The $20,000 Annual Cost That Disappears if the $15 Billion Funding Question Gets Resolved
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
The $20,000 Annual Cost That Disappears if the $15 Billion Funding Question Gets Resolved
The Current Cost
NEW YORK — Many New York City families pay upwards of $20,000 annually for child care, which is the largest expense in their household budgets after housing. For a family earning $80,000 — above the income threshold for subsidized child care programs, but below the income level at which $20,000 is a manageable cost — the child care expense represents approximately 25 percent of gross income, or considerably more than 25 percent of after-tax income. The Mamdani administration’s universal child care proposal would eliminate this cost through public provision funded by progressive revenue from high-income earners.
The Research
Research projected that universal child care would generate $900 million annually in personal income by helping 14,000 women return to the workforce. The mechanism: families who cannot currently afford child care, or who have one partner working reduced hours to manage child care logistics, would have both partners able to work full time in the sector that pays them. The income generated from this labor force participation is taxable income that partially offsets the program’s cost to the public.
The Hochul Constraint
The universal child care program costs $6 billion annually in New York City and $15 billion statewide. It would be funded, in Mamdani’s proposal, by the millionaire surtax that Hochul has declined to support. The pied–terre tax generates $500 million of the needed $6 billion. The PTET reduction generates approximately $1 billion. The remaining $4.5 billion requires either revenue mechanisms not yet agreed to or a fundamentally different approach to the program’s scale and funding structure.
The Families Waiting
The families who would benefit from universal child care exist in the city now, paying the $20,000 that the program would eliminate, making the labor force participation choices that the cost constrains, and calculating whether the math of working full time justifies the cost of the child care that working full time requires. The policy exists as a proposal. The families exist as the people the proposal would affect. The distance between the proposal and its implementation is the distance that the budget fight is trying to close.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.