So Medicare as-is for kids wouldn't be significantly cheaper than ACA for kids.
To make it cheaper, you'd need to either substantially increase the subsidy on Medicare, or decrease US medical costs (administration costs, drug costs, doctor salaries, etc)
Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.
One of our parents pays about $20k/yr all in for ACA - $12k/yr of premiums and $8k/yr on top of that (all unsubsidized)
Her (also unsubsidized) Medicare would be $6.5k/yr partA premium + $1.6k partA deductible+ $2.3k partB + $1k partD + $5k medigap, or about $16.5k total. She has no work credits for Medicare subsidy.
If you have subsidy from free partA premiums, then Medicare is about twice as cheap as unsubsidized ACA, yes. If you don't have subsidy for either, it's a little cheaper, but not by a ton.
So if you just stuck kids on existing Medicare pricing with no work credit for partA, then it would not be substantially cheaper than unsubsized ACA.
No they don't. A lot of the "Medicare for All" crowd assumes that "medicare for all"/universal healthcare is free or at least very low cost rather than something that's in the ballpark of unsubsidized individual/family healthcare plans which is the reality at least within a few years of leaving the professional workforce.
No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented.
Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you.
This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's another issue, but when they get sick they more than deserve treatment.
And finally, the vast majority of illnesses can be treated cheaply if irregularly do your checkups. It can cost society $200 today for a doctor visit , or 30k for an ER stay in 3 years.
That said, I think this should be handled on a state by state basis. If the people of Alabama don't believe in single-payer healthcare, or they want to forbid using single pair healthcare for contraceptive or something, that shouldn't stop a progressive state from implementing it.
Not sure what gives you this idea. The major political party in power in the US today campaigned in large part on cruelty and removing subsidies and social benefits from people. There are a huge number of people who would bitterly fight against providing health care to children. It's the same mentality that bitterly fights against free school lunch for children.
Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
And how did personal responsibility make housing unaffordable?
>Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How neat and tidy.
>How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
What are you talking about? Everyone who's poor and powerless should be helped. More importantly, though, they shouldn't be taken advantage of by wealthy interests. That includes animals, that includes expectant mothers who don't make enough money to survive because the "money to survive" dial was cranked up to 100 in the last five years. But please, lecture us some more about how that's HER fault.
>It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
It's also not kindness to raise their rent for no other reason than you can.
>Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
And we could end it all tomorrow by saying "the US government must fund university education". You know, like they do in Europe, or like we did a few decades ago in the United States. You're pointing to a radically predatory policy decision, designed to benefit rich people, and saying: "See? Government doesn't work!" But that's "conservatism" for you: say government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.
I don't know if you truly believe that education costs would come down if we stopped shunting students into indentured servitude (guess which loans are the only ones that can't be discharged in bankruptcy? What a curious law of the universe that must be!), but if that's the case, then I have a fabulous bridge I'd be willing to part with for a modest price.
I will never stop fighting against people who wield the power of the state to punch down and then point the finger at those same people and blame them. It's disgusting, it's abhorrent, and it must stop.
I can see that. Your ideology creates the problems you think we just need more of your ideology to solve.
You’re not some warrior for freedom or the oppressed, you’re just another person that mistakes enabling for actual care, and thinks serving the interests of the powerful is revolutionary.
So sure, let’s build a system that forces everyone into the workforce, benefits employers who pay too little, and produces worse outcomes for children.
How revolutionary.
What stops someone from saying “I’m an undocumented provider with 500 kids. Pay me 500 x AMOUNT”.
Public schools have residence and identity requirements. What’s an undocumented childcare provider going to have?
This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.
And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.
Such a tiny percentage of people actually want to do stuff like that.
Even without factoring in cost, most people shrug it off until it’s bad.
Practically every other country has figured this out, it’s not impossible
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.36756
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
For working class people , the skin in the game is having to miss a day of work, etc. Theirs still an opportunity cost
https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/childrens-health-in...
