The Childcare Complaint — And The Math Nobody Wants To Do

THE CHILDCARE COMPLAINT — AND THE MATH NOBODY WANTS TO DO

I keep hearing it.

Over and over. From parents, from politicians, from every left-leaning policy group that has a tax dollar to chase. The complaint comes in different flavors but it always means the same thing:

“Childcare is too expensive. The government needs to fix this.”

And look — they are not wrong that childcare is expensive. That part I will give them. The rest? Wrong. Every last syllable of it. Let me show you why.

But first — I need to ask a question that apparently nobody in American public life has the stomach to ask.

— HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN?

No, really. Sit with that for a second.

Not “of course I love my children” — that is the answer you give without thinking. I mean: how do you VALUE them? Because here is the thing about the complaint “childcare is too expensive” — when you strip away all the political theater and the carefully crafted hashtags — what you are actually making is a statement about VALUE. About tradeoffs. About what something is worth to you.

And here is the answer nobody on the left wants to hear:

If childcare costs more than you are willing to pay… maybe you should raise your own children.

Go ahead. Clutch your pearls. I will wait.

I am not being cruel. I am being mathematical. And I am about to prove it with the research of a woman who spent her career screaming from the other direction — Elizabeth Warren herself. Yes. THAT Elizabeth Warren. The “Tax the Rich” senator from Massachusetts. Her own peer-reviewed academic work. Published in the Stanford Law Review. The Brooklyn Law Review. Multiple journals.

This is going to be good.

— THE MATH NOBODY DOES

Here is what two-income households almost never do: the actual math.

Not the cheerful back-of-the-napkin version. The real version. The one that accounts for every dollar that flies out the door because BOTH parents are working.

Start with the second income. Let’s say $45,000 a year. Fine. Sounds useful. Now follow the money.

Federal income taxes first. And here is the part most people do not understand: the second income does not get taxed starting at zero. It gets taxed at your HOUSEHOLD’S marginal rate — which means it starts where the first income left off. If your household is in the 22 or 24 percent bracket, every dollar of that second paycheck is already losing nearly a quarter of itself before it touches your hands.

State income taxes. Every state with an income tax takes their cut. Off the top.

Payroll taxes. Social Security and Medicare. 7.65 percent. Gone. Every single check. Whether you like it or not.

Now childcare. And I am not talking about some magical grandma-down-the-street situation. Full-time daycare for one child runs between $10,000 and $30,000 per year depending on where you live. If you have two children in daycare simultaneously — which millions of families do — you can do that math yourself. It is not pretty.

The second car. Or the second car payment. Or the extra insurance and gas and maintenance on the car you already had, now that it is being driven twice as much. Commutes are not free. They cost money, they cost time, and they cost miles.

Work clothes. Because nobody goes to an office in pajamas. Not yet, anyway. Clothing costs money. Dry cleaning costs money. Professional appearance costs money.

Lunch. Because when you are working a full-time job and commuting and handling the chaos of two-income family logistics, you are NOT packing a lunch every morning. You are buying one. Four or five days a week. Fifty weeks a year.

Convenience food. Because after working all day and commuting and picking children up from daycare and fighting traffic, nobody is coming home and cooking from scratch five nights a week. You are ordering delivery. You are buying the pre-cut, pre-washed, pre-packaged version of everything at the grocery store, which costs roughly twice what the non-convenience version costs. This is not a judgment. It is reality.

Medical costs. Because children in group daycare settings are — and I say this as a former paramedic and a science teacher who knows exactly what I am describing — biological weapons of mass pestilence. They pick up every pathogen circulating within a three-mile radius and bring it home. Which means YOU get it. Which means sick days. Which means doctor visits. Which means missed work. Which means stress.

Add all of that up and subtract it from your $45,000.

I will wait here while you do it.

— WHAT THE MATH ACTUALLY SHOWS

A lot of families — when they sit down and do this HONESTLY, with actual numbers from their actual lives — discover that the second income nets them somewhere between a few hundred dollars and a few thousand dollars a month beyond what they would have if one parent stayed home.

And some families discover that number is ZERO.

Or negative.

