guns and bibles..." so they must be too stupid to know what's good for them. Which leads to neither side actually listening to the concerns of the other like a community should and instead just trying to gain full control of the government to ram through whatever laws their side wants.
You spend 40ish years working and funding Medicare with a 3% tax to use it for 20ish, with still paying these costs. I don't see how it would be feasible to extend the plan to everyone under that system (kids never paid in, how do they get coverage; what about young adults with no work history nor the savings to pay the premiums?). So the proposed systems must be fundamentally different from that.
They can't give you that 3% to invest yourself because then they have nothing to give people that are already retired.
> But I guess I'm just a dumb peasant who can't take care of myself.
Here's the rub. You, and many people, are likely able to manage that yourselves. Some people can't. They may already be poor and behind on their bills, so they'll put that 3% towards fixing the transmission in their car that hasn't worked for 3 months. They might be an entrepreneur with a poor sense of risk, that empties that money to start an underwater basket weaving college. Or they might just be bad for money.
If we let people manage that themselves, what do we do when someone has to retire because of medical issues, but can't afford health insurance or the medical care they need? Do we just let them die? If we treat them, then everyone is subsidizing their healthcare, at which point you're investing 3%, but you're also paying a 1% tax to help cover all the people that didn't invest their 3%. At a certain point, the most sensible thing is just to not save your 3% and join the people the government takes care of. At some critical mass, we're just back to Medicare.
Of course, if we're willing to tell people "You should have saved money, we're not going to help you. Please die close to the graveyard to make our lives easier." then that arithmetic changes dramatically, but I don't think that's a world I care to live in.
People who can't afford medical care can sign up for Medicaid. In fact, people on Medicare who can't afford it also sign up for Medicaid.
The other point is that you would have to have pretty large generation gaps to have child care while the child is still young if depending on Medicare. Once they're older they generally can stay home alone for a bit. Medicare age is 65. So for example, the grandparent would need to give birth to the parent at age 32.5 and the parent would have to give birth to the child at age 32.5. That would be for the oldest child, so you would be giving birth even later in life for the other children. I believe pregnancy after age 34 is considered to be a geriatric pregnancy.
If you take the generational gap the other direction, then you could have great grandparents providing child care if the next generation starts at 22. Higher education and financial stability might be a barrier in this scenario.
Then if we are talking about raising the birth rate, how sustainable is this model when families have 3 or more children? Meaning 1 set of grandparents would be responsible for 3 sets of parents assuming this model is used on a wide enough scale to affect the birth rate. This is exasperated is using the great grandparent example.
The line of thinking here is that feminism caused 2-worker households, which doubled the workforce, which caused wage stagnation. Basically that doubling the workforce crashed the price of labor, but companies were unable to reduce everyone's salaries, and instead stagnated wages until inflation caused them to fall to the new price of labor.
I find it crass to blame feminism for that, though. Women should have always been free to join the workforce, and the problem is really 2-worker households, not that women are able to work. I think single-worker households address some of these issues, but there's no reason to point and say women were the problem. It's just as valid for the wife to go work and the husband to take care of the house.
Single-worker households aren't going to make a comeback, imo. For one, we, as a society, don't really respect homemakers. It's unskilled labor, and we grant it about as much value as most unskilled labor. And the more likely you are to be able to afford having a single-worker household, the more drastic the gap in prestige between the worker and homemaker becomes, which creates a weird power dynamic. I.e. if you're a hotshot lawyer and your wife stays at home, that's a huge gap in how you're perceived by other people. The second reason is that wages have effectively fallen through stagnation and inflation. Even if we forced all households to only have a single worker tomorrow, I'm doubtful wages would rise to where they might have been. Third and finally, a lot of homemaking is stuff people don't really want to do. Time with the kids is great, but does anyone really enjoy vacuuming, or cleaning the bathroom, or doing dishes? This might just be my perspective bleeding through, but the work itself seems awful. And worse yet, you do it either almost entirely alone, or while children are playing/screaming/fighting around you. It's physically demanding, and generally not mentally stimulating.
Longer-term, I would bet that the solution to this is a) more optimized services (i.e. a cleaning service that cleans all the houses on your street, like landscaping people often do), and b) robotics that are able to handle small bits of this. Roomba is a good example. They're reasonably effective at vacuuming. Give it a decade and they'll probably be able to actually replace vacuuming. We will also need a way for people that can't afford the upfront price to have one, which will probably come forth in the form of a subscription (give us a $100 deposit, and then we'll charge you $1 every time it runs).
How is it unfair? Men don't get to choose whether to work or not. They can like it or lump it. If you told men they could stay at home all day spending someone else's money improving the home, many would jump at the chance. The grass is always greener on the other side.
> Women should have always been free to join the workforce
They were always free to join the workforce. Just like they are free to join men's sporting events etc. The problem is now they are being encouraged to join the workforce. They are being indoctrinated into masculine roles from a very young age, fed through education and into the corporate machine. Then they get to 30, panic and realise they are running out of time to have children but they are trapped in the machine. Women's happiness has only decreased.
Most women didn't want this. Going to work sucks. The only people benefiting from this are the billionaires who are richer and more powerful than ever.