I have a friend that had a daughter that lived there, and had serious mental health issues, and I'd hear nightmare stories about how bad the state was for that.
I have family with similar issues, in New York, and they get an amazing amount of state support.
The medical situation is getting worse by the year, though. I don’t think it’s just a matter of shoveling more dollars
People don’t want immigrants getting help that residents pay for, so they turn the spigots off for everyone.
One thing that struck me - towns down there had a template. 90% of towns we drove through were just a blood plasma "donation" center, a dollar store, a gas station, and a cemetery. Very bleak existence out there, oil and gas boom notwithstanding.
I know other states have as well, so nothing new there, but seeing as they basically fund all the state's social projects, felt a bit done wrong.
I took my GF to the emergency room once with chest pains (turned out to be a lung infection). After an hours long wait we got to see the "doctor". The doctor came in in street clothes which were wrinkled jeans and a frumpy polo. He was not smart and from appearance, speech and thinking patterns easily could have been the janitorial mid level manager (no disrespect meant to janitorial staff). They did a chest scan, he said he would review it, then told her to go home and take a Motrin and then she got mysterious bills for the next year from the event.
I would go to Texas which isn't far if the emergency permitted it, and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Just to be clear for those not familiar with the relative position of cities in Texas, imagine getting hurt in Illinois and the EMT's being like "the hospitals around here are shit, we're going to Gary".
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
And that also needs to be paid for.
2. What if not everything in life is about the economy?
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
The entire incel and tradwife spectrum hates these policies.
Am I mistaken? Thoughts?
As I said, the variability is the key metric.
I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.
If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.
I will say that (and this is 20+ years out of date) coming from a good for New Mexico public school put me about a year ahead of everyone else in a decent California public school when we moved.
So overall my main point is that you probably want to look at schools on some kind of basis other than the state overall, especially in states like NM and AZ.
They weren’t doing well before, but it’s not been trending well.
Having said that, Albuquerque is nice. Props to the Navajo nation for helping out with early COVID vaccine testing.
But you can have a pretty nice, affordable living in places like Taos, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and parts of Las Cruces and Albuquerque.
Breastfeeding doesn't move money around, but formula does; things like that.
Cooking your own meal doesn't raise GDP beyond the cost of supplies, but door-dashing from a restaurant does.
No complexity can make a $1 billion expense able to be paid with $1m of revenue.
I rarely find this to be the case for anything big or important.
That's not the claim I'm making. Someone entering the workforce has tax implications for a local government far beyond their individual tax receipts and will increase their future earning potential.
Again I didn't claim that. The tradeoff is generating some percentage of X benefit in economic activity vs some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare
There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.
This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.
"and incentivizes people to not work"
This would only incentivize low income individuals to not work, which could actually be beneficial as it could drive a living wage increase in that labor segment if employers had to compete against the benefit.
I don't think the benefit is even contingent on the parent working, and it definitely isn't contingent on the value of their current and discounted future earnings appreciation being greater than the cost of sending the kids to daycare. From what I can tell you can put the kid in daycare then lay on a beach if there is anything of that sort in the New Mexican desert.
I'm open to the argument that by certain measures "free" childcare leads to increased economic output, but they've certainly not crafted the program in a way I would expect someone with that aim to do it.
You can actually think through your belief. The announcement provides a concrete number: $12,000 per child. Do you generate $12k in tax revenue? Note that this means direct and indirect tax revenue, not only from your job and what your employer earns from your work but also with your own expenses that you can cover by having a job.
If you have a severely disabled child (who is on SSA), you often can get certified by the state and get paid as the caretaker. Then the action appears on the GDP.
I think you're confusing GDP with a measure of worth or quality. It is not. Just because you can earn money doing double-shifts in a coal mine that doesn't make it better than spending the same time at a beach doing nothing.
GDP of a country is flat for 10 years, but everyone is happier and healthier and feels better? Bad country!
GDP is soaring for ten years, but everyone is depressed, suicidal, deep in debt, overweight, and dying early? Good country!
Also, the daycares typically have structured programs that are fun and helpful for toddler development.
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.
We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.
> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
Any policy (UBI or others) must take into account the state and potential of the country. Based on the Gulf state UBI example (if correct, I did not check) it would mean that with their initial conditions UBI will not result in developing skills (although, thinking of it, maybe their purpose of giving UBI was close to the one observed, their ruler don't strike me as very progressive).
By your own argument, this policy dilutes the value New Mexico / Feds were prior giving to the poorer parents who met the means testing New Mexico used before, then, no? Because this isn't the beginning of "free" childcare in NM, they are just expanding it beyond the prior poverty-line times 'X" means testing.
Ergo per your logic "real outcome would be reduced benefits" to the poorer parents who already had subsidized childcare.
Edit: accidently switched "childcare" to "healthcare" a few times, flipped back
But this is true in the other direction, too. Means testing costs money, time, and ensures some needy folks fall off the program.
For example, Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/no-savings-found-in-fl...
They’re doing this on the federal level now. Most popular government programs have been cut or sabotaged, and as a result the debt is increasing by $4T.
> With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.
It's more complicated than that. Of the 6352 people who applied for TANF, 2306 dropped out during the process. Then of the 4046 TANF applicants remaining, only 2.6% tested positive for drugs. The vast majority of media coverage focused on the 2.6% being less than the ~8% drug-use rate in the general population.
What we don't know is of the people who dropped out, was this due to unintended reasons (privacy concerns, the inconvenience of the drug test, missing deadlines) or due to the intended reason (people self-selecting out because they knew they would test positive and become ineligible for 12 months). We'll never know the real breakdown, but it's misleading to say "it cost more than they saved".