We can argue about what to do with the parents but in the mean time we're going to let children suffer? That's lunacy. I don't even have children and I'll gladly pay taxes to prevent child suffering. How is anyone against that?
Let's argue about what to do with the parents but not let kids suffer
Like let's say there's two parents, the primary income earner dies, there's not enough in savings, so single parent now needs support. I don't think that's anyone's "fault".
On the other hand, we could look at a case where there's a family who's never made enough money to support their kids and keeps having more. You can take away the kids and fine the parents for fraud. (Obviously should issue a warning before this)
But I think that for some parts of this, tying the benefits to the child just reduces the opportunities for abuse. Medical care for children is a pretty straight forward one. You make it universal and the taxes are progressive such that you make it a wash for middle or upper middle income families and a loss for upper income families. So everyone gets the benefits but that creates an efficient system where we don't really need to do means testing on the child at time of their medical checkup. Same thing for something like food programs. Both of these can even utilize the existing schools so we don't need to build new facilities. For food, you just make it so access to the cafeteria is free. Provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Will people abuse the program? Absolutely. Nothing is 100% bulletproof. Will the cost of abuse outweigh the costs needed to avoid the abuse? Probably not. Will the costs of avoiding the abuse outweigh the costs of a child going hungry? Absolutely not.
I think this last part is important to note because frequently the complaints about these systems leverage the fact that the system is imperfect. We then spend years arguing about how to make it perfect (which is literally an impossible task) and meanwhile we leave the most important part of the problem unsolved, causing damage. If we are unable to recognize that perfection is impossible then our conversations just become silly as we love to "play devil's advocate" or "steelman" arguments. That adversarial nature is a very helpful tool for refinement, but it also can't serve as a complete blocker either.
I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.
I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.
America has universal public education because it started with the “Old Deluder Act”: the state wanted people to be literate so they could read the Bible.
The exact opposite of your allegation above: “Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: ‘don’t teach my children your Satanic ways.’”
There is a presumption at law, however, that parents generally want what is best for their children, and the state has a certain standard it must prove if it wants to claim otherwise. So if parents want to teach their children a certain ideology, that is assumed to be in the children's best interest, unless the state can prove otherwise.
Overall, I'd say most parents want what is best for their children and do their best to provide that.
OTOH, very few children have enough individual income to be disqualified from Medicaid, but it's based on household income.
My handwavey plan for universal federalized healthcare includes using the child's income as a qualifier for Medicaid, phased in so the system will hopefully adjust over time rather than get overloaded to collapse. Also reduce the Medicare eligibility age over time. A solution that takes decades to roll out leaves a lot of unsolved problems, but adding a large number of people to an existing program in one fell swoop feels like it's going to be a negative too.
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
[0] https://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/blog/the-lanham-act-and-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Child_Developmen...
We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
The government does not need to be run like a fucking business.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
That isn't necessarily true. If we find continual efficiency gains, it may never stop growing for thousands of years.
Most growth curves in life are S-curves. Population growth, etc. But technological advancement could continue until we become a type II civilization.
That's absolutely sci-fi speculation, but there are no signs of technological advancement ending.
If each round of advancement increases efficiency, growth continues. I don't see an end in sight.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
.
Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.
Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.
The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
0-18 months, there is no skill other than being the parent(s).
In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.
In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
Not exactly a “rich” thing, just a matter of “scale” (in YC terms).
My daughter's at an in-home daycare with IIRC five or six other kids. There are two adults there full-time, sometimes three.
Two adults supervising 20-40 daycare-aged kids is simply not feasible.
0-18 months: 1:3
18 months to 3 years: 1:4
3-5 years: 1:5
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars
2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
Yes, 100% agreed.
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
This is hypothetical, isn't it?
