[ip26]

I ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive.

When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.

[elil17]

$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on

[ip26]

No, but it does mean that as a parent, if (in this canned example) you are paying $18k/year- while the number initially sounds crazy- nearly all of it is going directly to caretaker compensation, not bloat & largess.

[pmiller2]

Maybe not, but it's a lot of money for most families to pay someone else to take care of their kids.