And that's the argument against many of these policies - removal of the needs based testing. Odd to see you defend the policy on the very basis others attack it on.
And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.
It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.
Geeks are as emotional and irrational as everybody else. They are even worse in fact because they can rationalize their behavior even harder.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with a paying their rent problem, they will also probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash. And then everybody's rents will go up because families with children have more capability to pay.
Nothing is ever a perfect system, but there are many more things wrong with the current system than concerns about the equity BETWEEN different working class families in different situations. Some of those dysfunctions will happily consume most of an incrementalist policy solution to an arbitrary problem. Direct provision or vouchered provision of necessary goods and services has a lot of minor problems, but it happily mitigates our ability to let one problem eat an unrelated solution.
This exists. It’s called the Child Tax Credit.
If the children have any parent that is working, whether it is one or two, by definition they need more money.
They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?
They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.
From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.
So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.
Edit to add: It is only better for the business and the economy short term, because ultimately it results in a lower birth rate and below replacement level fertility is the main problem we currently have for the near-future economy
Hell, think about how childless people must feel about this. Or the child tax credit. Nothing is "perfectly fair", but sometimes public policy is good enough.
Childless people basically get their cake and eat it too under the social welfare scheme of most western countries, getting the benefits of children without having to deal with much of the drawbacks.
End result is that Canada's child poverty rate was cut in half over the aughts.
https://x.com/trevortombe/status/1100416615202533377
And yes, it hit the same political hurdles you'd expect. A Liberal-party aide helped lose the 2006 selection by saying parents would burn it on "beer and popcorn". He's still around as a consultant and professional trash-talking commentator. This is ironic considering how the party championed it's success after they (rightly) expanded the program.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/liberal-apologizes-for-saying...
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy. A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work. Is this really what you want? If it is the poor your care about why not subsidies just them?
That's fine.
> A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work.
I don't get what point you think you're making. Do you believe that not offering universal child care changed that?
I’m confused; how does your preferred policy solve this problem?
Policy is a constant battle of unintended consequences. I clearly understand that nothing isn't immune from those consequences, and so I'm constantly adjusting my preferred policy trying to find the least bad compromise.
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
The only thing that might incentivize people to think about the long term is getting rid of all old age benefits (including continuous bail outs of broad market assets by the federal government by sacrificing the purchasing power of the currency).
Right now, we take productivity from people who sacrifice to raise kids well and give it to those who don’t raise kids well, or not have them at all.
This obviously leads to an arbitrage opportunity (as evidenced by DINK lifestyles).
I do not see any other way other than to remove this arbitrage opportunity. Which probably will not happen in any democracy due to old people’s voting power.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/che/swi...
Any sustainable policy would obviously result in a TFR of at least the replacement rate.
They are strictly less efficient than commercial daycare because the adult-child ratio is much higher. How many women would be of out of the work for if they were taking care of children?
Also, it prevents trickle down and the lifting of the poorest in society.
If your position is that people should not be compelled to contribute to overall society and the lifting of the boats of others, than there isn't enough alignment of values for a meaningful conversation.
I suspect there will be some fraud (I have 30 kids, wheee!) as well as foster/adoption abuse -- probably AZ's experiment with paying parents to home school would be instructive.
From the government's point of view, they want more people out in the workforce, so it probably doesn't make sense that way.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
And no it's not a free lunch. If stay-at-home in a family isn't reimbursed, they are actually worse off, because now they have an additional tax they are paying that they did not have before. So now even more people like you who wanted a parent to stay at home are driven out of it because their family budget comes upon this tax.
If we think there is a societal advantage to financially incentivize parents to stay-at-home with a subsidy, I'd be open to looking at the cost/benefit, but it's a different issue.
And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted. Not every tax dollar I spend needs to come back to me in the form of a benefit.
This seems like an unrelated consideration though. You may be significantly worse off. Maybe the government that provides this raises taxes considerably to make this work. Or maybe they take on crippling debt. Maybe their credit rating goes down.
1/ You haven't mentioned how that SAHM must get a cooking credit, healthcare, retirement or house management credit or anything else in the litany of jobs required outside of immediate childcare and costs incurred by simply existing as a woman. Just a voucher for the hours, I assume, at which childcare would be open and none of the other hours
2/ A SAHP (thats stay at home parent) should be incentivized by raising wages and allowing life to be more affordable but your argument seems to be very focused on "moms" and "capitalist enterprises" and does not consider the reality that when SAHMs were more economically viable, it was not viable for all families.
I'm willing to accept that position, I'm not necessarily for free childcare, only believe that if childcare is to be free it should follow the child. I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child. What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back -- trying to track to which caregiver the money goes instead of just providing the resources for the child and let the parents decide what works best for their family.
Flooding the market with new labor increases the supply Against a fixed demand, this lowers wages. So everyone not getting the subsidy feels pressure from stagnating wages plus the increased tax burden.
Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes.
All this does is modify the equilibrium of supply and demand in the market such that those not receiving the subsidies (or evem those not receiving as much subsidies as others) are negatively impacted through lifestyle discrimination.
Let's not make the absurd assumption that parents continuing their careers and more daycare centres in operation must be net negative for economic growth.
Even if that was the case, the alternative proposal to subsidise parents equally large amounts whether they use it to pay for childcare or not would result in a larger tax burden paid for from a smaller economic pie.
