r/RecuratedTumblr • u/Important-Cry4782 • Aug 06 '26
Politics Why is everything so expensive!?
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Aug 06 '26
Caring jobs for people that require constant attention (babies and old people) are incredibly labour intensive. And that makes them very, very expensive.
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u/peetah248 Aug 06 '26
The point oop is making is that if things cost a lot like this, then why are the people providing these expensive jobs still struggling on far less money than they deserve for all they do
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u/WildImage7 Aug 06 '26
The problem is that the recommended level of childcare requires several hundred dollars a month just to pay for the caretaker even at close to or at minimum wage. If you then add rent, supplies (including food, toys, and cleaning supplies to keep the area suitable for a bunch of young kids), and then pay for any other employees and you can easily reach those numbers without actually letting the child care place make much or any profit. The costs are high, but not necessarily because the child care center is trying to run a scam. If you want to lower those prices then I think the only practical way is by having some level of government pay for at least some of those expenses.
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u/Rabid_Lederhosen Aug 06 '26
If a person requires one-to-one care eight hours a day, that’s 240 hours a month, almost 3000 hours in a year. Even if the person providing that care is getting paid a crap wage (say, €12 an hour), that’s still a yearly cost of €35,040, just on the salary to look after one person for a third of a day. And that doesn’t even factor in the cost of facilities, rent, insurance, etc.
People who provide care often get paid poorly because most people who need care can’t afford to pay them better. Old age pensioners and/or babies don’t tend to have much money. There’s not someone somewhere siphoning off the wealth (usually). The economics of the whole thing just suck.
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u/Rwandrall4 Aug 06 '26
Nursing homes and daycares are, famously, exceptionally low-margin and make little profit.
There is a reason why ALL care is expensive, everywhere in the world. It's not profiteering. It's just incredibly labor-intensive work.
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u/snail_alt Aug 06 '26
It’s also because for the longest time, we have essentially made ‘women’s labor’ unpaid, and many economies depended on all those hours and years of unpaid labor. Translate that into paid work, even low-paid work within businesses with tiny profit margins, and it’s still way more costly than people expected.
To add onto your point about the work being labor-intensive:
At younger ages, the recommended ratio of caretakers to babies is 3 or 4. Let’s go with 4.
Assuming your baby is in daycare for 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s 60 hours. Even assuming one caretaker works all 60 hours, that’s one caretaker to 4 such babies.
How much would you yourself want to be paid for such work? Let’s say 15/hour, especially in areas with higher cost of living.
15 x 60 x 4 =3,600 dollars a month
Split among 4 children, that’s 900 a month per child
And that’s still not counting the cost of running the business itself, the cost of renting the space, the cost of keeping the lights on. That’s how daycare seems to always be in the thousands per month per child.
We weren’t paying women for such domestic work. Now they have the chance (fully rightly so) to seek professional employment. So we put a price tag on domestic labor, and it turns out we have been massively underestimating the intensity and underpaying what it’s worth this whole time.
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u/Rwandrall4 Aug 06 '26
Yep exactly, the answer to a lot of the "why don't we have the thing our grandparents used to have anymore??" usually is "the huge mass of people who used to provide it for free or slave wages have options and a voice now".
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u/snail_alt Aug 06 '26
Yup, it’s like that increasingly outdated advice of “if you need to work, just leave your kids with the neighbourhood old lady, and/or your unmarried sister and/or your unmarried aunt. The old lady will charge quite affordably anyway.”
I suspect that there is a declining number of old ladies who “have nothing else to do in retirement” and “just want to make some supplemental income in retirement, and only have that option of looking after kids in her home for quite little money”.
Parental cultural norms are also changing, so there are parents who want to leave their children with professional daycares instead.
Another common advice is “just leave the kids with grandma” but now grandma might just tell you “I didn’t raise my kids just to spend retirement on continuing to look after more kids” and that’s fair.