I did not make that up. I did not get it from a conservative think tank or a right-wing pundit. I got it from Elizabeth Warren. Who got it from twenty years of bankruptcy research, three major academic studies, and a book she co-authored with her own daughter.

The book is called “The Two-Income Trap.” Published 2003. Written because Warren herself was shocked — SHOCKED — by what her own data was telling her.

Here is what that data said.

— SENATOR WARREN’S RESEARCH IS THE RECEIPTS

In the 2001 Consumer Bankruptcy Project — a massive peer-reviewed study involving two sociologists, two physicians, a former HUD assistant secretary, four law professors, a computer systems analyst, and about a dozen other researchers — Warren’s team found this:

Married couples with children are MORE THAN TWICE as likely to file for bankruptcy as childless couples.

Two-income married couples are approximately TWENTY-SEVEN PERCENTAGE POINTS more likely to file for bankruptcy than one-income couples.

Read that again. The family with TWO paychecks is going broke faster than the family with ONE paycheck.

A Stanford University study published in 2019 — Fisher and Johnson, using Census data linked directly to court bankruptcy records — confirmed it. Two-earner married households are about TEN PERCENT MORE LIKELY to file for bankruptcy two to four years after both spouses are working, compared to similar one-income households.

And while both are working, their bankruptcy rate is LOWER. Because income is flowing. But here is the trap — the actual trap, the one Warren named the book after: those two incomes are causing these families to spend more, take on bigger mortgages, save less, and commit to higher fixed expenses. So when the shock comes — and it ALWAYS comes — the whole structure comes down faster.

Higher income going in. Less savings in the bank. More fixed costs locked in. Zero buffer.

This is Quinn’s Law #1 in action, ladies and gentlemen: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. The progressive policy agenda celebrated sending both parents to work as a financial victory for the middle class. Warren’s own research — funded by the Ford Foundation, Harvard Law School, and NYU Law School — showed it was bankrupting the middle class instead.

— THE “RESERVE EARNER” — AND WHY ELIMINATING IT WAS A CATASTROPHE

Here is the piece of Warren’s analysis that haunts me as a parent.

In the one-income household of the 1970s, when the primary breadwinner lost a job — which happened — the other spouse was available. Not working. Home. Able to enter the workforce immediately and temporarily fill the income gap while the breadwinner recovered, retrained, or found new work.

Warren called this the “reserve earner.” The financial shock absorber. The margin of safety built directly into the household structure.

When you commit to a two-income budget — when your mortgage, your car payments, your fixed monthly expenses are all sized around BOTH incomes flowing simultaneously — you have eliminated that reserve. There is nobody on the bench. The entire household is on the field at all times, and the family now has DOUBLE the chance that something hits the roster.

In the early 1970s, a single-income household faced roughly a 2.5 percent annual chance of the primary earner losing their job. Warren’s research calculates that a dual-income household faced between 4.9 and 6.3 percent — nearly two and a half TIMES the risk of catastrophic income disruption.

Two workers. Two chances to get laid off. Two chances for a catastrophic illness. Two chances to be restructured, downsized, furloughed, injured, or otherwise removed from the payroll.

And a 2019 Stanford study found that two-income households spend a HIGHER proportion of their after-tax income than one-income households. Higher housing expenses relative to income. Less saved. Less margin. More exposed.

Warren called the house “a cement life raft.” Big enough to feel like security. Heavy enough to drag you straight to the bottom when something goes wrong.

— THE HOUSING PRICE ANGLE (AND THIS ONE WILL MAKE YOU SIT DOWN)

Here is the part nobody talks about. The part that is sitting right in Warren’s own research and she managed to not connect the dots on quite the way I am about to.

The reason housing is expensive is, in substantial part, because households started bidding on houses with TWO incomes instead of one.

When the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act required lenders to count a wife’s income when evaluating mortgage applications, families immediately began qualifying for — and bidding on — more expensive homes. More dollars chasing the same supply of houses in desirable neighborhoods with good schools meant prices went up. Simple economics. Supply and demand. This is not complicated.

Warren’s own research found mortgage costs rose 70 TIMES faster than a man’s income over the past generation.

