Comment on Doesn't add up
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 5 hours agoTrue facts. The “missing” money in the equation is all the boring expensive stuff. Rent, property taxes, legal, administration (bookkeeping, compliance), insurance (child safety/liability is a convenient excuse for sky-high premiums).
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
We need to make it far easier for people to operate businesses out of their homes. So many of these costs disappear if you can use the structure you already have to pay for.
Flower@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
We had those for child care. Then government added additional regulations for safety after some incidents, and a lot of them quit because the additional costs made it not worth it anymore. Now the government complains about a shortage of child care places.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
It’s a hard problem. It’s also what prevents meaningful criminal justice reform. Some people just have a very hard time accepting that bad things are going to happen. If you make the justice system less punitive, yes, you’re going to get some number of extra crimes, as some people who should have stayed locked up will be freed. People have a very hard time grasping the concept that you need to do a cost benefit analysis for any policy. Sure, criminal justice reform will result in some small number of additional crime victims, but it will prevent orders of magnitude more people from being victimized by overly punitive laws and extreme jail sentences.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
My state has a framework for at-home daycare operations, but good luck finding one that’s not already at capacity. I’ve heard of other states scrapping their programs or not creating one to begin with, citing imagined “potential for abuse”. It’s always easier to just sit on your hands instead of improving things, and “think of the children” does an insane amount of heavy-lifting while managing to hurt the children and families it claims to protect.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Yeah people fall for it. Hell, look at the mass downvoting of my comment here.
I’m a leftist myself, but folks on the left are just as vulnerable to knee jerk reactionary thinking as conservatives. They see someone saying that regulations can be bad, and their mind immediately jumps to the conclusion, “THIS PERSON MUST BE A REPUBLICAN!!!” and all thought ceases.
Regulations can just as easily be a tool of big business as they are a tool to protect the public. And the easiest way for governments to take away people’s rights or for big business to stifle competition via regulation is “think of the children.”