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
And, of course, reducing the complexity and cost of welfare ought to be a left wing talking point as well! Again, it depends on what you do with the savings - sure, it can just be taken and used elsewhere, or you could maintain the spending but raise the bar on how much UBI provides.
But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
Multiply the US population by the poverty level annual income ($15.6K) and the resulting number is higher than all US federal tax revenue combined. In other words, tax rates would have to more than double across the board.
Subtracting out existing social programs barely moves the needle. Are you sure you did the math, or were you just assuming?
It's not as simple as multiplying the population. The point is that if everyone gets that check, then you can raise the nominal tax rate much higher but still get the effective tax rate (i.e. income - tax + UBI) in reasonable territory. As I recall I actually went all in and also made it a flat income tax to see how much the UBI offset would work at making it effectively progressive, and that also works out.
Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
US tax rates are complex due to local variance and other factors. Tax rate on the median NZ income appears to be ~30%. Tax on median US is lower, but state taxes can add significantly. There is not a neat divide between red states & blue states here; Alabama & Georgia have state income taxes, for example.
> The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country.
And that's before the health insurance premiums!
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
Given New Mexico's tax rates, it seems like it would be difficult to do so.
It looks like the program will cost about $600M next year. In order to generate more tax revenue than it costs, it would need to increase personal income somewhere on the order of $12-15B of personal income, taxable sales, business profit or some combination.
Now, a fraction of that will come from the childcare workers. Some may come from stay-at-home parents or parents working part time going to work, but given they say it'll save on the order of $12K/year/family, a family would need to increase their income by about $260K/year in order to pay $12K in extra state income taxes.
It's rare to see spending programs actually pay for themselves. Mostly when politicians talk about a program paying for itself, they preform verbal slight-of-hand, arguing that $x will come back as $x*y in economic activity. That is, of course, a lie, but no one calls them out the fact that economic activity ≠ taxes.
Now as a low population state implementing this at the state level means most of that federal savings/revenue helps people outside of the state, but that’s the issue with implementing such programs at the state level rather than an issue with the type of program itself.
I doubt many people would say they want to raise their taxes to cancel program X because it also helps people they don’t like. You could be right, but I think the more logical conclusion is they are simply being misinformed.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
See https://www.statsforvalteren.no/innlandet/barnehage-og-oppla...
France AFAICT
https://www.newsweek.com/us-mom-unpacks-costs-child-care-par...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/explainer-how-childcare...
Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.
With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
That’s not how fraud is defined. The fraud rates are calculated from doing in-depth audits of a sampling of applicants.
It’s not the rate of rejections. That’s an assumption you embedded and tried to project on to others.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a...
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
Google sez:
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
It is a measure of payment (or non-payment) errors, not fraud.
Why would you generalize your opinion to all when this is extremely clear?
How can things get better if you can't even be bothered to criticize at a granular level? Since we are a Democracy this matters.
Of course you're right, but spelling it out explicitly leads to a partisan flame ware.
> The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
Wait a minute… that sounds like…
Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight
This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.
Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.
Because let me tell you dude I and every other woman is picking the men's package in this deal. You go ahead and be a 50's housewife if you think it's so good. We've had the option to choose if we want that terrible life for 40+ years now and "fuck no" won in a landslide.
Do you know how depressing it is to find out that both my mom and my mother-in-law squirreled away money in a secret bank account just so they could have the tiniest bit of financial independence separate from their husbands. And keep in mind these are men who they both love dearly and are still married to to this day.
The fact that your mom and MIL needed secret bank accounts isn't an argument against raising your own children - it's an argument for financial transparency and shared accounts in modern marriages. And yeah, we should absolutely have that.
But here's what you're missing: plenty of women (and men!) are choosing to be primary caregivers today because we have the choice now. It's not 1950 - it's 2025. Nobody's talking about giving up bank accounts or financial independence. We're talking about prioritizing raising your own kids over outsourcing it, when that's financially possible.
