This is fantastic! I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential. Families who were previously in poverty because the mom would struggle to pay for childcare to work can now have assurance kids are ok while the mom can pursue jobs, start her own small business (huge chunk of businesses are small businesses ran by women) and prosper. If you pose your child’s safety vs another dollar, most parents would vote for their children. But if the children are taken care of, parents can give the economy their best and the taxes paid and GDP gained will pay back for the expense manyfold.
Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare. Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers. This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
There's two things I think you've overlooked. One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits. Additionally, when you don't have means testing, the bureaucracy is a lot more straightforward and politicians can't mess with it by effectively cutting the program by increasing the administrative burden.
> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.
This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.
I addressed your second point in another comment. If voters thought there was a societal advantage to financially encourage stay-at-home parenthood with a subsidy, I'd be open to listen to the pros and cons of that, too, but that's kind of a separate issue. This one is about easing the burden for those who already pay for professional childcare, including those on the margin.
The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(
It's not a crab bucket mentality. Subsidizing one group that competes in the same markets (e.g. only dual income families, who compete with single income families for housing in desirable areas to raise kids) actually increases costs for the unsubsidized group. It doesn't just make them relatively worse off, but absolutely worse off. It shifts the margin of who can afford a single family lifestyle, all else equal.
Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.
My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
The number of people in this thread workshopping their libertarian edge cases on an item of immediate importance strongly suggests the crab bucket. The comments don't reflect an understanding of the situation people are in or a grasp of the dynamics that led to it.
How is advocating for a larger unconditional child credit libertarian? As someone else in the thread pointed out, it's effectively UBI for children. It's literally advocating for more people to receive government subsidies. It's not even a crazy proposal since we already have a refundable child tax credit, so it's a matter of making it bigger.
Anything that might lead more towards decentralizing societal structure away from the state and quasi-state subsidized institutions back towards family units is considered "libertarian" on HN. Truly universal childcare "UBI" puts the power back into the hands of parents, rather than society taxing then lording over the head of parents as to which people are allowed to care for their children with it, just not funded in a libertarian manner. This is seen as a reduction in the power of the state which is a libertarian aim.
So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.
> One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits.
It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it and why is that a better place than where this policy is currently drawing it?
If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.
Yes, but that should be the point. Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. Subsidies fail these conditions. On what grounds should we delegate nonpublic goods/services be provided by the government and not the private sector?
The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
I’m unable to get the electric car tax credit for this year because my income is too high. However I’m likely to be laid off next year. Seems like I should get the benefit as my group status will change.
Childless people are free to start businesses to provide services that can take advantage of those rebates.
The argument you’re making in general is a valid one about subsidies, it’s a weird argument to make regarding children since having children is the only way society survives. Unless your claim is that we’re overpopulated but generally people in developed countries are not reproducing, and a meaningful part of that does appear to be the cost.
So the answer is that this specific subsidy is net beneficial as we want to make it easier for people to have and raise kids, not least of which because it produces better adults when those kids grow up and makes society healthier.
This is a great point, and the obvious answer is the government should provide zero subsidies or welfare programs. Every single program creates moral hazard and deadweight loss. Iterate your question to conclusion, and you will arrive there.
What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.
Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.
I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.
This strikes me as part of the disease of thinking like a tax payer and not a citizen. It's about the service/resource availability, not the money. And your system seems to create more perversion than what you're reacting to - a bunch of people keeping score to make sure they get theirs.
In AZ we offer ESA to homeschoolers, vouchers to charter or private school kids, and then normal tuition free public schools.
That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.
I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.
+1 This whole mentality of voucher system is selfish.
Even if we consider it as an "efficiency" problem, it is far cheaper for a person to be paid to take care of N children (where N is not too large), rather than have the have the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field, take care of just their children.
It’s not any more selfish than wanting subsidy for childcare. A voucher system is about choice. Parents get to have some financial assistance to make it possible for them to stay at home and be with their kids, or to provide their children with experiences that aren’t just sitting in the daycare center’s room. If they want to do things differently, why shouldn’t they be able to? Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
> the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field
Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids. And their qualifications in some other field doesn’t mean that working that field is better for them or their kids or the country. Having strong family structures and time together is pretty valuable.
If I as a taxpayer am going to subsidize someone else's activity, then why shouldn't I get a say in how they perform that activity?
If it costs $100/child at a daycare facility, but $200/child for someone to be a stay-at-home parent, and you're asking me, a random taxpayer, to pay for one of those for someone else, from a financial perspective I will likely prefer to pay for the former.
Now, I personally don't get to decide where tax dollars go, but I could easily imagine there are enough people with this preference that it could influence public policy.
Having said that, if it's actually significantly better for a child to have a SAH parent, I might change my tune. (My mother was a SAHM, and I think that was great for us growing up.)
The ask isn’t for more for the parents who stay at home, it’s for the equal amount.
In your system you’ve created a messed up incentive where parents are better off just sending the kid to the daycare and having the mom sit at home and do absolutely nothing.
> Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
I generally agree with you, but often the reason that these programs work economically is that those who don't choose to use them still contribute. There are (at least) three different categories: (1) caregivers who will care for their child themselves regardless of whether or not free care is available elsewhere, (2) caregivers who will find care elsewhere regardless of the cost, and (3) caregivers who will make use of free care if available, or otherwise, care for their child themselves.
I think the group (1) has a tendency to be higher income. It's certainly not true of everyone in that group, but I would wager that a significant number of people in that group do not need the financial assistance. Those people not using the free resource, but still contributing to funding it is what makes it economically viable.
Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.
"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.
People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.
> Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids.
Are they really though? I mean, I was raised by mine, and I've done well enough for myself, so that system can't be too bad, and most of the rest of humanity has also been raised by parents, for since... before there were humans. But if we look at this from first principles, it doesn't actually make sense. First, we let just about any random pairing of two humans, one of which has a uterus, can be a parent. Think of the most average person you know, then realize that half of everyone is dumber than them. Then put them with someone else that's just as dumb. Now give them a baby. And then add sleep deprivation on top of that. Seriously, it's a wonder that the human race has managed to survive this long.
Experience is another thing. Even the most talented brilliant person needs to practice to reach their full potential. Raising a child as a skill is no exception. So we're gonna have absolute amateurs each raise a child, and then, most likely, throw all that learning and experience they did away and not have 10 more. Practice makes perfect, so let's not do that.
What sort of training do we give parents before and during their parenthood? Before we send people off to do a job, non-stop for 18 years, how much training do we give them? Four dedicated years of college with plenty of lab and field work? Not in the slightest. Parents are expected to fund their own education for this job.
Finally, the incentive structure is misaligned. Children don't make any financial sense, since the passage of child labor laws. Don't get me wrong, those laws are a good thing! But from an economic intellectual standpoint, it doesn't make sense to fuck up your life like that. Birth rates in the developed world reflect this. It's obviously a problem though, because children are our future and without them, humanity dies out in a generation. So omg holy shit, have kids. Societally, we need them. Society's only allegiance is to it continuing, and it doesn't without kids. Unfortunately they can't show an ROI in a single quarter, so we'll have to figure out a better mechanism for it, but for something so important, our future, shouldn't we want our best and brightest people on the problem? Yet we don't spend rationally. In the US, the school shooting industry (what schools spend on security in response to school shootings) is a multi-billion dollar industry. That money would be better spent on counselors and on the teachers. But back to my point, we'd rather have unpaid amateurs raise children on their off hours, instead of hiring professionals to do it? And make them pay for it as well? Make that make sense!
The failure modes are known. Children get molested, abused, killed. Raised wrong. Those are corner cases, for sure, but I wouldn't argue that those parents are qualified to raise kids.
Still, that's how we've always done it, and holy shit kids are cute, and you love yours, so of course we think parents are qualified to take care of kids, but we don't actually do any qualification except in the worst cases that we know about. Everyone knows somebody that knows somebody that had a bad childhood and didn't get the government called on them though.
Children being raised by parents we assume are qualified is how we always done it, so the system works well enough, because humanity hasn't ended. But if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it that way.
Good government policies generally avoid step functions otherwise you get perverse incentives.
For example, if you lose too many benefits when you get a job, it can easily make getting a job yield negative expected value, this is bad because often it stunts future career potential.
There may be families that cannot quite afford to be a stay-at-home mom even though they want to. Providing the waiver also increases the overall fairness. In rural areas there are generally far fewer childcare options, so this becomes a benefit that accrues to those that live in cities. Not very fair.
My house has never been on fire, should I get a tax rebate for never needing service from the fire department?
Government services exist to help people who need them. The idea that government services need to have the same net effect on every citizen is unusually popular in the US and is part of the reason we have worse government services than our peer nations.
Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.
The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
>Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.
