* Primarily labor driven. You can't automate, you can't reduce hours, you squeeze 9 hours of child care out of an 8 hour workday.
* Regulation. This prevents the one way to lower labor cost: increasing child to adult ratio. Laws prevent this.
* Real estate costs. Child care can't be moved to cheaper cities and there is even limits on the extent it can be moved within a city before it becomes to costly (in time) for parents to utilize it.
Overall... I think the second reason can be wrapped up into the first one. While legally mandated insurance and such do have an impact, the biggest impact is the limit on child to adult ratio which has the largest impact on costs and that is because it limits the efficiency a single worker can have. If the ratio is 4 kids to 1 adult, the cost will never be below 1/4 the adult's salary. If you expect the adult to be paid a living wage, then in terms of others earning a living wage, 25% of their income will have to go to child care, and that is before counting any taxes or other costs.
The end result is still the same when you average it out. If your ratio is 4 to 1, the average wage of 1 child care worker has to be split between 4 adults, meaning that if they are being paid equal amounts, 25% of net income has to go to child care.
Even if that money actually comes mostly from the top 1%, the average money per person works out to the same. This explains why the cost is so high. With regards to explain why the cost is so high, if that cost is being paid by the parents directly or by the rich via taxes and subsidies is not a factor in that cost, only in how it is paid.
* Primarily labor driven. You can't automate, you can't reduce hours, you squeeze 9 hours of child care out of an 8 hour workday.
* Regulation. This prevents the one way to lower labor cost: increasing child to adult ratio. Laws prevent this.
* Real estate costs. Child care can't be moved to cheaper cities and there is even limits on the extent it can be moved within a city before it becomes to costly (in time) for parents to utilize it.
Overall... I think the second reason can be wrapped up into the first one. While legally mandated insurance and such do have an impact, the biggest impact is the limit on child to adult ratio which has the largest impact on costs and that is because it limits the efficiency a single worker can have. If the ratio is 4 kids to 1 adult, the cost will never be below 1/4 the adult's salary. If you expect the adult to be paid a living wage, then in terms of others earning a living wage, 25% of their income will have to go to child care, and that is before counting any taxes or other costs.