It's hard as hell, it's undervalued, and it's not for everyone. But acting like everyone who makes that choice is deluded? That's just as dismissive as the people who think all women should be doing it.
Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.
The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical. If they're lucky enough to be able to not work a job during that period, that is.
>Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession.
That sounds absurdly high. I think you need to revisit your calculations. Even if it was the real number, perpetuating the species is worth more than corporate bullshit meetings or whatever.
>Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
There were some unfortunate circumstances in the past but they are way overblown. Most people with a little sense know that it would be preferable to be able to live on one income, and that men and women alike wish for that kind of prosperity to return. It might come along with occasional problems, but what we face now with ever-increasing costs of living and awkward questions about finances and family roles is not great either.
Domestic labor and being primary caregiver for children is not, in any way, like a sabbatical.
Kids can be annoying, but they can also be a lot of fun. Having the luxury of being able to spend months on end with them, without worrying about money, is a luxury that unfortunately is on the decline. But it is still more attainable that most realize.
As a parent, I believe I speak for many when I say [citation needed].
That last part is very much not true, perhaps especially when children are involved.
> Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max.
Maybe if you are very bad at recognizing work.
> without worrying about money
Not earning money in outside labor is not the same as not worrying about, and managing, money.
The child tax credit.
It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.
In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.
For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:
"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality
"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).
There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."
The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:
"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."
Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.
The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent
Could you get private child care for 300 USD per month?
Looks like Quebec's past and rest of Canada is the control.
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
Oh the irony!
You clearly didn’t grow up in an immigrant neighborhood in the city
(Even C++ people show up! All in good fun.)
Excluding those whose land was stolen and redistributed by government.
> not community sacrifice
Excluding government-funded infrastructure projects like canals that enabled growth. And support that immigrants received from ethnic communities.
> Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty
Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
America truly is exceptional.
(You won't see many horses in wartime films, because the Germans tried to show off their industrial machines, not their reliance on horsepower.)
> The Titanic was built for that purpose.
It was built to compete with Cunard's Lusitania/Mauretania. While immigrants did board it, elite travel was prioritized.
> The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people
False. Those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants [1].
> The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
Exagarated at best. Many of those who fought in the war were as young ar 14 [2].
> In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
Do you have a verified source for this? In Erich Ludendorff's memoirs he attributes defeat to logistics / shortages, but does not note the physical stature of US soldiers.
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322981/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_soldiers_in_the_American...
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
The government did not engage in welfare until FDR.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.
I'll go with "all men" from the Declaration of Independence.
> the working poor are being absolutely crushed by capital right now
They're being crushed by the government. You cannot make a country wealthy by raising taxes and redistributing the money.
> your guys won!
I go with the "all men" thang.
Btw ~40% of the people i've met in homeless outreach have full time jobs, taxes are not what's keeping them homeless. In china 90% of the population own their homes, I'm sorry but the all that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich. Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Yes. The people who wrote the Constitution were well aware of the conundrum, but were faced with the reality that they could not form a union without allowing the slaveholders to continue. In essence, they kicked the can down the road, which resulted in a catastrophic war.
> did it include women?
Yes. Whether the word "men" means exclusively men or men and women depends on the context.
> taxes are not what's keeping them homeless
You're suggesting that taxes don't have effects beyond just paying the money. When a businessman is taxed, for example, that means he has less money to invest in his business, which means fewer jobs, fewer purchases of plant & equipment, slower growth, higher prices, etc., all of which negatively affect the rest of the economy, including poor people.
> that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich
America's rich people came from poor immigrants. The same for America's middle class.
> Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Have you ever looked at the size of government spending on redistribution? The US abandoned libertarianism in the early 1900s.
GP's point is that you are playing fast and loose with words here, so much so that your point doesn't make sense. "Community sacrifice" is a much broader category than those few policies you dislike.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!