The same is true for things like childcare and education. Improving outcomes for the next generation doesn't only benefit them and their parents, it improves the entire society.
>The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
You're just debating whether "everyone gets the same" is a better definition of "fair" than "everyone gets what they need". The only way for the government to satisfy the former without UBI (which I would support) is for the government to offer extremely limited services. That's the situation we're in. Because as I have said in another comment, the same argument that applies to stay at home parents applies to childless people so offering any childcare support is unfair according to the "everyone gets the same" definition.
Need is ill-defined. People have all kinds of different ideas for what they need.
I think it's worth considering what has significant majority support. For example I believe it's something like 80%+ support some kind of childcare subsidy or tax credit. Some childless probably make up the 20% just as some would prefer not to have a fire brigade.
At that level of support just pass the subsidy / tax credit and let the families figure out how to apply it (paid daycare or homecare).
This is more like saying you'll get a tax rebate if you move from your family home you built with your bare hands into a megacorp built condo complex of equal value and fire risk.
In most of those other households, it's highly probable that they wish they could have a stay-at-home-parent but can't afford it. A small payment can help nudge people over the line where it suddenly becomes financially viable. A voucher type solution would also work great for families that would also prefer to e.g. hire a private nanny instead of sending their child to daycare.
Also, stay at home mums often like to sometimes be able to use child care facilities. I doubt they feel cheated that they don't use it on the majority of days they prefer to spend with their kids...
But why not let them go to child care on those days, get those reimbursed, but also use the funds for other things (like supplies for raising kids at home, or to pay for other activities you take them to that aren’t just daycare)?
Because the point of subsidising care is to remove cost barriers to parents getting back into work or dealing with other stuff or socialising kids in a day care environment, not to turn parenting into a profit centre
Why would providing vouchers turn parenting into a profit center? That’s a cynical way to portray one side of this when you probably don’t take the same harsh view of the other side. The point of subsidizing care isn’t to get parents “back into work”. It’s to help people raise children. That’s it. You’re gatekeeping what this is for as a way to justify unnecessary centralization and a lack of choice where choice is possible.
Providing vouchers to pay for daycare doesn't turn parenting into a profit centre. Providing parents with $12k per child per annum which they can either spend on daycare or anything else they want if they don't need daycare does (and has the opposite effect of the current policy: it keeps the opportunity cost of daycare the same and lowers the relative value of going back to work)
I'm still lost as to why it's OK for daycares to be taxpayer subsidized profit centers but it's bad for a parent to receive the subsidies instead because some other parent may hypothetically be turning a profit on the kid if they just feed them pork and beans and stuff them into a closet.
I'm still lost as to why you think taxpayers need to pay people who don't need free stuff for not using the free stuff? I mean, if parenting during the daytime is so unpleasant or expensive parents need a $12k subsidy to stay at home, they can just use the daycare... right?
So your position is what, the people who currently weren't getting free daycare don't need it because they were already getting by? You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it.
I'm willing to accept that position, I'm not necessarily for free childcare, only believe that if childcare is to be free it should follow the child. I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child. What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back -- trying to track to which caregiver the money goes instead of just providing the resources for the child and let the parents decide what works best for their family.
> You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it.
Nope, I'm the one explicitly not ignoring the major rationale behind providing universal free childcare, which is that it removes a massive disincentive to using childcare (it's expensive), with the result that parents are less likely to work or take on other responsibilities some of the time and less likely to take their kids to nurseries to help socialise them.
People who mostly look after their own kids still benefit from the free care when they do need it, and those who would prefer to look after their children 24/7 regardless are essentially unaffected[1], unless of course they are the sort who upon seeing others enjoying a free lunch, become preoccupied by the thought the food supplier should probably pay them for having a full stomach.
[1]I mean, someone's paying a little more tax at the margin, but that's spread over a lot more people and the stay at home mums barely feature...
> I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child.
You don't understand why daycare centre employees would like to earn a living? Or you don't understand that paying some trained professionals to look after your kids in a big building might cost a bit more than staying at home with them and maybe buying an extra meal or two?
I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
> What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back
Nope. Actually, when it comes to yanking money and telling people they can get the cash back if they do something (have an infant kid and quit their job to look after it) that sounds rather more like your proposition of giving indiscriminate cash handouts to parents. I am pointing out that subsidising the amount of third party childcare parents actually want to consume requires considerably less tax money to be yanked away and has a different set of incentives.
> I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
The fact that you argue for daycare workers to be paid but not parents is honestly astonishing.
“No, we will not give you $100/day for your kid but we will happily give $100/day to BabyCorp to watch your kid” is a really fucked up policy stance unless you explicitly want to break children apart from their families. If that’s the goal, just explicitly say it.
> The fact that you argue for daycare workers to be paid but not parents is honestly astonishing.
I think it's even more astonishing that you are arguing that it's normal for parents to have so little love for their own child they should bill the government for time spent with them.
If my stay-at-home mum was like that, I'd definitely have preferred the full time daycare. It was even possible for her to send me to daycare some of the time without breaking the family up!
They are arguing the exact opposite, that parents love their kids enough they might move mountains to take care of the kids themselves if only they get get a bit of the taxes the state is sucking dry from their family back, enabling it to economically happen.
>Nope, I'm the one explicitly not ignoring the major rationale behind providing universal free childcare, which is that it removes a massive disincentive to using childcare (it's expensive), with the result that parents are less likely to work or take on other responsibilities some of the time and less likely to take their kids to nurseries to help socialise them.
The major incentive for providing childcare subsidies to everyone but stay at home parents (who now have net negative in this whole scenario post-tax) is to disincentive stay at home parents. If the idea was just to aid with childcare the aid with go with the child. You're purposefully excluding stay-at-homes from the definition of childcare, which is false and disingenuous.
>You don't understand why daycare centre employees would like to earn a living? Or you don't understand that paying some trained professionals to look after your kids in a big building might cost a bit more than staying at home with them and maybe buying an extra meal or two?
No I don't understand why daycare employees would want to "earn a living" any more or less than anyone else. I also don't understand why the fact their expenses are higher means a larger value was provided. If I dig for gold for 10 hours with an expensive machine and you dig for 1 with your bare hands, and we both end up with the same amount of gold I haven't created more value than you.
>I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
All well and good until you have men with guns showing up to tax the cash and force that incentive, the same men magically saying it is childcare when anyone that the parent does it. Goal here is clear, destroy the family unit as equal playing field in consideration of what is considered childcare, and put childcare corporation on a pedestal instead.
>Nope. Actually, when it comes to yanking money and telling people they can get the cash back if they do something (have an infant kid and quit their job to look after it) that sounds rather more like your proposition of giving indiscriminate cash handouts to parents. I am pointing out that subsidising the amount of third party childcare parents actually want to consume requires considerably less tax money to be yanked away and has a different set of incentives.
This is essentially the argument against taxation -- I actually 100% agree with you here and it's part of why I'm an ancap who is staunchly against this yanking. It is the argument for eliminating all child subsidies / welfare / public schooling which I think would be the absolute best thing for children we could possibly do. However if we have them, I'd like to see them apply equally rather than just payments to places like your proposed "profit-centers" of childcare corps. I will say you've handily played into the hands of the intertwining of the rich business owners with government to enrich themselves at the expense (via threat of violence of armed revenue collection agents) of stay at home moms.
> The major incentive for providing childcare subsidies to everyone but stay at home parents (who now have net negative in this whole scenario post-tax) is to disincentive stay at home parents. If the idea was just to aid with childcare the aid with go with the child. You're purposefully excluding stay-at-homes from the definition of childcare, which is false and disingenuous.
The objective of providing free childcare to anyone that wants it is to enable people to avail themselves of free childcare. Just like free firefighting and police services; it's not "false and disingenuous" that I don't get to define myself as emergency services and invoice the government for my services if I manage to keep my home crime and fire-free without their assistance. Nor is my tax bill and other people getting their fires put out at taxpayer expense a disincentive towards using a fire extinguisher if I think I can handle it myself.
> No I don't understand why daycare employees would want to "earn a living" any more or less than anyone else. I also don't understand why the fact their expenses are higher means a larger value was provided. If I dig for gold for 10 hours with an expensive machine and you dig for 1 with your bare hands, and we both end up with the same amount of gold I haven't created more value than you.
Value is also determined by the fact that stay-at-home mums are willing to look after their own kids for free, and childcare professionals are not. I'm not sure why a self-professed ancap is having such a great difficulty understanding that markets enable people and companies to charge to look after others' kids (with or without government intervention), but do not enable people to charge for looking after their own.
As for parents who want to earn a living as much as childcare staff, now they can go and earn that living without having to pay most of their salary to someone else to look after their kids...