Even if we consider it as an "efficiency" problem, it is far cheaper for a person to be paid to take care of N children (where N is not too large), rather than have the have the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field, take care of just their children.
> the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field
Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids. And their qualifications in some other field doesn’t mean that working that field is better for them or their kids or the country. Having strong family structures and time together is pretty valuable.
I generally agree with you, but often the reason that these programs work economically is that those who don't choose to use them still contribute. There are (at least) three different categories: (1) caregivers who will care for their child themselves regardless of whether or not free care is available elsewhere, (2) caregivers who will find care elsewhere regardless of the cost, and (3) caregivers who will make use of free care if available, or otherwise, care for their child themselves.
I think the group (1) has a tendency to be higher income. It's certainly not true of everyone in that group, but I would wager that a significant number of people in that group do not need the financial assistance. Those people not using the free resource, but still contributing to funding it is what makes it economically viable.
If it costs $100/child at a daycare facility, but $200/child for someone to be a stay-at-home parent, and you're asking me, a random taxpayer, to pay for one of those for someone else, from a financial perspective I will likely prefer to pay for the former.
Now, I personally don't get to decide where tax dollars go, but I could easily imagine there are enough people with this preference that it could influence public policy.
Having said that, if it's actually significantly better for a child to have a SAH parent, I might change my tune. (My mother was a SAHM, and I think that was great for us growing up.)
"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.
People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.
But leaving those arguments aside, I also think that only subsidizing daycare is too one size fits all, just like with public schools. If people want to raise their kids differently, they should be able to get assistance. Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
I don't expect every tax dollar I spend to come back to me in the form of a direct benefit.
> Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
I would be 100% open to this sort of taxpayer-funded educational enrichment for families who can't afford it themselves, depending on the usual criteria, like how well-run/efficient it is and so on.
If I'm a parent who does not intend to take advantage of the program and therefore not to get any benefit directly, and I assume the program is done well and not rushed, I could reasonably expect:
- More parents able to be in the work force (immediately) - Better metrics for the young children entering. Especially for at risk. - Savings from less crime in the future. - Higher attainment of students when they enter the work force later. - Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)
My understanding so far is that this leads to spending savings in addition to QOL of life improvements. And that's just for me. I want to live with less crime and less tax liability.
Asking for additional waivers imo just increases the cost in areas that will not as directly achieve the benefits of the program as stated. The only reason to ask for it is as a negotiation tactic.
I think the most important thing is to focus on the quality of the program and make sure the resources are there. And to make sure opportunities persist to prevent "fade out". I think that might have been the difference between Oklahoma's success in pre-k vs a program in Tennessee.
Why probably not? Childcare before primary school is a huge expense in the US, I think the largest for a healthy kid, around 24k$ per year where I live, so basically every other child is another 24k$ to the budget, or one parent not working. With this approach, having 2 or 3 children is more feasible, and the money saved from universal childcare could be in part invested for college or the child's future.
Does the influx of gov mandated childcare centers reduce the annual expense for parents? If so, it does so at the cost to the current workers by reducing their salaries.
If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.
The benefit is lower wages for those competing against the new laborers and likely higher government tax inflows?
Sure, you have that short term impact, but it seems NM society has chosen to take on the burden for this.
Long term impact for this measure however is worth it, as the state children will be better educated, and will commit less crimes, at least that's what research says. So long term you will have more taxpayers, and maybe hopefully have to spend less in security.
It affects you like if your neighbor got a $5000 tax credit and you didn’t.
It’s community money paying for it so it impacts you because it is your tax dollars being spent.
What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.
This is like getting mad that my workplace offers pet insurance when I have no pets so I demand the money anyway. Or demanding a trophy for not participating in a competitive sport.
Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home?
This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table.
The conversation on this table is: Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not own, an apt and live, not save for the future. Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
We cannot continue to expect people with choices to have children given this economic situation.
Trust me. You want people to continue having children, and you'd prefer them to be positive additions to society, for your own well-being in old age.
This is a major statement, and I don't think it's fully qualified.
Why have childcare expenses imcreased by 30% in the past few years? There should be an arbitrage opportunity if costs have stayed fixed. If costs have increased, is it due to general economic pressures or increased regulatory burden? If the former, wages should catch up (and flooding the market with additional labor likely will exert downward pressue market wages). If the latter, then why on earth are we passing such nonsense regulation?
In either case, moving out of a major metro is always an option.
Getting all children early education, which has been shown to have huge effects later on in academic performance (better) and criminality (less).
Let's say college is optional for the individual, as the child/teen decides.
Why is primary/middle/secondary school free and public, but daycare/preschool not? The child can't decide for itself, and there is data showing that having early education benefits everyone.
> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.
This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.
The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(
Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.
My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.
- Bidding up the price of housing
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.
It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it and why is that a better place than where this policy is currently drawing it?
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.
Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.
For example, if you lose too many benefits when you get a job, it can easily make getting a job yield negative expected value, this is bad because often it stunts future career potential.
There may be families that cannot quite afford to be a stay-at-home mom even though they want to. Providing the waiver also increases the overall fairness. In rural areas there are generally far fewer childcare options, so this becomes a benefit that accrues to those that live in cities. Not very fair.
Government services exist to help people who need them. The idea that government services need to have the same net effect on every citizen is unusually popular in the US and is part of the reason we have worse government services than our peer nations.
The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
The same is true for things like childcare and education. Improving outcomes for the next generation doesn't only benefit them and their parents, it improves the entire society.
