It's not about "daycare", it is about assisting families in the (massive) expenses that raising a child incurs. Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation.
Obviously this has the advantage that stock market crashes won't wipe out a whole generation's pensions and that the stock markets are not inflated artificially by enormous amounts of "dumb money" being loaded into anything that promises a profit (which is partially what caused the 2008ff crisis), but it has the disadvantage that society has to really take care of not falling into demographic traps.
On of the examples in a mother with 3 children who had to pay back a hundred thousand Euro that were classified as wrongly received benefits. That means she received tens of thousands of Euros per year! What an insane burden to put on mother.
If something goes wrong the consequences are gigantic. Just like it happened in this scandal.
I'm writing this from memory, so it may be wrong, but as I remember it: parents would receive "modest" support; a much larger part would go directly to the daycare, outside of the parents' view. Now if the daycare was deemed to be illegal/fraud/..., the parents would be on the hook for both the money they received as well as the money the daycare received.
Again, I may be misremembering - but this is definitely one way to put a mom into 100s of thousands of debt that she'd never seen.
They should stop doing that. The wealthy pay more taxes, so refund them as free childcare. If you think the wealthy are getting away with something under a universal entitlement, raise their taxes.
And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't peak dumbassery ?
Does it? Or is it just that the demographic issues are more readily apparent?
You can't eat the stock market, so you can accumulate as much wealth as you want in stock market-backed pensions plans or otherwise – if by the time you want to retire there aren't enough working-age people left around willing to provide you goods and services, your pension scheme is worth zilch.
Using investment returns to pay for retirement is no less dependent on young and healthy workers. Us retirees own the companies, working people work for them, and we skim the returns. It accomplishes the same thing but with less central planning. It's still vulnerable to demographic traps.
Which IMHO the European pension system is massively flawed as it's basically a Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people to keep the system going, more people that will consume more resources and need more real estate to live in, real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle making them unaffordable for the new generation of young people who are supposed to be many and pay into the system.
Add to that several other problems in NL in particular, and you have a recipe for disaster. One of the main reasons people with a median income have huge trouble finding a decent place to live.
flawed, maybe, it is actually been good for people that strted working in the 50s-60s, but a Ponzi scheme?
I don't see the connection.
Most pension systems in Europe are in balance and have no problem paying the pensions, the only real problem is that the population is growing older but people get their first job much later in life and the age of retirement is not advancing at the same rate of the aging of the population.
Many pensions in my country are contributing to the economy of the family, so they are not going into the pockets of some old grumpy grandparent that lives on the shoulders of the younger generations and spend 9 months/year cruising the Mediterranean sea, having breakfast in Venice, lunch in Split and dinner in Crete.
> real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle
real-estate is mostly a cost in Europe, unless you have a shitload of money.
Anything else is just an excuse to get higher budgets and grift.