> All well and good until you have men with guns showing up to tax the cash and force that incentive, the same men magically saying it is childcare when anyone that the parent does it. Goal here is clear, destroy the family unit as equal playing field in consideration of what is considered childcare, and put childcare corporation on a pedestal instead.
In between the tedious cliches, you seem to be ignoring the fact that childcare that costs $1k per month isn't on a "level playing field" with childcare that doesn't. It's not putting something on a pedestal to remove the bill.
Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...
> It is the argument for eliminating all child subsidies / welfare / public schooling which I think would be the absolute best thing for children we could possibly do
The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?! Sorry you managed to complete nearly two whole posts of pointless nitpicking in the guise of being pro-family and then you hit me with this!?
I mean, I get the people that think it's so important to incentivise stay-at-home parenting or to avoid any child being even slightly poor that the government should pay every infant's parent at least as much as daycare centres currently cost... that just happens to be very expensive. Don't get self professed ancaps who freely admit they don't care how/if the kids get looked after arguing the system that costs the taxpayer significantly less and doesn't disincentivise participating in labour markets is a worse one than the alternative of handing out max_childcare_costs to every parent...
>The objective of providing free childcare to anyone that wants it is to enable people to avail themselves of free childcare.
The objective of excluding the parent from that has been made pretty clear at this point, which is a deliberate choice to destroy the family unit.
>Value is also determined by the fact that stay-at-home mums are willing to look after their own kids for free, and childcare professionals are not.
The free market value of taking care of 1 child under some arbitrary standard of care is not meaningfully impacted by the fact an arbitrary person might do it for free, anymore than the fact I might be willing to search for gold for free reduces the value of gold. It will have some effect in aggregate, but that effect would impact the whole market so is meaningless in the context of differentiating a universal payment.
>Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...
It indeed does make it easier to decide to work if you're now getting taxed to cover $12K per child of every child in the whole state going to daycare, and you get none of that for your own kid unless you put them into daycare yourself because magically your own childcare doesn't count.
>The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?
I said from the beginning I wanted a waiver. i.e. reduction of taxes. I would put taxes at 0% and free up lots of jobs and returned tax money to low-earning families so they could afford more for their children, which I think is the best thing possible for them. With the added effect they can spend that money freely rather than having a state lord over them what one public school they can spend it on or lording over them with their own stolen money what childcare provider they can use.
The reason why I would argue for equal subsidies if they're provided is I believe either no tax, or equal subsidies is the most liberty minded solution. The solution where the state forcibly taxes and then lords the money over you depending on whom provides the childcare is the lowest-liberty solution of all of them. That is why I'm a temporary ally of the policy alternative I reference.
Got it, family units are destroyed by kids spending some time at nurseries. Free market values aren't determined by what the free market actually pays for services (absolutely nothing for parenting your own kid, potentially a lot more for looking after someone else's) but by weird analogies to gold (children of course also being a commodity). Parents are of course, famously transactional in their relationships with children, with the key priority being maximising how much the government spends on their care. If daycare is subsidised absolutely everyone will claim the maximum amount (just like the alternative you propose!) because otherwise all the burden of paying for it will fall upon stay-at-home mums (I dunno, maybe the income tax on their massive parenting salaries?) and not spread across the wider taxpaying base, the highest paying segments of which generally aren't parents of infants. Putting up taxes is bad, but putting up everyone's taxes much more to subsidise -checks notes- people who enjoy looking after children so much they'd prefer it to free daycare is better. But the best possible thing for low-earning families is for them to have to lose all benefits and pay for care, schooling, medical bills etc, because if there's anyone that pays more into the system than they get out of it, it's low income families...
Not gonna lie, if it requires this much compounded nonsense to construct an argument against childcare vouchers, the case for it is much better than I thought :)
The act of subsidizing childcare doesn't only help stay-at-home parents work, it forces everyone in the market to work more to maintain their same standard of living.
Flooding the market with new labor increases the supply
Against a fixed demand, this lowers wages. So everyone not getting the subsidy feels pressure from stagnating wages plus the increased tax burden.
Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes.
All this does is modify the equilibrium of supply and demand in the market such that those not receiving the subsidies (or evem those not receiving as much subsidies as others) are negatively impacted through lifestyle discrimination.
> Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes
Let's not make the absurd assumption that parents continuing their careers and more daycare centres in operation must be net negative for economic growth.
Even if that was the case, the alternative proposal to subsidise parents equally large amounts whether they use it to pay for childcare or not would result in a larger tax burden paid for from a smaller economic pie.
> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it?
This is rather noble of you, but the reason is obvious. If the playing field were "levelled" then you wouldn't have to be lucky. It is all well and good that you are lucky, but there is a certain population who want to emulate your choice but are unable to, because they are missing precisely the marginal amount that the childcare provision costs. It is a political choice to say that those people should not be able to pursue home-care of the children in order that we can avoid giving out a rebate.
Right. I agree, but I think you are appealing to generosity when it works just as well if you appeal to greed and selfishness.
If I'm a parent who does not intend to take advantage of the program and therefore not to get any benefit directly, and I assume the program is done well and not rushed, I could reasonably expect:
- More parents able to be in the work force (immediately)
- Better metrics for the young children entering. Especially for at risk.
- Savings from less crime in the future.
- Higher attainment of students when they enter the work force later.
- Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)
My understanding so far is that this leads to spending savings in addition to QOL of life improvements. And that's just for me. I want to live with less crime and less tax liability.
Asking for additional waivers imo just increases the cost in areas that will not as directly achieve the benefits of the program as stated. The only reason to ask for it is as a negotiation tactic.
I think the most important thing is to focus on the quality of the program and make sure the resources are there. And to make sure opportunities persist to prevent "fade out". I think that might have been the difference between Oklahoma's success in pre-k vs a program in Tennessee.
> Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)
Why probably not?
Childcare before primary school is a huge expense in the US, I think the largest for a healthy kid, around 24k$ per year where I live, so basically every other child is another 24k$ to the budget, or one parent not working. With this approach, having 2 or 3 children is more feasible, and the money saved from universal childcare could be in part invested for college or the child's future.
Let's go with this (I pay a little more than $24k/yr/kid for care now).
Does the influx of gov mandated childcare centers reduce the annual expense for parents?
If so, it does so at the cost to the current workers by reducing their salaries.
If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year.
That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.
The benefit is lower wages for those competing against the new laborers and likely higher government tax inflows?
> If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.
Sure, you have that short term impact, but it seems NM society has chosen to take on the burden for this.
Long term impact for this measure however is worth it, as the state children will be better educated, and will commit less crimes, at least that's what research says. So long term you will have more taxpayers, and maybe hopefully have to spend less in security.
Why wouldn't you want your friends to better be able to afford what you have, by getting an equal value stipend to stay at home if you're for universal childcare? There are many families that might be only one or two tuitions away from being able to stay at home with their child like they had wished, and assigning the waiver/voucher to the child instead of to the daycare can make that happen.
And no it's not a free lunch. If stay-at-home in a family isn't reimbursed, they are actually worse off, because now they have an additional tax they are paying that they did not have before. So now even more people like you who wanted a parent to stay at home are driven out of it because their family budget comes upon this tax.
Let it go. Everyone gets some tax benefits that others don't. Childless people get many fewer social benefits than people with children. We don't need to quibble over microgrievances.
We shouldn't provide any welfare services. Then we will all be equal. For as much as you Elsa folks quible about people being against giveaways, what is so harmful about not giving thigs away involuntarily?
I'm not sure I follow, but I'm open to being wrong. The point of this subsidy is not to encourage people to move from paid-childcare to stay-at-home. That's a totally separate economic decision. The point of it is to ease/eliminate the burden of those who require paid-childcare.
If we think there is a societal advantage to financially incentivize parents to stay-at-home with a subsidy, I'd be open to looking at the cost/benefit, but it's a different issue.
And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted. Not every tax dollar I spend needs to come back to me in the form of a benefit.
> And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted.
This seems like an unrelated consideration though. You may be significantly worse off. Maybe the government that provides this raises taxes considerably to make this work. Or maybe they take on crippling debt. Maybe their credit rating goes down.
So if I pack my kids lunch but other kids get a "free" lunch I'm worse off? Yes there is no "free lunch" I'm paying a tax for something I don't need. The comment you are replying to already anticipates this. How is it not the same argument? Your budget comment also puzzles me. What if my existing family budget is put under stress by the "free lunch tax" so now I'm even further away from being able to pack my own lunch? How is it different? Because it's a "new" tax? You can make the same argument for any tax then. At the end of the day are your children better or worse off if their future fellow citizens are growing up under roofs that can't afford childcare or healthcare or food? For someone that seems to know enough about costs and incentives and tradeoffs you seem to have quite a constrained view. Also, I'm curious about your waivers claim re costs because I would think given the scenario you laid out that would make the program more expensive. Your taxed for things other people use more than you. That's what society is. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people obsess over this as if they are being personally violated when really it is often just greed in the face of the common good.
