Child care is where you really see that it’s an economy for the affluent

On my worst days, I think the economy will roll forward with stagnant wages, a general lack of care for women, re-training programs that don’t work, and a continued burying of heads in sand piles about automation for roughly another 70 years, and then the whole thing will collapse, and there will be no jobs unless you were already affluent, and we’re in a Mad Max type situation where people are getting killed over milk. Hopefully it’s not that drastic, but I’m 40 now and I’d be 110 in 70 years, and since I’m not a very healthy person as is, I doubt 110 is in my cards, so I shall likely never know.

This morning I was checking out the Numlock News newsletter and came across this:

The economy relies on the ability of workers to find affordable childcare, and right now that does not really exist. While restaurant staff shortages have been stubborn, a line cook doesn’t need certifications or to sustain a mandatory child-to-adult ratio, so the shortage is bad and not getting better. The obvious solution — public funding of child care worker wages — isn’t done in most places, despite the clear advantages. A Louisiana study found that 44 percent of teachers in private child care programs leave every year and mostly exit the profession, vastly higher than the 16 percent K-12 teacher turnover (with half…