>The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
You're just debating whether "everyone gets the same" is a better definition of "fair" than "everyone gets what they need". The only way for the government to satisfy the former without UBI (which I would support) is for the government to offer extremely limited services. That's the situation we're in. Because as I have said in another comment, the same argument that applies to stay at home parents applies to childless people so offering any childcare support is unfair according to the "everyone gets the same" definition.
I think it's worth considering what has significant majority support. For example I believe it's something like 80%+ support some kind of childcare subsidy or tax credit. Some childless probably make up the 20% just as some would prefer not to have a fire brigade.
At that level of support just pass the subsidy / tax credit and let the families figure out how to apply it (paid daycare or homecare).
If you live in a city, there's a good chance your house hasn't been on fire because of the work of the fire department.
It is bad faith reasoning. If you imagine a person that does not want women to participate in the workforce but wants to express that in a way that doesn’t sound repugnant, it is pretty easy to see how someone would come up with that.
The way you can tell that it’s bad faith is by looking at the context that “pay women to stay out of the workforce” gets brought up. In this case it is framed as an alternative to providing childcare, but those two ideas have nothing to do with each other. As a society we could do both. The “pay women to stay out of the workforce” or “pay for childcare” dichotomy is completely made up, and folks that engage in that particular type of make-believe are either profoundly intellectually lazy or being intentionally disingenuous.
Therefore a waiver would help with this?
That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.
I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.
> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it?
This is rather noble of you, but the reason is obvious. If the playing field were "levelled" then you wouldn't have to be lucky. It is all well and good that you are lucky, but there is a certain population who want to emulate your choice but are unable to, because they are missing precisely the marginal amount that the childcare provision costs. It is a political choice to say that those people should not be able to pursue home-care of the children in order that we can avoid giving out a rebate.
But the lack of that subsidy should not cause someone to oppose a paid-childcare subsidy.
It does no such thing. If you could afford to be a stay-at-home mom before, this isn't going to make any significant difference to that.
Think of whether it would make sense if you applied your logic to other areas -- do public schools disincentivize people sending their kids to private schools? That would be absurd to say. Creating choice where there wasn't any before doesn't "disincentivize" anything. It gives people options to make the choices that are best for them.
It is good for children to go to a place where they learn to interact with others early. We give 480 days off to the parents to share (90 "mandatory" per parent), then they go to childcare.
Individualism breeds privileged shits, if you want your kid to be one of those then you pay out of your own pocket. We subsidize childcare so everyone can afford to work.
You don't want people paid for taking care of their children, but it's OK if other people are paid for taking care of their chidlren.
None of this makes sense. Especially not this false dichotomy that either you send your kids to daycare or they don't learn to interact with others early.
We should not subsidize stay at home moms or dad's because it's bad for society, if they can afford to do it or stretch their economy to do it for other reasons it's their bad choice, and we allow free choice even if it's bad, that's why cigarettes are still allowed.
I don't know who to look up, but if you have some suggestions I could look it up through ratsit.se
Americans are stupid enough without stripping them of what little education we do offer them.
All schools are indoctrination centers. Some very progressive cities push a lot of political programming into their curriculums. Why does it matter if someone wants their child’s education to have THEIR flavor of religious indoctrination? The money follows the child. The money for kids staying in public schools stays with them. So it doesn’t divert anything away.
so, no, extremely limited compared to what's being discussed.
Nothing is free. This means less resources for something else, marketed as "compassion".
Mothers generally take much better care of their own children than childcare. Childcare was already previously available for low-income families. To incentivize women to work when they can afford to care for their children is very bad for a country in the long term.
0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-mens-employment-growth-...
People don’t want to work because they’re “pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism”. They want to work for income, for career development, or even because they like what they do.
This is such a dismissive way to phrase it that doesn’t even acknowledge why people work. Reducing everything to “capitalism” is missing the point.
I think it's less "mindsets" that have changed so much as the incentives themselves. People no longer need to have kids in order to have sex or to have a comfortable retirement, so many simply don't. Though I'd agree there's certainly a mindset shift that has developed along with that.
Couple A: -$100 + $200 = +$100
Couple B: -$100 + $0 = -$100
It gives massive structural advantages to couples with low income, in the form of a lower marginal tax rate. Does it really discriminate between single and dual income though? I wasn't aware of that.
Historically it was considered a beneficial necessity to gather the children to write down knowledge so that it could be brought back home for the whole family to learn from, but in the age of the internet perhaps separating children and parents is never good at any (young-ish) age?
Since the advent of air-conditioning, there really isn't any good reason to close schools during the summer. But, like the internet bit before, we've just never bothered to stop and actually think about what we're doing. We carry on with the status quo simply because that's what we did in the past. Not because it makes sense, just because that's what we do.
But in establishing subsidized daycare now, we don't have to think about the time before air-conditioning was invented. We only have to worry about the constraints we have today. Hot summers are not a practical problem as of right now.
For a single parent, providing the needed money to survive and eat requires working, and child care can be impossibly expensive.
50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.
If you did have such a large cohort engaged in that activity, there should probably be some kind of education where one could learn 'the best'.
Of course people with kids would be too busy to attend.
And the ones who did attend wouldn't have any kids to look after.
That's not that revolutionary; it's kind of traditional.
The 1950s USA "golden era" where lower-class mothers could afford to stay home was a statistical anomaly, gifted to this country by virtue of our unique position as the major economic superpower untouched by WWII.
My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.
The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
There are so many benefits to day care for the children. It’s hardly the prison camp people make it out to be.
I don’t know if these negative comments are because HN in general dislikes the wider educational system, or if it’s because they dislike governments handing out “charity” to help less affluent families. Maybe a touch of both? But daycare can actually be a really rewarding experience for children.