It's very convenient that it is greed when the stay at home mom wants an equal voucher, but not greed when a mom joins a capitalist for-profit enterprise for whatever wage she can avail herself of with the childcare bill footed by everyone else. Which is precisely what we are discussing.
Your argument smacks of insincerity due to its limited scope of viewing SAHMs as moms providing childcare.
1/ You haven't mentioned how that SAHM must get a cooking credit, healthcare, retirement or house management credit or anything else in the litany of jobs required outside of immediate childcare and costs incurred by simply existing as a woman. Just a voucher for the hours, I assume, at which childcare would be open and none of the other hours
2/ A SAHP (thats stay at home parent) should be incentivized by raising wages and allowing life to be more affordable but your argument seems to be very focused on "moms" and "capitalist enterprises" and does not consider the reality that when SAHMs were more economically viable, it was not viable for all families.
Make it a progressive tax then? The point was many people can afford to help others to make society better for all. But you only want to pay taxes for what you're personally interested in? If you think stay at home needs to be prioritized in some way, as another comment mentioned, that's a separate argument. You are also relying on scenarios that don't even sound plausible. If someone can barely afford stay at home and this tax makes it that painful for them, then make it more progressive. Then again I'm not sure they are equivalent. At the end of the day a majority deciding something like this is in the common interest and you having a problem because you won't personally take advantage of it sounds like greed to me. No one should be going broke because of this tax. If you think capitalist mommy is making too much while you foot the bill then wouldn't the remedy be to tax her more? Are you worried about people who can't afford the tax or do you just resent some people for getting societal benefits while also making more than you?
I'm not talking about "prioritizing" stay at homes, I'm talking about just giving them the same thing the company/entity that would be taking care of their kid would get paid for doing it. I'm speaking of removing the prioritization for commercial childcare.
Semantic games. At the end of the day if x is prioritized more than y and you want x and y to be equal you do want a relative boost in the priority of y. So fine. As I said I'm not sure they are equivalent or how this specific objection can't be applied to any other tax in a way that feels implausible. Should I get a voucher if I pack my kids lunch? Why are we "prioritizing" commerical food preparation?
Yes. And no. The gov gives the child X$ per week/month/year. The child parents use that money to take care of the child.
Society benefit from children that are well taken care of. Mechanisms to ensure that they are well taken care of are needed. Well funded daycare centers are one of the mechanism. A well funded household with a parent/grand parent/uncle is another one. In both case, an agency is in place to ensure the wellness level of the child.
It is bad faith reasoning. If you imagine a person that does not want women to participate in the workforce but wants to express that in a way that doesn’t sound repugnant, it is pretty easy to see how someone would come up with that.
The way you can tell that it’s bad faith is by looking at the context that “pay women to stay out of the workforce” gets brought up. In this case it is framed as an alternative to providing childcare, but those two ideas have nothing to do with each other. As a society we could do both. The “pay women to stay out of the workforce” or “pay for childcare” dichotomy is completely made up, and folks that engage in that particular type of make-believe are either profoundly intellectually lazy or being intentionally disingenuous.
Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home?
This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table.
The conversation on this table is:
Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not own, an apt and live, not save for the future. Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
We cannot continue to expect people with choices to have children given this economic situation.
Trust me. You want people to continue having children, and you'd prefer them to be positive additions to society, for your own well-being in old age.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear initially. The point is that women should not stay home. Yes, this is “fully gendered” because reality is fully gendered. Far and away the majority of childcare is performed by women. Always has been. Always will be.
The emphasis on jobs over children as where we want women’s energy, time, and attention to go is what is being demonstrated by this policy. We will pay you to leave your children with others. We will not pay you to take care of your children.
Why anybody thinks this will result in more children being born is beyond me. Sure, it might make it “easier” in some sense to have children, but what it teaches is job > children, and that is going to result in people learning to deprioritize children. As intended.
"We want women's energy and time" seems to indicate "not women" want women's energy in time.
If you will not pay "women" to take care of "their children" rather than, say..."the future of society" or "our children" then women will not have a child.
And that is exactly what you're seeing happen. Women worked in all times. Every single time period you can think of. Population is dropping because
a/ we have rights as women and are outstripping men on every measurable term within just a couple generations of access
b/men are not stepping up to create something more equitable
Men have been offered the chance to step up and change the current (and yes its current, not a "natural state" of affairs) dynamic.
The idea that you're striking on is defining my life for me and quite frankly, with your benefit in first position.
> Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
This is a major statement, and I don't think it's fully qualified.
Why have childcare expenses imcreased by 30% in the past few years? There should be an arbitrage opportunity if costs have stayed fixed. If costs have increased, is it due to general economic pressures or increased regulatory burden? If the former, wages should catch up (and flooding the market with additional labor likely will exert downward pressue market wages). If the latter, then why on earth are we passing such nonsense regulation?
In either case, moving out of a major metro is always an option.
According to a quick google and the census:
|| Approximately 3 in 4 Americans (or about 86%) live in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA), with the percentage of the U.S. population in these areas reaching an all-time high. As of 2024, nearly 294 million people—or about 86% of the total population—resided in a metro area, a trend that continues to grow.
If we think the wage differential will keep up in less populated areas, that is no longer occurring either. We do not live in a perfect capitalist system and many trades, activities and services are given benefits and protections for a variety of reasons.
There are other places - outside of the US - that have provided this tax credit. Its not shameful to learn from other countries and adopt things that are going well and are beneficial both to the freedom of people and the economy.
Getting all children early education, which has been shown to have huge effects later on in academic performance (better) and criminality (less).
Let's say college is optional for the individual, as the child/teen decides.
Why is primary/middle/secondary school free and public, but daycare/preschool not? The child can't decide for itself, and there is data showing that having early education benefits everyone.
Does this provide education or care? Being in childcare in and of itself is not correlated with better outcomes. Only high-quality care produces such results, and greater hours in non-family-member childcare results in long-term negative outcomes in for example impulsivity and risk-taking, regardless of the quality of the care.
Exactly. If the incentive was to take care of children, the money would go with the child whether they are taken care of by a stay at home or someone the state can tax income from.
100%. This is also why it makes sense to have money move with the child regardless of whether they’re in public schools or home schooled or at a private school.
If I'm already benefiting from a new boiler, I don't need another new boiler just to get the $5000 tax credit. This is silly. There are benefits to being a working parent vs a stay at home parent and if you have access to stay at home care you simply don't need it.
This is like getting mad that my workplace offers pet insurance when I have no pets so I demand the money anyway. Or demanding a trophy for not participating in a competitive sport.
Of course it affects your situation. It’s paid for from taxes so it takes away from other things you as a taxpayer could have, right? But also if the goal is to incentivize raising children, someone who wants to raise their child in a family centric way rather than outsourcing it should have help too right?
But leaving those arguments aside, I also think that only subsidizing daycare is too one size fits all, just like with public schools. If people want to raise their kids differently, they should be able to get assistance. Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
> It’s paid for from taxes so it takes away from other things you as a taxpayer could have, right?
I don't expect every tax dollar I spend to come back to me in the form of a direct benefit.
> Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
I would be 100% open to this sort of taxpayer-funded educational enrichment for families who can't afford it themselves, depending on the usual criteria, like how well-run/efficient it is and so on.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
It’s a red state, so the goal was probably to waste as much welfare money as possible, while also reducing benefits.
They’re doing this on the federal level now. Most popular government programs have been cut or sabotaged, and as a result the debt is increasing by $4T.
> Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved
It's more complicated than that. Of the 6352 people who applied for TANF, 2306 dropped out during the process. Then of the 4046 TANF applicants remaining, only 2.6% tested positive for drugs. The vast majority of media coverage focused on the 2.6% being less than the ~8% drug-use rate in the general population.
What we don't know is of the people who dropped out, was this due to unintended reasons (privacy concerns, the inconvenience of the drug test, missing deadlines) or due to the intended reason (people self-selecting out because they knew they would test positive and become ineligible for 12 months). We'll never know the real breakdown, but it's misleading to say "it cost more than they saved".
The state tries to take kids away from people who use drugs, so I would expect custodial parents to be below the average drug use of the general population.
> An internal document about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, caseloads stated that the drug testing policy, at least from July through September, did not lead to fewer cases. “We saw no dampening effect on the caseload,” the document said.
> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.
It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling problem, they will probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with a paying their rent problem, they will also probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash. And then everybody's rents will go up because families with children have more capability to pay.