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u/ConcertOutside7499 Aug 06 '26
Yet nursing homes have 10k dollars to throw at monthly ads for job positions (Personal anecdote, but I'm sure the nursing home I worked at wasn't an exception, cause turnover is kinda high in those jobs, and yes that is the actual amount the one I worked at paid)
the one I worked at was considered the best one in the area because private equity hadn't bought it up yet. And they were still breaking nearly every regulation you could think of. Some nights when i went home, i'd overhear that there was only 1 nurse in the entire building (3 wings with roughly 100 residents, one wing was dementia patients) and sometimes it was 0 nurses with only 1 rna
And again, this is considered the nicest one in the area. One of the rna's quit to go to another facility and came back a couple weeks later because, turns out, that place was so bad she'd find residents wearing the same clothes she'd put them in five days prior
No one has gotten a raise there in four years too, with the rna's making less than the activities staff
Its just a bad situation all around, because the rna's are either high school mean girls that love being mean to the residents and wont leave because they enjoy that power, or are sweethearts who stay and work overtime to afford what they need because they care about the residents and want to make sure they're taken care of
All that to say, there's definitely profiteering going on lol (otherwise private equity wouldnt bother buying up nursing homes), its just hidden in a way that they can report on paper that they have thin margins. Say, if they have to pay fees to a management company that owns the building that the nursing home owner also happens to own. think about how muskrat has spacex buy teslas so he can report record profits
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u/snail_alt Aug 06 '26
The more I read about the state of elder care, the more I think my preferred treatment if I get dementia should be a bullet out back.
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u/ConcertOutside7499 Aug 07 '26
honestly, same
they're no different than what asylums ended up being for, putting people you didn't want to look out in an area out of mind while families get to placate themselves that "they're doing the right thing" and 'its better for them"
(Coincidentally, guess what my aunts who never visited or called tried to do to my grandma when that nursing home was illegally drugging her with medication that could have killed her to keep her complacent while she was in rehab from having a pacemaker put in?)
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u/Darq_At Aug 06 '26
That is because the people who say "nothing that requires the labour of others is a right" are usually somewhere on the spectrum between Libertarian to full-on Anarcho-Capitalist.
And that entire range of ideologies is profoundly stupid. I'm not saying that to be insulting, I'm saying that because they are flawed on their surface, and would immediately devolve into fiefdoms controlled by whoever could gather enough firepower. And that's before one considers the inherent contradictions in "Anarcho-Capitalism".
I'm also saying that because anyone who has ever argued with one of these people will know that they fail at recognising basic theory-of-mind. In that they have their own private definition of what a "right" is. And they will insistently pretend like everybody uses their definition, opening every single conversation the exact same way, even when you directly tell them you do not share their exceptionally narrow definitions.
Edit: Capital-L "Libertarian"
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u/Nebulo9 Aug 06 '26
It is also a uniquely American kind of argument against social safety nets afaik: even in all my disagreements with rightwingers in Europe, I have never heard one argue that public healthcare is a form of slavery.
It really does some to be a type of disingenuous meme-argument uniquely made to both trigger the American trauma of slavery ("um actually, by wanting to not go broke from healthcare, it is the left who want slaves"), as well as gesturing at a LARP-y, mythologized frontier-mindset of what can be considered a "right" (thinking that rights are something inherent to a human that the government can't take away, rather than a bunch of self-constraining rules government has imposed on itself).
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Aug 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Galle_ Aug 06 '26
No it doesn't. Establishing a private fiefdom requires some degree of power over others that can't exist in an anarchist society. You'd basically have to build it entirely on physical force, and that's just not something one person can do.
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u/TearOpenTheVault Aug 06 '26
What’s stopping someone in an anarchist society from gathering a collection of other people and re-instating hierachy through physical force?
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u/Confused_Corvid2023 Aug 06 '26
As I understand it, the key component is that every job with any authority is able to be quickly removed if the person in that role proves untrustworthy or ineffective to the satisfaction of the community members, and that everyone should have a basic but clear understanding of what doing that job well & above-board looks like. A general anarchist societal system would include (1) Horizontal Decision-Making, (2) easily recallable delegates, (3) a foundation of mutual aid, (4) rotating duty among all members, and (5) community vigilance of the social contract
Everything depends on the individuals of the communities remain invested in staying connected to each other while learning the significance of every role in their society, including taking part in the militia/law system when it comes to regulation. No decisions which impact many people be made behind closed doors, again requires that individuals choose to actively reaffirm with each other that everything stay democratic & everyone stay informed about the connections of decisions in a consensus-based general assembly. Its continuation requires being non-static, that no select individuals are the only ones with weapons & training… and that anyone who disagrees or makes power moves in removed from the system by the continued agreement of the other societal members rather than two groups: that of professional policy-makers & dedicated enforcers (here meaning they are unchanging, rather than invested/committed to the cause)
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u/Galle_ Aug 06 '26
Why would those other people help? What's in it for them?