So much so, that I have parent friends who one of them is a stay-at-home parent and they still send their child to day care at least one day a week to help the child’s independence, social skills and comfort when away from home. And they’ve found their child has been better for the experience
Edit: and the fact that I’ve been downvoted within seconds of posting this shows how ridiculous people are on here when it comes this topic.
Preschools in the UK have curriculums they have to follow. That includes maths, reading and writing too.
I’m not going to comment on preschools in your country, but in the UK the kids who attended preschool are IN GENERAL the stronger students, socially, emotionally, and academically, when it comes to starting infants/ elementary school. Particularly in the less affluent areas. Though there might be some selection bias here too due to the kinds of parents who can sand their child to daycare verses those who cannot.
It’s not like boarding school where you’d only see them during the holidays ;)
Even with daycare, parents are spending a substantial portion of their time with their children.
People who stay at home and take care of their own kids aren’t skipping socialization. They still participate in various activities where there are other kids. But, the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford. If you stay at the daycare and observe things, you’ll see how difficult it is for the workers to split attention.
Oh and you get a lot less illness if avoiding daycare. And that regained time, is development time and time to go do fun things.
Not to mention parents have more to them to simply being parents. Their own desires, wants, and needs. Balancing these with being parents leads to the more fulfillment.
Maybe, but definitely not always. There's a lot of variables with this logic. My wife and I aren't trained early childhood educators. We didn't spend years studying such things, we haven't been doing this for many years, and we aren't always as equipped with things like lesson plans and educational development attainment goals.
Without a doubt, every child is different, different kids grow in their own spurts and what not. But when we took our kids out of daycare for my wife to stay at home and tend to the kids after our youngest was born, we had our oldest remain in twice a week daycare so my wife could spend more time focusing on our infant at the time. His growth trajectory definitely fell. He wasn't able to keep up with a lot of his classmates, even though it had just been a single semester. He wasn't as happy, and his connections with his close friends he had known since he was barely able to walk were clearly fraying despite attempts to schedule as many play dates. Our youngest wasn't progressing as fast as others we knew from the daycare. In the end we put both kids back in full-time once my wife managed to find similar employment again. Once both kids were back in full time, it was almost night and day difference. Our oldest child was noticeably much happier. He quickly caught back up with the class and had those friendships restored. Similar story with our youngest.
We also tend to hang out with a lot of at-home families as well. Most of the kids I know from our school seem significantly ahead in logic and socialization skills compared to most of the kids I know who stay at-home. Not all, for sure, I know a few families who are exceptionally great at being educators for their kids. But I also know many families who try very hard but ultimately aren't that great in comparison. Not everyone is a good teacher, and that's OK.
In the end, we're not as effective of educators for our kids, it's just not what we're necessarily great at doing. So, they spend time with people who are. And we continue to try and do our best with them at home as well with things they aren't taught in school.
Why bring gender into it? There are plenty of families who choose to have stay at home Dads while the mother goes back to work full time. We are not in the 1950s any more.
The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is the economics of it. The pay for the staff is very low but the cost of service to parents is very high. That means so much of the cost is overhead which would make the whole thing quite unsustainable, even when ostensibly covered by the government.
I live in Canada and a similar issue is occurring with our universal health care system. The costs are skyrocketing even as wait times are increasing.
Try to find one that has long average tenure (10+ years, if possible).
Government programs almost universally have higher overhead and more waste than private businesses. There is no incentive for government employees to improve efficiency, reduce budgets, or cut costs.
If anything, there was a negative correlation: The big corporate ones had high teacher turnover, more levels of administration, and turned a healthy profit for ownership/shareholders. They were priced to match.
Also, government run programs usually are less expensive (take pretty much any privatization program anywhere as an evidence). The government programs don’t have to pay money to shareholders, and aren’t siphoning resources for expansion, marketing, etc.
If government leadership is corrupt as we see in the US right now, then, of course, prices skyrocket, though that usually comes hand in hand with outsourcing/subcontractors/privatization. It’s hard to collect bribe money from civil servants…
Yay teacher's union?
Really school funding and public education in the US in general is in a very strange place across the board and has been for decades
The results for a given teacher are poor no matter what the reasons, it's a bad "hey get a union" rallying cry IMO.
Yeah, I dated someone that was a teacher and didn't like her job. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide education to kids.
These ratios seem reasonable to me. Much better than the 1:25 in elementary school.
So beyond everyone going back to a Neolithic way of life and living in a bunch of straw teepees all bundled close together, daycare is the best solution I've found to this need.
Just as an example, my oldest has been besties with another kid since they were both 7 months old.
That and we did take her out all the time. She just wasn't in daycare. The thing about stay-at-home parents is they don't literally stay at home all day.
Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
Making mortgages with a > 20 year term illegal, putting limits on the total principal allowed to loan as a multiple of income, and barring entirely non-human (i.e. any business entity) ownership of single family homes would do far more for families and children by removing the burden of ridiculous housing costs by removing the ability for people to compete for ridiculous housing prices.
Don't let people get 30 year mortgages. Don't let people own houses they don't live in.
You want to change what now? The dictionary definition does not specify any particular time. There is no legal definition for full-time. The IRS uses the term full-time, but they actually use it exactly like you wish: 30 hours per week.
People out on the street often casually use full-time to refer to 40 hours per week. I anticipate that is what you are referring to. But that usage is simply used to refer to how many hours they are working. 40 hours under that usage is an observation, not a commandment.
> Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads?