Nothing is ever a perfect system, but there are many more things wrong with the current system than concerns about the equity BETWEEN different working class families in different situations. Some of those dysfunctions will happily consume most of an incrementalist policy solution to an arbitrary problem. Direct provision or vouchered provision of necessary goods and services has a lot of minor problems, but it happily mitigates our ability to let one problem eat an unrelated solution.
In Poland, they have a "universal child benefit" that pays a stipend for every child you have.
They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.
From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.
So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.
The US has a similar thing with the child tax credit. It looks like Poland pays out the equivalent of about 220 a month while the child tax credit pays the equivalent of $180 per month. If you only count the refundable portion it is $140. Relative to the cost of living its worse, but the concept seems similar.
> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay ...
By your own argument, this policy dilutes the value New Mexico / Feds were prior giving to the poorer parents who met the means testing New Mexico used before, then, no? Because this isn't the beginning of "free" childcare in NM, they are just expanding it beyond the prior poverty-line times 'X" means testing.
Ergo per your logic "real outcome would be reduced benefits" to the poorer parents who already had subsidized childcare.
Edit: accidently switched "childcare" to "healthcare" a few times, flipped back
"But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care."
And that's the argument against many of these policies - removal of the needs based testing. Odd to see you defend the policy on the very basis others attack it on.
I would very much be considered someone who doesn’t “need” the funding, but when deciding between having a 3rd child or just sticking with 2, I wasn’t comfortable enough to afford 3 in daycare and helping 3 through college. However, I expect my offspring to be significantly greater economic contributors to society than the average. It would have made sense for society to fund my childcare to incentivize me to populate the earth.
>Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?
"it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care". Looking at data like 77% of US workers would face financial difficulty if a paycheck was delayed by just one week. I would imaging % of people with kids who don’t need it for child care is fairly tiny.
The real reason this is “bad” is because the policy actually being implemented is, as the GP comment demonstrates, to get women into the workforce. This requires the goal to be getting them out of the home away from their children. Thus, you must relatively penalize mothers who stay home and care for their children, which is what this policy does. Of course, it is worse for children, worse for families, worse for mothers, worse for just about everything except “business.”
Edit to add: It is only better for the business and the economy short term, because ultimately it results in a lower birth rate and below replacement level fertility is the main problem we currently have for the near-future economy
Nobody's being targeted for additional tax. But correct, benefits aren't being spread evenly across the population. That's how pretty much all social benefits work.
Hell, think about how childless people must feel about this. Or the child tax credit. Nothing is "perfectly fair", but sometimes public policy is good enough.
Childless people are getting the best deal of anyone. They get new social security payers with a better invested upbringing, all for paying out a pittance and offloading most of the cost onto parents -- all the meanwhile having their social security payout almost completely untied to making the investments needed to get their payment.
Childless people basically get their cake and eat it too under the social welfare scheme of most western countries, getting the benefits of children without having to deal with much of the drawbacks.
And yes, it hit the same political hurdles you'd expect. A Liberal-party aide helped lose the 2006 selection by saying parents would burn it on "beer and popcorn". He's still around as a consultant and professional trash-talking commentator. This is ironic considering how the party championed it's success after they (rightly) expanded the program.
That feels like an entirely separate policy. This one is about making sure small children have care, not whether or not people deserve a minimum guaranteed income
I'm not the user you're asking but the same logic holds true for UBI, yes. The societies with the most effective social welfare programs do it via a robust and de-stigmatized social safety net. I think most of the common criticisms of UBI (it will make people lazy, its not fair, it will cause inflation etc) are silly, and I also generally support universal programs over means testing or exemptions. Still, I will be a skeptic until I see a somewhat large scale successful rollout of a UBI program beyond just studies and pilots.
Many of the Persian Gulf GCC nations essentially had a form of generous UBI since the early 80s. It has certainly made people far less enterprising and productive. Inflation hasnt happened since they import the vast majority of their requirements. It has led to increased religiosity etc since people are freed up to engage in religious activities all day long and don't necessarily have to develop skills like social competency or engage with others.
Many north African and middle eastern states tried to switch to democracy and that did not go as planned either, would that mean that democracy does not work?
Any policy (UBI or others) must take into account the state and potential of the country. Based on the Gulf state UBI example (if correct, I did not check) it would mean that with their initial conditions UBI will not result in developing skills (although, thinking of it, maybe their purpose of giving UBI was close to the one observed, their ruler don't strike me as very progressive).
In a world where we produced so much that we have caused climate change and mass extinction, I can't imagine people being less enterprising and productive being a truly bad thing.
A weird side-effect of this is UAE/Dubai, and to a lesser extent some of the other gulf states, have become far more open to relative free trade and immigration as a result now that the citizen's cake is assured and immigrants are not much a threat. Now Dubai is a burgeoning hub of relative "free trade" and international commerce, with pretty lax visa rules for people from surrounding more trade hostile countries to run a business in a more business friendly environment, in a region that prior was fairly impenetrable.
In the book 'Double Entry' the author explains that the guy who created GDP was actually in favor of having family caregiving and household activities accounted for in GDP. If that had happened, different world
This actually DOES occur at the margins, in some cases.
If you have a severely disabled child (who is on SSA), you often can get certified by the state and get paid as the caretaker. Then the action appears on the GDP.
More realistically here, there’s a limit to the funding any individual state can come up with to fund benefits. Tradeoffs have to be considered and increased workforce participation increases the tax receipts that fund these programs. It’s not much more complicated than that.
It's sometimes surprising to read a comment like this, which applies just common sense, basic math, and logic, instead of the typical online comment mixture of hysteria, panic, and portraying one's non-favorite "team" as a bunch of mustachio-twirling cartoon villains.
You read a lot of books about economics, history, and political science and suddenly everything starts to look like it's complicated. The recent trend of commentators shouting "it's actually not complicated" is troubling. I try to present commentary with some nuance and humility. I have a perspective, but I endeavor to leave room for the possibility that I don't have a full understanding or that my model of the world doesn't fit every set of circumstances.
I find it dubious that adding the people who don't find it financially feasible to use childcare to cover working hours will generate tax revenue to cover this due to the low income and low tax nature. Not to mention the addition of the cost from all the current paying families.
> I find it dubious that adding the people who don't find it financially feasible to use childcare to cover working hours will generate tax revenue to cover this due to the low income and low tax nature.
You can actually think through your belief. The announcement provides a concrete number: $12,000 per child. Do you generate $12k in tax revenue? Note that this means direct and indirect tax revenue, not only from your job and what your employer earns from your work but also with your own expenses that you can cover by having a job.
Yes, I understand that and still don't think that adds up. Things like SNAP for a family of 4 would be less than $12k per year. And that increased tax revenue would have to offset the currently working and paying families that will now use the program. We would have to wait for the experiment to conclude to see what the increased earnings for participants will be.
That's not the claim I'm making. Someone entering the workforce has tax implications for a local government far beyond their individual tax receipts and will increase their future earning potential.
You imply an overall net netral to net positive. I find it hard to believe that would total $12k per year. If there are complicated n-order effects, then perhaps you should call them out instead of saying it's not complicated.
> I find it hard to believe that would total $12k per year.
Again I didn't claim that. The tradeoff is generating some percentage of X benefit in economic activity vs some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger.
I fail to understand what value your initial comment holds. The grandparents of that comment was talking about financial feasibility of the program in the context of a proposed waiver. This necessarily implies that on-topic responses to that should be weighing financial feasibility of the program with and without the waiver. Your most recent comment seems to just be clarifying that your initial comment is just the same generalized explanation for the current expansion - expanding the benefit to the currently working higher earning parents where the return is unclear and logically dubious, thus providing some much lower percentage of X while X is much larger. The only way to claim what your comment is trying to is to also display some evidence that this current expansion will provide economic activity benefit beyond the previous program that had 4x poverty level means testing. Otherwise, it's simply "some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger" vs the same thing with X being even larger.
The idea of extending the program to pay people who aren't using the benefit directly sounds nice in theory but would cost way more and incentivizes people to not work. This necessarily makes the broader version of the program even more expensive than it appears at first. A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care. This offsets the cost a little. Giving essentially cash payments to people who stay at home has no such offset. So it is much more expensive and disincentivizes people working which might slightly offset the cost.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare
There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.
"A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care."
This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.
"and incentivizes people to not work"
This would only incentivize low income individuals to not work, which could actually be beneficial as it could drive a living wage increase in that labor segment if employers had to compete against the benefit.
>This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.
I don't think the benefit is even contingent on the parent working, and it definitely isn't contingent on the value of their current and discounted future earnings appreciation being greater than the cost of sending the kids to daycare. From what I can tell you can put the kid in daycare then lay on a beach if there is anything of that sort in the New Mexican desert.