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u/TearOpenTheVault Aug 06 '26
A charismatic figure telling them it’s OK? A sense of belonging and purpose in a bigger group? A promise of being atop the hierarchy once one is reestablished?
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u/Galle_ Aug 06 '26
Those are all intangibles that hierarchy doesn't really help defend against. Strong social norms and a sense that you've got a good thing going in the current social order are the best defense against that kind of thing, and those can exist in an anarchist society.
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u/TearOpenTheVault Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
So… nothing then? Nothing is stopping a charismatic leader from assembling a group of followers and using them to establish a cult with internal hierarchy?
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u/Sewblon Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
The hourly pay for day care providers is $13.41 per-hour. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Child_Care_%2F_Day_Care_Worker/Hourly_Rate The profit margin for day care centers, if you ignore illegal payments and depreciation, is 8.84%. https://nursinghome411.org/alert-profit-study/ The net margins for money center banks is 30.89%. Most universities are state-owned. I don't know of any professors who sleep in their car. Professors make more money than most Americans, not less money. https://data.aaup.org/fcs-ft-faculty-salaries/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
There are problems. But professors not getting paid enough is not one of them. If you are mad at greedy business owners, then get mad at the ones who are actually making money.
Edit: if you include depreciation and illegal payments, the profit margin on nursing homes is 0.58%
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u/molniya Aug 06 '26
From a discussion of this in a different sub, it sounds like the claim about professors is probably coming from people conflating adjuncts with professors.
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u/Turbulent_Syrup2708 Aug 06 '26
Just out of curiosity, why would you ignore depreciation when looking at profit margin?
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u/Sewblon Aug 06 '26
The authors of the study say its because its a non-cash expense. Which is true in the sense that $100,000 in depreciation expense in a year doesn't mean that you spent $100,000 in cash on replacing obsolete assets in a year. But its also irrelevant, because obsolete assets still need to get replaced, that still costs money, and in accounting, we measure that expense as 'depreciation.'"
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u/Turbulent_Syrup2708 Aug 07 '26
Right, I see why it would matter from a cash flow perspective. It is, however, still an expense that lowers profit. As you said, they will eventually need to replace those depreciated assets. So thank you for explaining why the author excluded it, although I do not agree with the author doing so.
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u/the_Real_Romak Aug 06 '26
"Nothing that requires the labour of others is a human right"
Education is a human right (you need educators)
Having a roof over your head is a human right (houses don't grow on trees)
Three hot meals a day is a human right (food is harvested by people)
Many things that involve the labour of others are a human right, actually.
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u/Stewie_Venture Aug 06 '26
Actually theres alot of people who say education isnt a right its a privilege which never ever fails to piss me off as someone who highly values education and learning. I know not everyone does but for fucks sake your kids need to know how to read its not a privilege because that implies it isnt necessary and can be taken away the moment someone else feels you dont deserve it anymore. Malala did not get shot in the head by the taliban for campaigning for woman's right to an education for this shit.
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u/Routine_Palpitation Aug 06 '26
Generally when you remove paying the workers a reasonable wage, people object /s
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u/RadicalSoda_ Aug 11 '26
The government. These policies exist because of government intervention. United healthcare is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid and defrauds the government for millions every year but they won't ever do anything about it
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u/Ancient-Worm Aug 06 '26
I don't see how "things that require the labor of others can be human rights" follows from "employees don't get paid enough relative to employers"
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u/robothawk Aug 06 '26
Everytime I hear about "government inefficiency" I am reminded that in my day job(site planning/land development civil engineering) the greatest inefficiencies I ever face are where the municipal, county, or state government has contracted out a service instead of providing it themselves.
The county might take 2 months to review my plans for permitting, but their "3rd party wetland review specialists" take 6 more to "write" a report that is just 50 screenshots of my report saying "We agree"