That's... not even remotely what the sentence said? Or are you offended because you believe childcare obligations have historically prevented men from working their full potential?
What does full potential even mean? If someone wants to do something, but they have to do something else or they would starve (that is play vs work) which is living up to their full potential - what they want to do, or what they must do?
Women are far more likely to be the primary, stay at home caregiver if one exists and face a lot of discrimination in the workforce as a result of those expectations (on top of already facing other workplace discrimination issues).
Citing GDP growth is cute, but as nothing has been done to address the underlying drivers of price inflation, we can reasonably expect that socialized child care will become an economic necessity. Any potential benefits of productivity gains will continue to be eaten by those who are first to drink from the monetary spigot. While GDP and hours worked may increase, living standards may not.
Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
There are many public services we already rely on and there are many countries that offer free child care already in some form. What you call (forced) liberation is just societal specialization and not bad per se.
Focusing on fiscal/wage issues is a big and important topic though. I bet over time, budget hawks will reduce this public service like others and like in many other countries too. We are so many humans on our plentyful earth, we could achieve many things, yet, "we" lack money.
On top of that the increased taxes are going to raise prices of everything because the businesses don't just eat the cost of taxes, they pass it off to the consumer. So all these families that get free childcare are going to be paying more for their groceries, rent, unilities and everything else.
To top things off, you now have random strangers with no bond with your children looking after them in a ratio of maybe 1:8 or 1:10. So your children are going to be stressed out and anxious and are going to act out both at the childcare place and at home, so you're just going to be getting phone calls all day about your children fighting other children.
All in all, you might feel like you're better off but once you do the math you're at about the same place if not worse off.
The curriculum is just a net zero, and could be argued that it's a net negative because it wastes the kids time with useless knowledge that they will never need or use.
Wouldn't be that hard give people a little device that tracks the roads they use and charges them $0.05 per mile that they drive and then have the company be a co-op that's owned by the people living in that town.
A local co-op would never last. If it could, we'd see far more local co-ops.
Most US states pay for a significant fraction of road maintenance from motor fuel taxes ("road tax"). You probably aren't paying those taxes if you're in the US and you don't buy motor fuel.
Increased EV adoption is likely going to change that regime.
Also if we care so much about these inefficiencies, why is it that I still have to subsidize drivers? Why aren't we investing in better public transport infrastructure, rather than letting drivers take up 1000x the space on roads that I'm forced to pay for?
This is just an extension of that.
I also worked for a non profit that helped people get government assistance and got an inside look at what these families are like and what they prioritize.
One of the reasons you must have a two-income household to be economically middle-class in most American metros now is because two-income households became the norm. When I was growing up 25-30 years ago, that made you comfortable. Then people realized that there was "untapped" value in that extra income and raised prices accordingly. If you're looking to buy the things that make up the "American Dream", you are now competing to buy against people who are willing to throw two incomes at the problem.
Now that there are two incomes, the only way to grow is to start shedding other things that keep people from creating more value for their employers. Kids, home improvement, community involvement, all are - or have been - going by the wayside.
I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
It's similar with those studies showing hiring a diverse workforce is actually good for your business. It might be, but, like, it's also the right thing to do to not discriminate against minorities.
Unfortunately, this is how some people think, so phrasing things in this manner is a way to win them over ("paying a bit more in taxes is actually going to benefit you").
bleak
This feels like the wrong goal. Why does it matter how much an economy can grow? Is that worth not having a parent raise the child? In my opinion, it’s important for kids to spend more time with their families not less. Having one parent at home is very useful for bonding, development, etc. And frankly no childcare, even one with good ratios of workers to children, can substitute for it. I think the notion that “if the children are taken care of” is perhaps not recognizing that there are different levels of “taken care of”.
Our kids are fine.
Turns out kids need a lot of time with other kids.
That would be a rarity.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Unfortunately late capitalism made sure we went in the opposite direction.
From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?
Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.
In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.
If the economy is what you're trying to optimize for.
Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.
Surely parents should be giving their child(ren) the best, no?
Giving the economy your best only makes sense in Communism, and since that has never gone well, I'll assume that what was meant was "self-fulfillment via work" or "better standard of living". The first just seems like one of these modern lies. I'm neither a mother nor a woman, but I've never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling, although I have generally more or less enjoyed it. I've met no father (or mother) who say they wished they had more time at work rather than their children. I have heard both fathers and mothers say that it is the most fulfilling part of their lives. The second is just prioritizing the self. I've never met a child who was excited that his/her parent(s) are working and/or making lots of money instead of being with them. I don't think a goal of career or comfort/wealth is compatible with flourishing children.
Second, are the children actually taken care of? Assuming everything is well-run, then sure, their physical needs and safety are taken care of. They aren't getting love from parents during that time. They aren't living in a loving community. Instead they are getting socialized into being atomized, like the rest of us, where loneliness is epidemic. I'm really thankful my mother stayed home with us. (She started teaching part-time once we all got into all-day school)
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.
Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-...
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064...
They aren't just theoretical concerns.
(Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.)
(I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.)
> "The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently."
Indeed. Is the solution to sacrifice for it? Or tax it to care for the human? [4] We can make better choices, as New Mexico shows. I'm tired of hearing its impossible. It isn't, it's just a lack of will and collective effort in that direction, based on all available evidence.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY
(I am once again asking to think in systems)
If jobs are tenuous or insecure, long term financial obligations will not be made (the cost to raise a child in 2023 dollars is $330k, not including childcare or college). If jobs do not pay enough, people will need to put their kids in childcare (which will have to be subsidized) or they will forgo having children [1] [2].