As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
Guess where the north got their cotton to make those shoes? The south. The textile industries of the north would've never gotten their start without cheap cotton made possible by slavery.
> As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
Every South American nation that tried to raise itself out of poverty had their government overthrown or their leader assassinated with the help of good ol' USA. Japan/S. Korea/Taiwan industrialized because USA decided they needed strong allies to counter Russia/China. Check out the grand area plans. Africa was colonized, exported millions of their people to slavery, and is continually destabilized by the west (corporations, world bank, IMF, etc) to perpetuate resource extraction.
The poor is kept poor so the rich can get richer. Why is food so plentiful and cheap? Slave labor. Read Tomatoland for a taste. Why are clothes so cheap? People are working for pennies to make those clothes. Why doesn't the iPhone price rise with inflation? There are millions of poor rural Chinese pounding for a chance to work at inhumane conditions for a few dollars a day. You think they make enough to pull their families out of poverty? Nope, it's mostly foreign companies that are reaping the bulk of the profit while continually pressing their costs (labor wages) down.
This is false, and easily disproved by history. I don't have time right now to go through it point by point -- but will try to when I can get to it.
It's indisputable that had the US been resource poor -- in arable land and exploitable resources -- it would have never become a powerhouse able to not only sustain millions of incoming immigrants from Europe, but ultimately make them prosperous. And it got that arable land and exploitable resources by driving out the local inhabitants and stealing their land--that is not a "theory". The fact that much of the early economy needed to catapult the US to the top by cotton and tobacco, which was harvested by slaves and powered the factories in the non-slave states, is not a "theory" either.
> Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
The slave owners were very prosperous. The majority of the population was slaves and they indeed were by definition impoverished. No need to build infrastructure for a slave population, no need for much in the way of cities either. The factories in the north were powered by the raw materials from the south. (It's the reason the North accepted the Slave south in the first place and later went to war to keep them in the Union.) The US got rich the same way the European countries became so prosperous in the 1600-1800s: occupying other lands that were resource rich, and extracting their resources, and where possible, using slave labor.
Edit: If you're talking about the _modern_ economy, then yes, I would agree with you to some extend. And you use the example of Taiwan -- which was impoverished by the way until 60 years ago. But remember this conversation is about "the founding the US" -- that's the economy being discussed, not one where TSMC emerges.
The remembering/forgetting what "made America great" is very selective. Factory jobs: yes! Labor unions: (silence)
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
You’re right about the main benefit of population decline though. It gives Nature a needed break
Little is being done to give them assurances they will be able to provide for themselves.
[edit] And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor" for his times? I am sure you can come up with some less fortunate people during the same times which didn't really get the experience of that one room schoolhouse.
In the world where he was born on the frontier in a log cabin, which is this one.
And it seems I need to spell it out for you, right there in the US during the same times, children of black people in the south didn't get access to education[1]. Serfdom was a thing in Europe until the early 1900, serfs children didn't get access to proper education[2]. I'm giving you a link to Russian education, but the whole of Eastern Europe was at a similar level. I don't know what kind of rose tinted cool aid you guys have been drinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...
Places like the South that didn't want to do that found themselves on the receiving end of losing a war, and now it's universal across all of America.
btw analogy is not a good way to win arguments.
1. Some point.
2. Counterpoint.
3. Countercounterpoint.
4-10. Belabored analogies that people argue about.
11-15. Weird blood-and-soil stuff.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
Also, I'm not even against state support for parents needing childcare, but giving $500 a month to each parent who needs it to find childcare in an informal system will actually be much better than a state run system that spends $2000 per kid.
We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.
Having standards in training, operation, and oversight of childcare seems just as important as safety standards in the food supply. Even though everybody cooks at home, you're not allowed to run a restaurant without certifications and inspections either. And thank goodness.
Of course, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.
What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?
Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?
When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.
You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.
You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.
Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.
We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.
Most people fail to understand:
- Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income.
- The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported.
- The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.”
