Posted on 03/04/2019 1:18:18 PM PST by grundle
In the discussion of the nation’s problem with child care costs, a crucial factor has gone mostly unmentioned. This is one of the most regulated industries. These regulations are driving up costs. Adding more government control of the industry risks making a bad situation even worse.
To be sure, costs vary by state. So too do the relevant regulatory regimes. According to data from Child Care Aware, child care for a toddler in a Massachusetts center costs on average a whopping $18,845, or 65 percent on the average single-parent family’s income in the state. Low-cost Mississippi, on the other hand, is $4,670, less than 25 percent of the average single-parent family’s income.
Why does child care in Massachusetts cost four times what it does in Mississippi? Indices estimate that the ratio of overall cost of living between the two states is about 1.5, suggesting factors specific to child care account for part of the wide gap.
Massachusetts mandates that child-care centers must have one staff member on hand for every three infants. In Mississippi, that staff member can care for five. Massachusetts requires a staff member for every ten preschool-age children. In Mississippi, that number is fourteen. Staff in Massachusetts must complete at least a two-year vocational child care course. Mississippi has no such requirement.
These are just two of dozens or even hundreds of categories in which states make different rules. In addition to child-to-staff ratio and overall group size, regulators can stipulate the education of staff, numerous health and safety codes, and requirements for continuing staff education, children’s immunizations, and square footage.
Mandating that states regulate a service like child care while giving each of the 50 state governments broad flexibility can lead to quirky results. For example, Idaho, unlike the other 49 states, does not impose a fixed ceiling on child-to-staff ratios but uses a point system based on various criteria to calculate the limit. In another example, the Denver Fire Department recently mandated that any facility caring for more than five children purchase a $30,000 sprinkler system.
The purpose of regulating child care is to increase the probability of high-quality outcomes: children kept safe and healthy who enjoy and grow from their experience. But a centralized regulatory body, even in one of the smaller states, cannot possibly monitor these factors closely for every child. These measures are likely no substitute for the intuitive sense of quality held by parents, friends, and neighbors who as a group observe a provider far more closely.
To discern the regulatory contribution to costs, in a deeper study published by AIER, I start with the Cato Institute’s Freedom in the Fifty States project, which provides an index and rankings for each state on several margins. The regulatory part of the index measures each state’s land-use, insurance, labor-market, and many other regulations.
If you combine Cato’s data on each state’s overall regulatory burden with the data on the average cost of center-based care for a four-year-old in each state, you can generate an overall regulatory propensity for each state as a proxy for the propensity to regulate child care.
More-regulated states, all else equal, offer child care services that are thousands of dollars more expensive. This correlation does not imply causation, and one important factor working the other way is that more-regulated states usually have higher incomes. But the correlation proved to be statistically robust when I replaced dollar cost with cost as a percentage of median income.
A careful look at these data shows that child care in the United States bears the tell-tale signs of an industry with barriers to entry. A limited number of incumbents charge prices that put the service out of reach for all but higher-income families. Meanwhile, people complain of shortages, especially in lower-income areas. Regulations that add to a business’s labor and capital costs form barriers to entry, leading to high prices and low availability.
Reducing regulations intended to protect the well-being and safety of children is not a comfortable topic, nor should it be. But given the number of children and families struggling under the status quo, deregulation could reduce costs while on balance improving well-being and safety. The high cost of child care is far from inevitable. The solution, however, is not national; it falls to the states to fix how this industry is regulated.
Because in Mississippi the kids are tied to a fence post in the back yard. That ain’t spensive at all...
“Why Does Child Care in Massachusetts Cost Four Times What it Does in Mississippi?”
Because...White people? Climate change? Trump?
In Massachusetts they have to have a specialist for each of the possible “genders”. :)
Economists, particularly free-market ones (because there are a lot of the statist-central-planning types) need to popularize a government bureaucratic deflator.
Trick question...because the massholes don’t know how to divide by the number of esses in the state names
My older brother would put us on the top of the refrigerator where we were afraid to jump down.
Fear of death would keep us well behaved.
Who is John Gantt?
What the market can bear?
KYPD
So build a fast train and ship the kids off every morning to the South.
> Because...White people? Climate change? Trump? <
Or the Russians. Don’t forget the Russians.
Hahaha!!!!
Why is it that NY (and NJ) still after all these years of taxes raised again and again, with increased population and so even MORE people paying those taxes...still have cannot provide enough electricity to the people in the seasons they need and have still have black outs!?
Are the regulators state lawmakers who are elected by ordinary, legal voters? If such is not the case then this may be a problem with state constitutions that put legislative powers exclusively in the hands of popularly elected lawmakers.
In other words, non-elected state regulators could be an indication that such states are not maintaining a constitutionally guaranteed republican form of government imo.
"Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government [emphasis added], and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
H O W E V E R …
In order for the United States to guarantee each state a republican form of government, patriots first need to do the following.
Patriots need to elect a new patriot Congress in the 2020 elections that will not only promise to support PDJT’s vision for MAGA, but will also promise to do its constitutional duty to make penal laws that discourage state actors from ignoring republican forms of government for their states.
Corrections, insights welcome.
It costs more to provide for the special needs of retards.
Because the children in Massachusetts are obviously more precious - just ask their parents.....
Perhaps Massachusetts parents are SUCKERS?
my daughter is 31, i didnt pay a dime for childcare, she had a mother that stayed home while i went to work
It’s cheaper to buy than to rent by the hour?
Mea culpa.
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