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
See also: US healthcare.
Of course they are gone now but point stands. :-)
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?
> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead
Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
Tech.
I actually really like this idea (even though I'm red leaning) but hope they are able to effectively administrate it. I have my doubts they are.
Paid for child care frees up some stay at home parents to enter the labor force; it's kind of circular, but some of those parents will work in child care. This won't fill the whole gap, but it will fill some of it.
I have to admit that with everything else that has been going on politically, I haven't followed this latest push for universal child care, and don't know if the way they are funding it is sustainable. But previous pushes for preschool funding, etc weren't IMO; they were based on pretty optimistic estimates of both fund performance and economic returns from the preschool programs.
The vast majority of the EU does not offer anything close to free universal early childhood care like this. None of Western Europe. I can think of only Latvia and Romania off the top of my head.
What?
It's not quite free in every state, although it's closer to that than many people here probably realize.
At least until 2025 (unsure how the July budget cuts will affect this longer-term), Medicaid provides free or low-cost insurance to eligible children/families, which in theory should apply to everyone who isn't eligible for health insurance through other means. Emphasis on in theory, though - in practice, there are plenty of people who aren't covered.
It's probably more accurate to say that almost all children are eligible for healthcare coverage, and that coverage is free or low-cost for millions of people who meet various income thresholds. (People who are covered on private insurance almost always have copays or deductibles, so it's not truly free for them because there is some out-of-pocket cost).
This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.
This post is about childcare - ie daycare/preschool/babysitting - not child health care.
The point of the US has always been to make it easy for people to accumulate a lot of money, so that they can independently purchase things like child care if they need it, but if not, they can freely invest their money into other things.
Prioritizing cashflow over social safety nets results in a very liquid lifestyle, that can change quickly according to your own individual desires. Since you are not depending on any government handouts, you can simply take your money to wherever you see fit and live how you want. This appeals to many American individualist values.
If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you. Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
Unfortunately though in the US, this entire concept collapses when people are no longer able to accumulate a lot of cash. They will live in the worst of both worlds: broke and the government isn’t helping them.
You don't have to live any specific kind of lifestyle, but it is true that a sizable portion of your income still goes to the public institutions. You can send your kids to private schools or (in some countries) homeschool them, but you're still paying for everyone else's public education.
Same with savings and pensions funds, a portion of your income goes to the state pension fund, no opting out of that, but you can also invest in private funds or whatever else.
Nobody's, for example, forcing you to work a 9-5 like everyone else, you're free to start a business, be unemployed, work and also run a business on the side etc.
As for moving countries, you can freely move around EU member states while keeping the benefits. You are also still entitled to the benefits of your country of origin even if you move across the globe as long as you keep your citizenship and tax residency there (which might be more impractical than just forgoing the benefits though).
> Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
The wealth inequality varies quite vastly depending on which European country you're looking at. Also note that European does not automatically imply them being an EU member state. Overly general statements like these are totally pointless.
This is confusing me, is this the same as "at or below the federal poverty level" or is there something I'm missing with that 400%? Do you have to be 400% below the federal poverty level to qualify?
Many programs use that, or variations on like (like this 400%) - to index. So if the poverty line for a family of four is 32,150$ - then this program is available to your family of four until you make over 128,600$.
Others will say "below 200% FPL OR qualifying condition" (think newborn, pregnant, etc). So some programs are open to baseball player families, as long as the qualifying condition is there.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-unive...
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
It is great to offer free childcare to all citizens, but if those childcare facilities are inadequately resourced the quality of care will decline.
It looks like it's 1:6 until kids are 27 months, at which point the ratio becomes 1:10. When kids are 3-4 the ratio is 1:12, and when they're 5 and up, the ratio is 1:15. These are numbers from 2011, so not sure how that's changed over time.
This still happen at daycare. If you have sent your kid to daycare/preschool, you'll know that kids become friends wit nother kids there, and parents can become friends withnother parents. A community forms because playdates are necessary when daycare/preschool is out.
> parents
Sometimes economic realities are such that both parents have to work to make ends meet. There are single-family households that also exist. Childcare is a necessity in these and other situations.
I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
Pick your poison.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
If this is the criticism then it's a glowing endorsement of daycare and school.
"So I can provide for my family"
"Why do you want to provide for your family?"
"So my children can have happy and fulfilling lives"
"What makes your young children feel happy?"
"Spending time with me"
A strong parent-child relationship is the biggest determination of life-long child happiness even into old age.
How so?
Once you see it, you'll see it everywhere.
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
- Kids need lots of time with their parents
- Kids need lots of time around other kids
You can do that by sending them to daycare, and ALSO spending lots of time with them when they're home.
You can also do that by taking time off work, and then taking your kid(s) to places with other kids.
Both work; and it depends on your context which works for you.
The market already has incentives to create them -- a ton of good places have waiting lists nationwide, showing unmet demand even at the current price. This suggests the price will need to go higher to attract enough people to do this job. It seems their "$12,000 value" estimate is based on an optimistic belief that they will be buying childcare for their citizens at current prices. When they realize there aren't that many slots available at current rates of pay, will they be okay significantly increasing the costs of the program?
So, my expectations for these facilities are very low and that's a big part of my concern.
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13230
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
So the children that do well in daycare comes from poor homes? So kids from rich home don't do well in daycare?
Every interaction I've ever had says the opposite. The disruptive bully at school usually comes from a broken home.
Or did you have something else in mind?
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I have a toddler.
They are absorbing everything and gaining a personality from day one.
