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My wife and I have occasion to worry about money these days. In one respect we're doing better than ever. We've bought a house, so a chunk of monthly housing expenses goes into a pretty safe long-term investment. But we're also watching the mutual funds set up by my frugal maternal grandparents, which helped smooth out a lot of things over the last twenty years, dwindle rapidly towards zero.
Here is a confession which feels a little awkward for a conservative: We've gone back on WIC, I expect happily to receive a federal Additional Child Tax Credit handout next year, the new baby will get a Trump Account handout, most of the kids have Texas Education Freedom Accounts now, and I've been looking into other forms of government assistance. But you know what welfare program we've always rejected? The public schools.
Hardly anyone thinks of the schools as a welfare program. But they are the single biggest form of government (allegedly) helping kids because their parents aren't rich enough to afford an alternative. That's welfare. (Check the dictionary--third definition.)
Of course, I could always send Mrs. Augustine back into the workforce to make some more money. (I could, but I won't.) She'd easily get 20k or 30k a year, probably more like 40 or 50—maybe 60-80k or more. The smallest of those numbers would solve most or all of our problems.
But what would that cost? Some things you can't put a number on, like the value of a full-time wife and mother—maybe the third-best gift I can give my children, right after a Christian worldview and siblings.
But there are numbers you can put on the decision to sacrifice that. Ask the internet what Texas spends on children in public school. Depending on how you phrase the question, you'll probably get answers ranging from 11,500 to more than 18,000 per child per year.
We have 8 kids and 1 on the way. For a simplified estimate, take a lower per-student figure and imagine just 6 kids in public schooling: 69,000, but let's round up to 70k.
That would be one price for Mrs. Augustine entering the workforce. The government is eager to spend 70,000 dollars so I can send my wife out to make us more money.
One personal consideration is that even if we go for food stamps and get 20,000 dollars a year in government credit cards to spend on groceries, we'll still be taking less welfare assistance than most families, and less than even your average libertarian would expect us to take.
There are personal finance complications too: Once you factor in gas prices, extra driving time, school extracurriculars, daycare, expenses relating to no one being at home to clean stuff and to let in the gas repairman, and so on, a second income looks a lot smaller.
But I'd like to really zoom in on one point:
The cultural norm is that the government will spend—at a low estimate for a state which probably spends well below the national average—$11,500 per child per year so that both parents can work outside the home.
Why do so many assume that this is the right way to go?
Even in economic terms—possibly the crassest of all available terms—this is a net loss in many cases. The size of a second income should rather reliably indicate the value of the labor it buys. If a mother makes $45,000, her economic productivity is a little more than $45,000. And for that the government will happily burn $11,500 per child. If she has 3 kids (and under the false assumption that everything else is equal), society gains a little. If she has 4 kids, who knows? If she has 5 kids, it's a net loss. And if it's more like $18,000 per kid and she has 2 kids and gas prices are up this year, who knows?
It's been nine years since I wrote the post "It’s Not Bad for the Economy When Moms Take Care of Kids." I recommended that a thousand arguments—most of them non-economic—bloom that defend stay-at-home moms. I offered a modest economic argument myself: When you factor in the long-term economic productivity of having children raised by the people who love them best and who have the best knowledge of how to help them thrive, there's a pretty good chance that outweighs any lost economic productivity from Mom not working at the office.
And here's another: When you factor in welfare spending in the public schools, there's a pretty good chance that outweighs any gain from Mom working at the office.
Discussion (41)
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Need I offer disclaimers? Here are the first few that come to mind:
Not all public schooling is equal: A classical charter school ain't an ISD, one ISD ain't another ISD, etc., etc.
Some families with special needs kids might need public school help a lot more than other families.
Not all welfare is equal: State-run vs. federal-run, trampoline or safety net vs. hammock, etc., etc.
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The flaw in your math is that the marginal cost of one additional child attending a school district is not the same as the average cost calculated by total spend/number of students. You don't need to add additional physical plant for a single child. You probably don't need to add staff.
Yes, if you start adding dozens or hundreds of students then the incremental costs increase. But that's a different calculation.
This doesn't take away from your broader point about the value of a parent in the home instead of in the workforce. But that's a sociological factor as well an economic one.
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And the flaw in my math is where? Aren't you just talking about different ways of estimating what Texas spends per kid? I went with the low estimates for a reason.
Or are you suggesting that for estimating what they would spend for my kids specifically I should just use the Basic Allotment number of 6.2k or whatever it is?
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Not a bad objection. If correct, it would mean some of my estimates are bit too pessimistic.
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I have no idea what the size of your school district is, but I’m suggesting that if your school district has 4273 students in it, the incremental cost to the school district budget of adding a 4274th student approaches zero.
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