- The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)
What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.
And no, "subsidized" means a portion of something is covered by someone else, but not necessarily all of it. E.g. a subsidized cafeteria at work may mean all the food is 50% of cost. Subsidized can mean fully subsidized, but that's a special case.
So subsidized is not more precise, it's actually much less precise. "Free" continues to be the accurate and correct term.
You're taking a right-wing political stance against current levels of social spending, which is your prerogative, but there's no need to change perfectly fine language to do so. Even if we called it the mouthful of "fully subsidized childchare", that's not going to make it any less popular.
My source is my upbringing in Europe and my subsequent long-term residence in two other countries, which provided me with a unique perspective on people’s feelings and beliefs.
My source is my diverse life experiences, during which I actively engaged with people from all walks of life as much as I could. I am not making any claims about science or indulging in conspiracies. For such claims, I would require concrete evidence.
What I am saying is that a majority of the Europeans, particularly the youth, has become disconnected from the fundamental principle that to distribute wealth, you must generate it first.
I hope that helps.
That honestly sounds as plausible to me as saying the majority of Europeans thinkg 2+2=5.
Forgive me if I have a hard time believing you. Because I can definitely tell you Americans understand where their government spending comes from, and I have a hard time believing that Europeans are somehow less educated on this.
For most Europeans, a tax is an unclear bill at the end of the month, leaving them feeling powerless to do anything about it.
One thing I learned from living in America is that people here are much more engaged in civic life and politics. The UK (which I also lived in) is perhaps the exception to this European rule.
I'm American but have spent a lot of time in Europe -- France, Spain, and Germany mostly. I have seen nothing to indicate that Europeans are ignorant of where government spending comes from. They seem just as smart as anyone else.
And national elections in Europe also seem like large news events, even if the campaign season is (thankfully) a whole lot shorter.
I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.
As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.
Any kind of "funded by the rich" program will mostly come from that group. That's why it's hard to pass these thing.
Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.
However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
Unfortunately, I have found that such framings are mostly associated with a set of beliefs which I feel profoundly at odds with (e.g. unlimited wealth inequality is fine). So I find myself aligned with the "health care is a human right" crowd despite my discomfort with the ideological underpinnings.
Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
No... it's a statemet of fact that means when I leave the doctor's, I don't have to pull out my checkbook or credit card or wait for a bill to arrive.
This is the most strawman of strawmen I might ever have heard.
By your logic, the word "free" should be banished from the English language, because literally nothing could ever be free.
Except, for people who have common sense, "free" means you don't have to pay for the thing directly.
In this case, your taxes get aggregated with everyone else's and then some gets split up into health services. But since there's no direct connection between the two -- you don't get more healthcare if you pay more taxes individually, and you don't get to pay less taxes if you don't go to the doctor -- it's conceptualized as paying taxes on one end, and getting free health care on the other. This is just common sense. Everyone understands how this works. It's the same way we have free schools. Or you think schools aren't actually free either...?
Again, by your logic, nothing provided by someone else could ever be free. Right?
So then what exactly is the point of having the word?
So let's get rid of the word. Now, we need a word to mean things you don't pay for directly, since that's a very useful and practical concept when it comes to your personal budget. What do you think of the word... I'm just brainstorming here... "free"?
Am I missing something here?
For Europeans, while they understand the concept of taxes, the government’s vastness and involvement in everything make it a black box that they fund without having a say. They can just hope it’s being used effectively (although many believe it isn’t).
Most European elections revolve around sentimental signaling and rarely present concrete plans that explain practical solutions to problems.
Americans assume the rest of the world is on the same page, but that’s not the case IMO
You're taking a bizarrely extreme ideological position that does not match reality. Elections in countries like France and Germany are vibrant and heavily contested and citizens are greatly interested and involved.
Whether there's more sentimental signaling than you'd like, or too few concrete plans -- that's true across the world, and in the US.
