Soaring child care costs
-
- June
- 16
In the Hudson Valley, the cost of child care is increasing by $781 a year, according to a statewide report released today by U.S Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY.
The average Hudson Valley family spends about $13,341 a year for an infant in child care, $11,261 for a toddler and $11,254 for a school-age child, she reported.
Gillibrand’s plan would:
- increase the Dependent and Child Care Tax Credit maximum deduction to $6,000
- make the child care credit fully refundable for some low-income families
- provide larger tax breaks to employers who provide child care at the workplace
- allow employers to deduct 20 percent of the costs for child care resources and referral services
- create a new tax credit of $2,000 a year for up to three years for any college graduate who specializes in child care and works at least 1,200 hours a year in a child care facility
- encourage employers to institute telecommuting
- provide part time students with access to the Child Care Tax Credit
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm by Susan Elan.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
| 
Email This
Advertisement
So, what’s the ultimate goal – drop millions upon millions of babies on the public’s porch in the dead of night? If you want children, plan for them and pay for them. You already have publicly financed cradle to 18 surrogate baby sitters. You want more than that, apply for federally funded earmuffs, move to Sweden and eat frozen worms.
Its time for Gillibrand to go…I’ve had enough of her policies lately.
It’s refreshing to see a US Senator tackle a problem that truly makes for sleepless nights for young parents. It’s easy to see why Gillibrand was re-elected in her Congressional District by a whopping 62%. She’s working hard on solutions for besieged New Yorkers, traveling the state and meeting constituents. The people who meet her are impressed and understand that her opponents and the news media created a very false first impression. She is more than ready for the US Senate and, I predict, will be there for a very long time.
You don’t have to go as far as Sweden to find excellent child care. The US military provides service members the best child care in the nation. Here’s from the US Army website after the DOD won an award for it’s child care services:
“Military Child Care is both a readiness issue and a quality of life issue. Quality child care helps service members, working spouses and single / dual military parents by reducing the conflict between their parental responsibilities and the military mission. Soldiers and families can find comfort in the knowledge that their children are in the best care system in the nation.”
Hmmm – quality of life, reduced conflict between family & work & comfort. Shouldn’t the rest of US working families strive for the same? Thanks to Senator Gillbrand for this legislation. The measures are an excellent start to bringing the US up to international (and US military) child care standards.
Many people who cannot carry a theory to its logical conclusion have yet to notice that the US military is, de facto, an armed communist philosophical base in place to theoretically defend capitalism and the “American way.” The more children you have, the more dollars you get, the more housing allocations you get, the more shoes you get. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. You have the same “rank” and do the same work (or more) as the guy next to you and he gets paid substantially better because he “needs” more. Where to you see this in the private sector? If our ever-expanding socialist system slowly is allowed to morph into quasi-communism, let’s at least be honest and call it what it is.
Every study of early childhood development talks about the importance of safe, affordable, high quality day care for young children, and for their parents. Knowing your child is well cared for makes for better. more productive and reliable employees, and a stimulating, social environment contributes to well-adjusted inquisitive children.
Brava Kirsten!!!
ed1 is right! And as for “every study of early childhood development,” every study of early childhood development is written by a horde of useless PhDs in education who approach the issues with a smug, theoretical vested interest and have no clue as to how anything truly works on terra firma, as is evident from their perpetual and worsening reality-based failures. They are interested only in throwing more and more hundreds of billions, if not trillions at a malfunctioning system.