You are not the one doing it.
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Yo, what the fuck HN?
I send my kid to the daycare run by foreigners to learn cultural values.
WeAreNotTheSame.jpg
Real businesses subject to real inspections and real assessments, you mean? With "strangers" who need to have qualifications and background checks?
To each their own of course but I'd prefer somewhere I know is actually judged to be a safe environment than some under the table option.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect the former to have ADA compliant doors or hot water that meets state regulations but the "give a fuck factor" is just so, so, so much higher when someone is working out of their own home, one of their own kids is in the mix, the rest of them are kids of a friend or friend of a friend, etc, than it is when your kid is being looked after by some 20yo college kid who's doing this part time.
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.
We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.
If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).
Universal healthcare is similar. You want to support small businesses? Lack of affordable healthcare stops a lot of people from leaving corporate America to start their own business.
That's what happens when party doesn't have an actual policy stance and min-maxes their pooling numbers based on target audience instead.
Another more cynical take is "childbirths" is just a code for racism and "pro-life" a code for religious types.
The minute they even think that minorities are help by pro child policies they will be back to the “welfare queen” dog whistles that Reagan did.
But to be fair, a few of the religious non MAGA conservatives did understand that the best way to reduce abortions were to support new mothers and children. But now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, they don’t seem to care about it anymore.
Didn't the Big Beautiful Bill include $5K for newborn babies? I thought I saw a headline that said that. But anyway, yeah, 5-grand is gonna solve everything. /s
That said, this is a fine thing for a state to experiment with. From other comments, it sounds like NM's ability to try this out is related to a recent oil and gas boom. We'll see how it goes.
I wonder if some of the intent behind this is to reduce some of the generational effects by exposing children early to at least some semblance of order and sobriety? Then when they enter school they have more of a chance.
I'm not by any means "socialist inclined" but I can't say I'm against this program because the situation is dire enough something must be done.
When I lived in Norway 35 years ago, I’m pretty sure they had this. Little kids went to barnehagen. I think as early as 1. Can anyone from the Nordic states chime in? Is that still the case? Does it work? I would guess Sweden and Denmark were similar.
My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.
Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.
That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.
For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.
Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.
On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)
[1] (if you can avoid thinking of the class-based eugenics that such a policy would amount to, if it were actually obeyed)
[2] punish by impoverishing them further, or by making it more likely they'll be neglected by those parents that you already suspect aren't responsible
https://www.nmhealth.org/news/vaccine/2025/8/
The states are stepping up.
I suspect that for every one job the government would subsidize for a daycare professional, that we’d see three women enter the workforce.
That’s a net of four people employed.
I have no proof of this aside from my own experience watching parents struggle to find care for their kids. Even well off ones where I live. In Massachusetts!
Good for you, New Mexico. I’m rooting for you.
Is this a reasonable wage in New Mexico? Here in Southern California you could not find qualified candidates for that but I know general cost of living is higher.
https://www.aecf.org/interactive/databook?l=35
You can research for yourself and see other evidence that the educational outcomes for children in New Mexico is generally very, very poor.
Expect similar results with New Mexico's "universal" child care.
Quartz ranked New Mexico 5th: https://qz.com/early-childhood-education-by-state-ranking-20...
If I look hard enough, I can find a study that ranks New Mexico at every single ranking from 50th to 1st.
In particular, the study you linked ranks on a lot of factors outside the control of the school - which is largely affected by the huge number of poor people in New Mexico (#1 in the country... Which is why they got the rating they did).
That said, if you don’t have a job… do you need childcare? But I’m assuming there will still be enough demand from those employed
Does this mean a stay-at-home mom or dad can get a daycare license and get paid by the state to take care of their own children?
>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.
How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care
[1]https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...
While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.
One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).
I wonder what other laws like this can be passed that do not harm billionaires.
So this will be financed by a voluntary election by those who support it, i.e., voluntary increase in the various taxes people pay in NM?
I see all these comments in the vein of 'why should you force people to work in the mines and not get to love their child' and I wonder if any of these people have ever had toddlers. I love my kid, and love spending time with her. But she really likes daycare (and now school). Not only does she get better socialization than me taking her to the park for 2 hours, but she learns skills that I wouldn't be consistent about teaching. It turns out, being taught by people who have years of practice and degrees in childcare is a pretty good idea!
We did Prek-4 at our public school and you could immediately tell the difference between the daycare kids, the nanny kids, and the home-parent kids. The daycare kids were much more prepared and able to cope, and this is at a school where parental involvement was quite high. I don't think the different approaches are universally better or worse, but it's clear to me that the quality of the daycare and the parent matters a lot more than which one you choose.
thelastgallon•8h ago
bediger4000•8h ago
I haven't see a coherent rationale for reversing course on this doctrine, which was extremely strongly held, and cited a lot.
outside1234•8h ago
Muromec•7h ago
fragmede•7h ago
dataflow•8h ago
gchamonlive•8h ago
stetrain•8h ago
mcny•8h ago
I don't think government at any level should get to discriminate based on protected classes and I hope most people alive today will agree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
scarface_74•7h ago
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/supreme-court-ice-r...
pjc50•8h ago
By whom?
> since at least 1980 that small, local government was best. I was given the impression
By whom?
> extremely strongly held, and cited a lot
By whom?
Muromec•7h ago
ChrisMarshallNY•8h ago
post_break•7h ago
ChrisMarshallNY•7h ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it encourages companies to have on-site daycare.
Probably richer taxpayers are the ones that won't like it.
Redoubts•8h ago