Seventy. Times. Faster.

So the second income you took on partly to afford the house… is one of the reasons the house costs what it costs. You are in a bidding war against yourself. Every dual-income family that ever competed for a house in a good school district contributed to the price inflation that made the house require both incomes to afford.

And now the proposed solution is to subsidize childcare so MORE families can have two incomes competing for those same houses at those same inflated prices.

I keep seeing Democrats say “Tax the Rich” while being the rich — writing the tax loopholes, knowing the tricks, earning six figures and demanding government solutions to problems their own ideology created. And here is another version of the same thing. I do not want to hear about the childcare crisis from the people whose policy agenda built the two-income trap, inflated housing to the stratosphere, and are now asking me to fund the childcare that lets families dig deeper into the exact hole they helped design.

Lead by example. Or sit down.

— BUT LET’S PUT THE MONEY DOWN FOR A SECOND

Because here is where I stop being a finance guy and start being what I actually am.

A teacher.

Your child’s brain develops more in the first five years of life than at any other period in their entire existence. The neural architecture laid down in those years — attachment, language acquisition, emotional regulation, curiosity, trust — is foundational. It is not rebuilt later. It is not duplicated in a daycare setting by a stranger who is managing seven other children at the same time.

I am not attacking daycare workers. They are doing their best with an impossible ratio.

I am asking a question nobody wants to answer:

What is that time worth?

Not in dollars. I mean the actual question: what is the irreplaceable developmental window of your child’s first years of life WORTH to you? Because if the answer is “I do not know, but childcare is too expensive and someone else should pay for it” — then I think you may not have actually asked the question yet.

The “childcare is too expensive” argument is backwards. It treats the COST of someone else raising your child as the problem, rather than asking whether someone else raising your child during the most formative years of their life is itself the question worth examining.

I understand single parents do not have this choice. I am not talking to single parents.

I am talking to the two-income households that have never sat down and done the actual math. Never asked what the net really is. Never compared that net to the value of the irreplaceable time on the other side of the ledger.

— THE DIVORCE STATISTIC THAT NOBODY BROADCASTS

One more gem from Warren’s research that didn’t quite make the campaign posters.

By the 1990s, a working wife was FORTY PERCENT more likely to divorce than her stay-at-home counterpart.

I am not telling you what to do with your marriage. Your marriage is your business.

But. If you are running a two-income household because both incomes are required to service the fixed costs you’ve taken on, and that model comes with a 40 percent higher divorce rate, and divorce is one of the top three causes of personal bankruptcy, and you have children who will live inside this financial and structural instability —

The math is still not your friend. Even on the back of the napkin.

Warren identified this. Published it. And then built a political career arguing the solution was more government programs enabling the exact model her research showed was structurally fragile.

Quinn’s Law #1. Every time.

— WHAT I AM ACTUALLY SAYING

I am not saying women should not work. I am not saying ambition is wrong. I am not saying two-income households are stupid. Some families genuinely need two incomes to survive, and I respect that reality.

What I AM saying is this:

The complaint “childcare is too expensive” is a symptom of a set of decisions — personal, structural, and political — that have never been honestly examined. Decisions that inflated housing, doubled financial risk exposure, reduced the developmental presence of parents during the most important years of children’s lives, and increased both bankruptcy and divorce rates.

And the proposed solution is to subsidize the system that created those problems so more families can participate in it more deeply.

That is not a solution. That is a shovel for the hole you are already standing in.

Before demanding the government — which means demanding ME and every other taxpayer — fund your childcare, do the math. The actual math. Every dollar. Then compare that net to what it would mean to be home with your kids during the years that actually build who they become.

Some families will do that math and discover two incomes still make sense. Fine.

Some families will discover it does not.

And some families will realize the conversation they should have been having all along was not about the COST of childcare — but about the VALUE of time.

The one nobody gives you back.

But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who actually read the peer-reviewed research, including the academic work of the very senator who identified the trap, published the data on the trap, named the trap in a book title, and then spent the next two decades campaigning to subsidize her way into deeper versions of it. Quinn’s Law #1 keeps delivering. Every single time.

Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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