But that has nothing to do with whether it makes sense to call government services provided at no direct cost "free".
You've made it clear you want to redefine language to suit your kind of right-wing ideology, where you seem shockingly judgmental and dismissive of your fellow citizens. No thanks.
As I mentioned, my only claim here is that I’ve lived for years in various Western countries. I’ve paid taxes, held jobs, bought and sold homes, made friends, volunteered, and so on. I believe my experiences give me an edge over others who just are “traveling” or “spending the summer.”
I grew up in Europe, and I can tell you that you’ll encounter more right-wing perspectives in a random bar on a Tuesday than you’ll find anywhere in America. Europe has always been an ethnonationalist continent, which is why it surprises me that calling out its inner workings would result in accusations of being right-wing.
Like I said, time will tell.
Any political scientist will tell you that the American political spectrum is well to the right of the European one, no matter what personal conversations you have in bars.
And you're advocating for less social spending -- that's essentially the definition of right-wing on the economic dimension.
And there's no need for any "time will tell". Conservatives have been complaining about social spending for a solid three-quarters of a century by now. If three generations isn't enough to show that social democracy is a system that works in terms of delivering services, how much more do you need?
Your perspective on the US political spectrum is where I suggest you reconsider. Most Europeans are ethnonationalists, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider the rise of the far right following immigration. While the outcome remains uncertain, I fear it won’t be pretty. It certainly won’t be something to boast about. Europe is on the brink of experiencing its most extreme, fascist, racist, and rightward shift in a long time.
This raises the question of why you’re so certain that Europe is “left-leaning.”
The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.
People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.
However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
Saving people and a local healthcare force are fringe benefits, accounting wise.
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.
;)
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make though.
https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/sexual-health/free-condo...
Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.
It’s true that it’s means tested, but I’m not entirely sure we need to be providing free meals for rich people.
The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately need the quality education who are going to be left behind.
If it were up to me, I'd send those people to jail (yes yes, I know. I'm just angry and lashing out)
Personally, I find Boaler's advocacy extreme. Her famous quote: "Every student is capable of understanding every theorem in mathematics – and beyond – the mathematics curriculum. They just need the opportunity to struggle with rich tasks and see mathematics as a conceptual, creative subject.” This sounds inspiring, but in practice she advocated the policy of truly dumbing down math curriculums and text books. To say the least, shouldn't she at least demonstrate that she could understand any theorem? But instead, she advocated that SFUSD eliminate algebra from 8th Grade . Another example was that the curriculum that she advocated, College Preparatory Mathematics, was so boring and trivial. She also said something along the line "Traditional mathematics teaching is repetitive and uninspiring. We give students 30 similar problems to do over and over again, and it bores them and turns them off math for life.” What's funny is that the alternatives that Boaler prescribed were quite uninspiring and low level: https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/. All I can derive from her policies and complaints is that she couldn't do math. Why people would listen to someone who sucked at math about math education is beyond me.
Hope this helps.
What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over
Of course, it's also not going to happen because proportional popular vote will strongly favor one party...
If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.
While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it
And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc
What about illegal?
I reassert: voting with your feet is a privilege.
For illegal immigrants, I would say that if successful in crossing the border, they are in a more privileged position compared to their compatriots who did not. Not more privileged than citizens or legal immigrants here, though, that's for sure.
https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2025-10-13/childcare-univers...
> The state has spent years building early childhood funding — In 2020 it created a $10 billion trust fund using revenue from its booming oil and gas industry. Then, in 2022 voters approved drawing more from the Land Grant Permanent Fund.
https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/is-universal-childcare-sustai...
I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
People who have no children in particular would prefer to be paid wages versus other people getting childcare and them getting less wages.
Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.
No, but it is during our most productive, aware, and valuable daylight hours.
> Also, it's really weird to be making this argument for mothers and not fathers.
In the context of human history, it’s not weird at all.
> Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.
How?
It reduces the time children spend with a parent, and it creates a world in which both parents have to work just to afford having children.
For many families, both parents have to work. Most time spent not working or sleeping is spent doing a task simultaneously with childcare. Cleaning, preparing meals, repairing things, laundry, etc. Even for families where one individual shoulders the bulk of the burden this is largely the case.
If you want to talk about “ridiculous”, ignoring reality doesn’t make it any less real, no matter how much you might find it ideologically inconvenient.
Once you have spent six months or a year raising an infant, it is personally psychologically difficult (and developmentally questionable) to cut that tie.
I get that it’s ideologically convenient to pretend that men and women are interchangeable economic cogs, but the sexes are fundamentally different in very pertinent ways.
We all lose under this model, but ultimately the people who lose the most when economic and social policy rejects our inconvenient biological differences are the children themselves.
Family should be able to support themselves on a single earner’s salary. That’s what we should prioritize. They can decide themselves who should stay home, if anyone; gender doesn’t need to factor into our policy if we simply make it our goal for families to not require dual incomes.
Don’t give me free daycare, just make it so much less punishing to stay at home and take care of my kids.
All of it is kindof dumb, I pay a higher tax because joint filing is not a thing, and my increased tax pays for subsidized daycare…
Also no, women (or men) who stay home don’t “know best” by default. That knowledge is earned and requires intent.
Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.
If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
When I was a kid (youngest of four) growing up in a suburb of a small town, my mom would often drop me off at a neighbor's house to watch me while she ran errands or did stuff for my siblings. No payment, just neighbors being neighborly.
Now, I can't fathom something like that being feasible in our increasingly individualistic neighborhood. Regretfully, I don't even know the names of most of my neighbors. I wave to them on the street but I wouldn't ask them to take care of my daughter.
I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
Ideally we could go back to being an interdependent society but it has to happen organically. No amount of legislation or budget can fix that.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.
You still can. I managed to make friends with a few neighbors just by asking a few innocuous questions every time we meet. Some are friendlier than others. I don't talk to everyone I meet, just those I think could be friendly. I'm usually wrong though and the ones I'd never think would be friendly turns out the most talkative. I met my next door neighbor on afternoon and we talked for 6 hours. Take a chance, odds are good you'll find someone who wants to reach out as much as you.
A bit tangential, but the overall problem is that cost of having children is privatized while the benefit is socialized. I'd love to see age and number of children progressively factored into the income tax bracket people pay. Something like a 60-80% tax rate for all income >150k for those >40 without children so those that benefit the most from future generations being born are helping to shoulder the cost
A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
Instead of figuring out why and fixing that, you’d apparently prefer that we take a page from the soviets and further embed our social and economic regression into law.
It must be oddly soothing to live in such a simple world of your own imagination, but that’s just not how people actually work. This isn’t magic, and your suicidal empathy for those you paint as systemically marginalized will never change that.
HarryHirsch•2mo ago
kiba•2mo ago
Otherwise, any welfare program will just get some of its value captured by landlords.
blfr•2mo ago
Avicebron•2mo ago
balamatom•2mo ago
Aarostotle•2mo ago
Governments buying goods for people with tax money turns them into dependents, sometimes permanently. It’s easy to overlook that.
SoftTalker•2mo ago
Putting the land to its most efficient use isn't possible if all you're allowed to build is a two-story detached single family house.
ecshafer•2mo ago
Tanoc•2mo ago
The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.
storf45•2mo ago
ransom1538•2mo ago
ryandrake•2mo ago
OGEnthusiast•2mo ago
That seems pretty reasonable to me actually? When housing is so supply-constrained, any subsidies/incentives/bonuses/etc. will be captured by the owner of the scarcest asset (real estate). Building more housing at this point seems like it should be a P0 priority before anything else.
Eextra953•2mo ago
usaar333•2mo ago
And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...