I'm open to the argument that by certain measures "free" childcare leads to increased economic output, but they've certainly not crafted the program in a way I would expect someone with that aim to do it.
> There are many things that may be better overall, but because they're not financialized, they don't show up on GDP and so are deemed "worthless."
I think you're confusing GDP with a measure of worth or quality. It is not. Just because you can earn money doing double-shifts in a coal mine that doesn't make it better than spending the same time at a beach doing nothing.
I'm not sure there is equal value, in economic terms at least. A stay at home parent caring for 1-2 children comes at the opportunity cost of a full time worker, which would typically be a lot more than 12-24 thousand dollars this is saving them in childcare costs. On the flip side, a childcare worker in NM can care for the children of ~6+ such stay at home parents (depends on randomness of ages and number of children each had).
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
and these $12-24k are net dollars so the parents needs more like $20-40k of gross income to pay for it, but now they can have a small job or small business that nets them even as low as $15k and still come out ahead
In Sweden we value equality and everyone working. If someone is wealthy enough to have a stay-at-home parent it's their choice to do so, we shouldn't subsidize the rich.
It is good for children to go to a place where they learn to interact with others early. We give 480 days off to the parents to share (90 "mandatory" per parent), then they go to childcare.
Individualism breeds privileged shits, if you want your kid to be one of those then you pay out of your own pocket. We subsidize childcare so everyone can afford to work.
You don't subsidize the rich, yet you subsidize rich child care corporations (or high-level bureaucrats in the event it is public) at the expense of not subsidizing stay at home moms.
You don't want people paid for taking care of their children, but it's OK if other people are paid for taking care of their chidlren.
None of this makes sense. Especially not this false dichotomy that either you send your kids to daycare or they don't learn to interact with others early.
We live in different societies, yours is extremely on the individualism spectrum and ours is on the "common good" spectrum. We don't subsidize the childcare corporations here, we do what's best for society.
I might be wrong, but I believe in Sweden salaries are able to be publicly found. Find some high level people in the public or private childcares in your nation who are beneficiaries of these subsidies and then tell me how rich they are compared to the average stay at home mom.
There are barely any stay at home moms because it's socially detrimental, the ones who are are either social outcasts by lack of capability or religious oppression.
We should not subsidize stay at home moms or dad's because it's bad for society, if they can afford to do it or stretch their economy to do it for other reasons it's their bad choice, and we allow free choice even if it's bad, that's why cigarettes are still allowed.
I don't know who to look up, but if you have some suggestions I could look it up through ratsit.se
I appreciate your honesty, there are not many willing to admit it's really about viewing stay-at-home parents as morally deficient. I have no interest in refuting the argument, it might be true, merely to point out I think why we're having so much trouble getting straight answers is that the underlying motivation is going unspoken.
Depending on how they structure the childcare, women who want to stay with their kids can be childcare providers at one of the centers, so they take care of not just their kids but also others. Similar to the Israeli Kibbutz system.
One of the reasons to care for your own kids is you can give them individual attention. Unless you have so many kids that you are only caring for your own anyway your plan diverts their attention away to other kids (or those other kids get less attention)
The argument is that stay at home parents should get the same credit as childcare providers because they perform the same service to society. If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids. You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
> If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids.
I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.
> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.
If you're trying to be efficient, you could also put 100 kids in a room with an adult to do whatever as long as the adult can keep them alive, but most people would recognize that the services are not equivalent. It's not more efficient; it's lower quality.
That's literally the exact same argument. 100 being too many doesn't mean 1 is ideal. No one is saying there isn't some threshold beyond which quality drops, just that the threshold is higher than 1.
Your characterization of the service provided is "adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues". That sounds to me like a lower quality "service" than what e.g. my wife provides, which is actually raising them, teaching them, giving them emotional support, taking them on errands around town, etc. Even with your own kids it's way more difficult to give them as much attention when there's 1 vs 2, so I find the assertion that quality of care doesn't drop after 1 to be dubious as well.
> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults).
In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.
>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.
In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care.
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. An interesting one is that children who spend extensive time in daycare even end up less socially competent which is quite interesting since it runs contrary to one of the typical arguments in favor of daycare. But it's also not surprising if you think about it, because at home a child is getting vastly more attention and interaction than he would in daycare.
And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.
> You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur."
These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization.
> Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more.
You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly.
> Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on.
Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim.
Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).
I don't know if that's what they had in mind, but "stay at home mom" is probably not just men/women who solely watch their kid all day long. A full remote worker keeping their kid nearby would probably fit the same criteria, especially if the couple is both remote and they can split dealing with the chores.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
> With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed.
And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy. A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work. Is this really what you want? If it is the poor your care about why not subsidies just them?
I don't have a stated preferred policy here. I'm questioning if the post I replied to really preferred this policy.
Policy is a constant battle of unintended consequences. I clearly understand that nothing isn't immune from those consequences, and so I'm constantly adjusting my preferred policy trying to find the least bad compromise.
This isn't a perfect solution. If you want the most equitable then you go the UBI route. Otherwise you have to do fixes like this in order to make things better. Also you have to do the ROI on means testing
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
It does no such thing. If you could afford to be a stay-at-home mom before, this isn't going to make any significant difference to that.
Think of whether it would make sense if you applied your logic to other areas -- do public schools disincentivize people sending their kids to private schools? That would be absurd to say. Creating choice where there wasn't any before doesn't "disincentivize" anything. It gives people options to make the choices that are best for them.
I totally get the reasoning behind that, but the majority of women are not stay at home moms, and most families don’t have the resources to make it happen. Society is just not oriented to family creation, and both women and men (to a lesser extent) take a hit when they decide to start a family. The entire world is in a fertility crisis now that could easily endanger the very society we live in, with all the ideals and principles we take for granted, and that calls for solutions that may not end up being absolutely fair to everyone in it. If the tradeoff is between childcare that actually works versus a watered down version because we are also paying people who don’t avail of it, I think the former option will do most to support families.
I agree with you except the part about the policy making a dent. Scandinavian countries have all sorts of "universal childcare" and benefits, and their TFR is still going straight into the shitter. All this talk about expanding the GDP and going towards total workforce participation IMO is why family formation is slowing to a crawl (I mean look at South Korea, where it's all about being a workaholic and they basically will cease to exist in maybe 50-100 years, literally). If we want to continue as a nation or entity of people, I believe the people and the government are going to need to put their thumb on the scale in a way more aggressive way, including both childcare credits for all, paying stay at home parents a salary, major cultural changes (including our own version of the Soviet Mother Heroine/Order of Parental Glory that carry real status with them, perhaps), and economic and cultural pushback on being a DINK or similar. We have no future the way we're going, and these sort of policy interventions have been tried elsewhere and they don't do shit. We really have got to rethink a lot of things, in a way that's probably painful or irritating to the readership here, otherwise we're basically done.
You don’t want just kids, you want well raised kids. Badly raised kids are easily a net negative, so just paying people to be parents isn’t going to work.
The only thing that might incentivize people to think about the long term is getting rid of all old age benefits (including continuous bail outs of broad market assets by the federal government by sacrificing the purchasing power of the currency).
Right now, we take productivity from people who sacrifice to raise kids well and give it to those who don’t raise kids well, or not have them at all.
This obviously leads to an arbitrage opportunity (as evidenced by DINK lifestyles).
I do not see any other way other than to remove this arbitrage opportunity. Which probably will not happen in any democracy due to old people’s voting power.
I beg to disagree. In Switzerland, a lot of emphasis is put on assimilation to a Swiss identity via pre-school and school. Now this eventually raises the bar for parents to raise their kids, but it also acts to Swissify immigrant kids quickly as well (and 25% of the residents in Switzerland are not born as swiss, many of those are refugees from African countries that America has problems dealing with). America's DIY hands off parent-focused system consistently has the worse results of all the world's developed countries, and is proving to be worse than even developing country systems.
I have no idea what TFR has to do with anything here. So Swiss people aren't having kids like they were before, that is not relevant to education outcomes, maybe they are just really good in teaching sex education.
Switzerland has a high immigration rate, so they aren't going to be hit by this in the short term, and in the long term I don't think they are going to sweat some population loss.
That's clearly not the assumption at all. The idea that we can pick and choose what we pay taxes for is not a reality. That's not how this works. There are tons of subsidies, pork, and other ways my tax dollars get used that don't benefit me at all. Just because you don't have a kid or choose not to use the new system, doesn't mean you shouldn't pay your share of taxes, just like everything else in this country.
