HARRISON – Can’t pay for daycare? Wait until you can afford kids
John Horgan promises $10 daycare.
IT’S LIKELY one of the centre pieces for the NDP’s election campaign in B.C., and it’s one the taxpayer cannot afford, and should not have to pay for.
It’s the plan for $10-a-day daycare, a plan the NDP confirms will cost at least $1.5 billion a year. There will no doubt be a great deal of applause from many quarters for this kind of initiative, but not from this corner.
How would this be paid for? The same way the party appears to want to pay for everything — tax the rich, or at least those they consider to be rich, with earnings beyond $150,000 a year.
Beyond that, they’d dip into the province’s surplus, which was built largely by property purchase tax revenues, which with a cooling real estate market won’t be sustained.
Of course it’s easy for the NDP in its quest to redistribute the wealth to tax the initiative and hard work of some, while opposing resource projects and other developments that might give people the wherewithal to make ends meet.
We get that it’s difficult to find affordable daycare, but as prehistoric as it may sound, why do families today expect the government, or in essence the taxpayer, to help them raise their kids?
It wasn’t so long ago, parents took responsibility for raising their own kids.
We get it. The cost of living is high, the cost of housing is high, and so too is the cost of child care, but for those who find it unaffordable to raise a family, here’s a novel thought — why not wait to bear children until they’re in a position to afford them.
Listen to Jim Harrison’s editorials weekdays on Radio NL, and to the Jim Harrison Show at 9:08 a.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at jharrison@radionl.com.
I agree that it would be nice for the government to subsidize daycare, it would certainly help young families. I remember when I was growing up, we had 4 kids in the family, that daycare was not even heard of, my Mom had to stay home from work to look after us, my Dad did not have a high paying job, many times we had canned cream corn for dinner, we made it through, actually we were all quite happy with life. It was simpler. Why people now insist that the government is responsible to look after their every need is beyond me. I read this today “Once the public has its dipper in the government trough, of course, it may fight to keep it there. It may even itch for more and support spokesmen to intercede for it and develop rationalizations to support or enlarge existing programs, largesse, and handouts”. The declining ability for government to meet the growing demands for better health care, subsidized or free university education, subsidized or free daycare, etc, etc, on top of the cost to every citizen for attaining better environmental practices, is going to stretch every budet of every person and at every level of government. The challenge of repairing aging infrastructure and the financial pressures atteched to that are immense and just one more issue to overcome. Where does all this end? When we go over the financial cliff?