Child care prices rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation

The national average price of daycare and preschool services rose 6% in July from a year before, the Labor Department reported recently. That was nearly double the overall inflation rate of 3.2%, which was down from its recent peak of 9.1% in June last year. ... a mother of three living in Blaine, Minn. ... said she is paying about $2,500 a month for child care this summer.

More.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Real earnings of men are still lower than in 1973: Was feminism worth it, darling, seeing that you are up ten grand but spend it on daycare?

The average cost of daycare is $11,666.

Laugh of the Day: Over 100 "Day Without Immigrants" protesters fired from their jobs

From the story here:

More than 100 protesters across the country were fired from their jobs after skipping work to take part in last week's "Day Without Immigrants" demonstration. Restaurants and day cares were among the businesses in states like Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma and New York where bosses fired workers after they didn't show up for work in order to protest. ... At Ben's Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant & Caterers in Long Island, New York, 25 workers were fired Friday when they returned to work, according to Telemundo 47. Police escorted the workers from the restaurant — most of whom were undocumented and have worked there for years.

Rep. Justin Amash: How About Some "Re-" In Front of That?

Politico.com has a story generating considerable interest about how Republican freshman Rep. Justin Amash (MI-3) has been voting "present" a number of times, even on some serious matters like de-funding the abortion provider Planned Parenthood:

In total, Amash has voted present on roughly 4 percent of the legislation that has come to the House floor in the 112th Congress.

Amash has voted "present" five times, which calls to mind Obama's voting record as a state senator in Illinois, where he voted "present" 129 times, about 3 percent of the votes he cast.

Obama's record attracted the attention of Nathan Gonzales in 2007 because Obama also had cast such votes on several controversial issues like partial birth abortion:

For example, in 1997, Obama voted "present" on two bills (HB 382 and SB 230) that would have prohibited a procedure often referred to as partial birth abortion. ...

[I]n 1999, Obama voted "present" on HB 854 that protected the privacy of sex-abuse victims by allowing petitions to have the trial records sealed. He was the only member to not support the bill.

In 2001, Obama voted "present" on two parental notification abortion bills (HB 1900 and SB 562), and he voted "present" on a series of bills (SB 1093, 1094, 1095) that sought to protect a child if it survived a failed abortion. In his book, the Audacity of Hope, on page 132, Obama explained his problems with the "born alive" bills, specifically arguing that they would overturn Roe v. Wade. But he failed to mention that he only felt strongly enough to vote "present" on the bills instead of "no."

And finally in 2001, Obama voted "present" on SB 609, a bill prohibiting strip clubs and other adult establishments from being within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and daycares.

It's not like people weren't warned in Amash's case, either, since he had a famous reputation here in Michigan as a state representative for reporting his votes in real time on his Facebook page, and for voting "present" now and again.

Still, you'd like to think that a guy who graduated from law school could come up with a better excuse for voting "present" than not having "a reasonable amount of time to review the legislation." (Gee, I'm sorry, Professor, my dog slobbered all over my homework at breakfast). Besides, he's getting paid an awful lot of money if all he's going to do is "present" us. How about some "re-" in front of that?

In the Planned Parenthood case, Amash said he doubted the constitutionality of the language. Well, then didn't he have an obligation to vote "No" instead of "present"?

If most Americans could go back and listen to candidate Obama on the stump talking about how he and his supporters were going to transform America, I'm sure it would elicit a shudder now, knowing what they know about the carnage his policies have wrought in America. Which is exactly what I felt when I heard Justin Amash thank his supporters on election night in November 2010:

In his victory speech at Kent County GOP election night headquarters, he said the party should work to bring more Democrats and independents into the party to "transform this state" and "transform this country."

Yep, just what we need. More transformers. More Democrats.

UPDATED Sunday February 27, 2011:

Unlike doctrinaire libertarians who think they are always right about everything but are in consequence thereof not free to admit it when they are wrong, we must retract the following:


[Amash] had a famous reputation here in Michigan . . . for voting "present" now and again.


Amash never voted "present" in the Michigan legislature.

But his voting record was noted for its "singularity." Of 1315 votes cast, there were 76 in which his was the lone vote against legislation which otherwise obviously overwhelmingly passed. That's 5.8 percent of his votes. It is useless to speculate how many of these would have been cast as "present" if he had been permitted to do so, as he is now in the US House, where, however, it is becoming clear that after just two months his record in Michigan is a kind of proxy for how his record in DC has already shaped up.

This does not mean Amash was wrong, of course, in every instance, but it does show that he marched to the beat of a different drummer. That drummer was distinctly libertarian. His singular votes often reflected an aversion to using legislative power to single out groups for special favors or penalties. Sometimes it appears to have courted the stoner vote. Other times it disdained regulatory intrusion on private industries, and otherwise steered clear of do-gooder legislation, such as protecting "endangered species" or senile old women in danger of freezing to death in their homes because they forget to pay the gas bill.

In Michigan Amash's record meant that he went against his own party almost 36 percent of the time (472 votes), which makes perfect sense of the rhetoric to get more Democrats and independents into the Republican Party (without the singular "libertarian" votes, Amash voted against his own party 30 percent of the time). His election night remarks in that regard were jarring and startling in a year marked by one of the biggest partisan Republican victories nationwide in decades, but play well in a district full of Democrats and independents and union members. The clarion call of the Tea Party was not bipartisanship, but that's often the ploy of libertarians, whose small numbers keep them forever in need of allies. It's smart politics, not but it's not principled conservatism.

Methinks thou dost protest principle too much.

With the "present" vote on de-funding Planned Parenthood, one suspects Amash is taking a page out of Obama's unprincipled playbook.

"Suddenly" coming to the conclusion that DOMA is unconstitutional, Obama has instructed the DOJ not to defend it in court. But at the same time he is going to enforce this "unconstitutional" law until the courts have done with it. Instead he should be using his own Executive power to preserve, protect and defend the constitution as one of its co-equal representatives by not enforcing DOMA, which he views as a threat to it. In this Obama plays a cowardly slave who is in thrall to the courts, and doesn't have the courage of his own convictions. He is a weak president, of very poor character, but it does shore up his street cred on the left.

Expressing doubt that voting to de-fund Planned Parenthood would be constitutional, Amash was content to let de-funding pass unopposed by him, hiding in the half-way house of "present" and putting the constitution at risk. He too is guilty of ceding his co-equal authority, in this case of the Legislative power in which he shares. It was a moment of weakness. He may have escaped the anger of the left in his constituency, but his so-called conservative principles were sacrificed.

I say it was cowardly.

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."