No one said they're not going to pay taxes. They advocated for what they consider to be a better policy. What you're saying is like responding to someone who thinks we shouldn't start random wars with "we don't get to choose what we pay taxes for". Uh, yeah, we do get to advocate for and vote on how the government spends our money. We can and should point out that starting pointless wars is bad and we should encourage others to support a policy where we stop doing it. Arguing against specific uses and for other uses of taxes to build consensus for your point of view is exactly what people are supposed to do in a democracy.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
This is how it works in Finland, but with some adjustments based on family income. You are eligible for up to 500€/month if you take care of your child. The other option being childcare costing up to 300€/month.
I see benefits for stay at home Moms, universal childcare means she has somewhere safe to drop her kid off while she goes to her own doctor appointments, or when she needs a break, or if there’s a family emergency she needs to attend to or even if she’s going into labor to bring kid number 2 or 3 into the world. There are a lot of stay at home parents that don’t have family near by or a reliable sitter and this can help plug some gaps.
In what way does this disincentivize anyone? If you want to stay home with your kids, stay home with your kids. This is literally not preventing anyone from being a stay at home parent.
Lots of two-parent working families do the maths, and realize they would pay more in childcare than the income from a second job. This incentivizes one of them to stay at home. Here, the incentive is gone. This is worse for the economy and probably the family.
Suppose childcare is $15k/year and you work minimum wage making less than $15k/year. Then there's less wealth to go around, just more in your pocket. But actually, you probably don't take home all the wealth you create, so it can actually still be better for the economy. It is still worse for the economy, but not for that reason. Probably because labor has a backward-bending supply curve, and most people are already working more hours than is optimal. As another commenter said, it would probably be better for the economy to make a 30 hour work week.
Your taxes pay for the public service whether you use it or not. Take a look at your property tax statement and I bet you can find all sorts of things you may or may not use: parks fees, library fees, health/hospital fees, schools, etc. Should everyone who reads but doesn't use the public library get a book voucher? I'm a stay-at-home-reader, why shouldn't I get the government to subsidize my reading?
As a resident of New Mexico I can tell you that it is a miracle that we can afford to launch this program at all. Perhaps when the long-term economic benefits begin to pay out, we'll be able to pay people to support their personal preferences. As it stands, while I don't have kids at home anymore, I can see the long-term economic benefit to the state, and am very pleased that my tax dollars are helping to get this done.
Nothing is free. This means less resources for something else, marketed as "compassion".
Mothers generally take much better care of their own children than childcare. Childcare was already previously available for low-income families. To incentivize women to work when they can afford to care for their children is very bad for a country in the long term.
Norway does this. Kindergartens are nearly free ($120/mo), but with a "cash-for-care" benefit for parents who choose to stay at home with the child ($750/mo).
> You can receive cash-for-care benefit for children between 13 and 19 months, starting the month the child turns 13 months, up until and including the month the child turns 19 months. You can receive cash-for-care benefits for a maximum of 7 months.
so, no, extremely limited compared to what's being discussed.
I wonder why they don’t have the same allergy to a voucher program that is prevalent in the US on the political left. For some reason, letting people exercise their agency and do things their own way is seen as a threat here.
It's not an allergy to vouchers. It's an allergy to diverting tax payer dollars away from public schools and into subsidizing religious indoctrination centers. There are good religious schools: I've been largely impressed by the Jesuit-run schools I've seen. But most religious private primary and high schools in the US are run by weird little cults that fundamentally fail to meet muster in the whole "not being thinly-veiled excuses for indoctrination" side of things.
Americans are stupid enough without stripping them of what little education we do offer them.
> It's an allergy to diverting tax payer dollars away from public schools and into subsidizing religious indoctrination centers.
All schools are indoctrination centers. Some very progressive cities push a lot of political programming into their curriculums. Why does it matter if someone wants their child’s education to have THEIR flavor of religious indoctrination? The money follows the child. The money for kids staying in public schools stays with them. So it doesn’t divert anything away.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
They are strictly less efficient than commercial daycare because the adult-child ratio is much higher. How many women would be of out of the work for if they were taking care of children?
Also, it prevents trickle down and the lifting of the poorest in society.
To less children. Even if the area under the curve was the same (and I suspect that there very much are diminishing returns) they have a very negative effect on the Gini coefficient and that is a negative externality that should not be incentivised.
If your position is that people should not be compelled to contribute to overall society and the lifting of the boats of others, than there isn't enough alignment of values for a meaningful conversation.
It does offer a potential backdoor to UBI while also encouraging desirable outcomes -- increased birth rate for wanted children, more people willing to foster, optionality for women to enter workforce, etc.
I suspect there will be some fraud (I have 30 kids, wheee!) as well as foster/adoption abuse -- probably AZ's experiment with paying parents to home school would be instructive.
While true, social policies do not need to provide an equal benefit to everyone. People who can afford to stay home with the kids are not the ones who need this sort of policy.
because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
Not sure about your point. I live in Europe, and State pays for the first 1 year or two. Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).
From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?
Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
> I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
Actually, any job she likes? In this case, it's not for the baby, it's for her. Being with a child 24/7 has its toll, and people are social animals, they like being with others. In this case, work - especially white collar - is a kind of rest for parents. At least this is the attitude of many fresh mums (and dads) around me.
Taking care of a baby can be very social ... as long as the other mother's aren't all at work.
And what exactly are these jobs that are a rest compared to taking care of a baby? Are they actually economically productive or are they bureaucratic fake jobs?
I have noticed that many of my peer parents make parenting more stressful than it needs to be, and don't invest enough in learning techniques to make it less stressful. Like, some parents don't even invest in baby-proofing and then they are constantly chasing their toddler around. But, the first year of baby is always going to be stressful because everything is so new, just as the first year at a brand new job is always going to be more stressful than a job one is highly experienced at.
The live-in nanny. A high-paid lawyer and a sr software engineer together make, let's presume they make $500k/yr combined. They should take some of that money and hire someone else to do it for them. The question shouldn't be to compare one mom's job vs taking care of two children, there should be a team of professional adults taking care of a cadre of children. Amortized over that, the numbers look a bit better.
Look up how much housing costs, and how much professional nannies cost, in a location where the software engineer and lawyer are making $500k combined. And you'll need at least two nannies, one overnight, one during the day. I don't think the math is going to work out very well. Also, there are a lot of greedy jobs that don't pay nearly as well as $250k, especially early in career.
I was with you til the end, so now I need to ask what you really mean by "greedy jobs". I took it to mean jobs that are all-consuming, no fixed hours, high pressure, high stress. If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy. The vast majority of jobs are non-greedy by this definition, unless the US has really regressed so far from Europe as to be unrecognisable.
If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.
What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.
In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.
I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...
Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.
No, because you have to count all the employment going into running and supplying the daycare, which includes facilities, equipment, administration, extra staff, etc. You have to look at the all-in cost.
I've never seen a daycare with more than 5% of staff doing admin. Either it's a small daycare with a handful of workers and everybody doing care, or it's a large one with one person doing admin.
It all adds up. On average, daycare in USA costs $18k a year per child ( https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/ ), which is the best measure of the total resources that it takes up, all-in. Median income for a 30yo man is $55k and for a woman $45k. So even with just two kids, the lower earning parent with the non-greedy job is not clearing much if anything over the cost of the daycare.
There are more important things women - and other people - can do than simply grow the economy.
One of the reasons you must have a two-income household to be economically middle-class in most American metros now is because two-income households became the norm. When I was growing up 25-30 years ago, that made you comfortable. Then people realized that there was "untapped" value in that extra income and raised prices accordingly. If you're looking to buy the things that make up the "American Dream", you are now competing to buy against people who are willing to throw two incomes at the problem.
Now that there are two incomes, the only way to grow is to start shedding other things that keep people from creating more value for their employers. Kids, home improvement, community involvement, all are - or have been - going by the wayside.
If I'm not mistaken, Elizabeth Warren has literally written a book about this problem, so it's not some reactionary desire to keep women in the kitchen.
This would solve a lot of Republican’s problems as well. Israel has the kibbutz system and they have the highest birth rate of developed economies. They also have amazing tech and women participation and excellent contributions even in the military. If you raise the country’s children well, you get more GDP and less prisons and less need for policing, and less need for welfare programs. Plus you get quality workers for those american-made factories.
Only about 1-2% of Israelis live on a kibbutz, and unsurprisingly that number has recently fallen.
You actually see the elevated birth rates even in Tel Aviv. There’s a broader cultural expectation that would be impossible to recreate elsewhere.
Israel's current birthrate has more to do with the ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities and nothing to do with the kibbutz system. The ultra-Orthodox communities are also exempt from those "excellent contributions even in the military". While female ultra-Orthodox participation in the workforce is around 80%, that's largely due to males not participating (50%).[0]
The problem with more people entering the workforce is that the people never end up better off. Prices just go up and people end up working more for the same result.
Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
Making mortgages with a > 20 year term illegal, putting limits on the total principal allowed to loan as a multiple of income, and barring entirely non-human (i.e. any business entity) ownership of single family homes would do far more for families and children by removing the burden of ridiculous housing costs by removing the ability for people to compete for ridiculous housing prices.
> Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
You want to change what now? The dictionary definition does not specify any particular time. There is no legal definition for full-time. The IRS uses the term full-time, but they actually use it exactly like you wish: 30 hours per week.
People out on the street often casually use full-time to refer to 40 hours per week. I anticipate that is what you are referring to. But that usage is simply used to refer to how many hours they are working. 40 hours under that usage is an observation, not a commandment.
Sigh. Nobody reasonable would think I was suggesting that a dictionary definition change would be helpful.
In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and an amendment in 1940 established the minimum wage and the 40 hour work week by requiring overtime pay beyond 40 hours for non-exempt employees. [1] Many other countries have many similar things.
What I'm talking about is amending the FLSA down from 40 to 30 hours per week for mandatory overtime and reducing the scope of exemptions so that many more people in professional positions are covered by this or a similar set of requirements.
No I think there should be extreme limits on anybody owning a single family home that they don't live in. With enormous tax penalties for those who do.
Don't let people get 30 year mortgages. Don't let people own houses they don't live in.
Worker productivity has consistently increased, yet workers are struggling to support their families or delaying having a family, because they cannot meet the cost of living. Instead of looking towards the inflation of the monetary base as a driver of price inflation, families are supposed to let the state raise their children. Pricing parents out of the house and into the workforce is instead marketed as "liberation". Liberty implies that a choice is given. Mothers or fathers should have the ability to choose to stay home and benefit from the increases in productivity.
Citing GDP growth is cute, but as nothing has been done to address the underlying drivers of price inflation, we can reasonably expect that socialized child care will become an economic necessity. Any potential benefits of productivity gains will continue to be eaten by those who are first to drink from the monetary spigot. While GDP and hours worked may increase, living standards may not.
And what choice do you have regarding rising cost of living?
There are many public services we already rely on and there are many countries that offer free child care already in some form. What you call (forced) liberation is just societal specialization and not bad per se.
Focusing on fiscal/wage issues is a big and important topic though. I bet over time, budget hawks will reduce this public service like others and like in many other countries too. We are so many humans on our plentyful earth, we could achieve many things, yet, "we" lack money.
I’m 100% on board that GDP is increasingly becoming a poor proxy for well-being. That being said I can’t really think of many other things a state can do. The trends you are describing are national if not global.
Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
I appreciate your optimism but I’m skeptical. I dated someone who worked in child care (with a degree in ECE). She was quite miserable caring for a dozen screaming babies all day. I think the burnout and turnover for such a job (which requires a degree but still paid minimum wage) is likely to be extremely high.
The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is the economics of it. The pay for the staff is very low but the cost of service to parents is very high. That means so much of the cost is overhead which would make the whole thing quite unsustainable, even when ostensibly covered by the government.
I live in Canada and a similar issue is occurring with our universal health care system. The costs are skyrocketing even as wait times are increasing.
Sure, if the place paid everyone a lot and had much higher staff:child ratios then everything would be great. Except it would cost an absolute fortune for parents thus even less viable under a government program.
Government programs almost universally have higher overhead and more waste than private businesses. There is no incentive for government employees to improve efficiency, reduce budgets, or cut costs.
We didn’t notice a positive correlation between teacher tenure and cost when we looked around.
If anything, there was a negative correlation: The big corporate ones had high teacher turnover, more levels of administration, and turned a healthy profit for ownership/shareholders. They were priced to match.
Also, government run programs usually are less expensive (take pretty much any privatization program anywhere as an evidence). The government programs don’t have to pay money to shareholders, and aren’t siphoning resources for expansion, marketing, etc.
If government leadership is corrupt as we see in the US right now, then, of course, prices skyrocket, though that usually comes hand in hand with outsourcing/subcontractors/privatization. It’s hard to collect bribe money from civil servants…
Teachers union(s) are some of the highest profile anti union targets in the US as well. There’s also issues on a structural level that leads to poor compensation for teachers vs other government positions.
Really school funding and public education in the US in general is in a very strange place across the board and has been for decades
Twelve is a quite high ratio of children to carer. In Sweden what is considered a healthy ratio is 5:1, and many places do meet that rate or are very close to it.
10:1 would be considered a very poor daycare, and most people wouldn't want to put their children on it — only if they have no other choice.
Regarding pay being bad this happens over here as well, unfortunately. Teaching in general is not paid as much as it is worth.
- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting
- Taxes
- Insurance
- Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance
- Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own.
- Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)
Maybe babies aren't meant to be cared for a dozen at a time? But no, we have to "scale" child-rearing, just like we have to scale everything for greater growth numbers. \s
Babies, just like adults, are extremely social animals. And they absolutely need to interact with a bunch of other people their age, even more than us. Daily, and for a long period of time. An hour at the park doesn't cut it, and being all day with a sibling doesn't either.
So beyond everyone going back to a Neolithic way of life and living in a bunch of straw teepees all bundled close together, daycare is the best solution I've found to this need.
Just as an example, my oldest has been besties with another kid since they were both 7 months old.
As a counter-example, neither of my kids really acknowledged other kids in any way at that age (and other infants ignored them right back). A quick Internet search suggests it's normal for them to not interact with other kids until after 12+ months. This was a point of contention with my wife and MIL because my MIL would complain we weren't "socializing" our oldest enough when she was an infant despite clearly never having looked up anything about childhood development.
That and we did take her out all the time. She just wasn't in daycare. The thing about stay-at-home parents is they don't literally stay at home all day.
I would expect larger groups of young children to require more even ratios of care takers. I don't know if 3 care takers per 12 children is enough for instance, but I've got a feeling 9 care takers for 36 children is not enough.
Depends on the state. My state is 1:3 for under 2, 1:6 for 2-3, and then 1:10 for 3-5. Presumably after that you're out of child care and into school. Ratios get more complex when it's a mixed group, but most childcare centers are going to have children separate based on age.
These ratios seem reasonable to me. Much better than the 1:25 in elementary school.
> because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
This feels like the wrong goal. Why does it matter how much an economy can grow? Is that worth not having a parent raise the child? In my opinion, it’s important for kids to spend more time with their families not less. Having one parent at home is very useful for bonding, development, etc. And frankly no childcare, even one with good ratios of workers to children, can substitute for it. I think the notion that “if the children are taken care of” is perhaps not recognizing that there are different levels of “taken care of”.
It turns out that kids raised by their parents still get a lot of time with other kids though. Their parents don’t just keep them at home. They meet with friends. Go out and play. Their parents take them to classes and activities. Your view is “our kids are fine”, but most parents may say that about their own kids without knowing what the alternative could be. I’ve experienced both situations myself and also observed it as an adult. I think most childcare is a lot more of a free for all than parents think, rather than some sort of well designed experience. If you reduce the ratios significantly by having two kids per worker, maybe the quality improves to approach what a parent can provide. But that’s a lot more expensive.
> I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow
I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
It's similar with those studies showing hiring a diverse workforce is actually good for your business. It might be, but, like, it's also the right thing to do to not discriminate against minorities.
> I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
Unfortunately, this is how some people think, so phrasing things in this manner is a way to win them over ("paying a bit more in taxes is actually going to benefit you").
There will obviously be abuse and other issues. The question is, does New Mexico give up at the first sign of trouble like a bunch of losers, or do they push through, because of, or despite all the voters. It just takes one shitty person, in just the wrong place, and not enough good people fighting against him or her no matter, (or especially)
how righteous he or she thinks they're being, to fuck it up for everyone else.
How so? What do they have now that they will be losing under the new system? It seems like having childcare paid for would be beneficial to any single working parent.
Any system, program, or social group involving tens of thousands of people is going to have issues. But if you systematize it you can work to address them rather than ignoring them in search of the perfect system (which doesn't exist).
That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.
Just because women have been shunted into childcare for millennia doesn’t mean we’re naturally better at it. It just means we’ve had to do it. Do you similarly think it’s a rarity for men not to be cut out for subsistence farming?
The bond between a mother and her child is very special and intense. That doesn't happen with a paid caregiver. Heck, I was glued to my mom till I was 4.
I'm sad for you that you don't seem to understand this, with words like "shunted".
My parents are decades gone, but I miss them every day. Not so for any paid caregiver.
My grandmother died when my dad was 9. In his 90s, he forgot that she was dead, and would cry wondering why she didn't visit him.
The notion that this can be replaced with the state is absurd.
Firstly, I am a mother with two children, so no need to educate me about the bond between mother and child. Secondly, of course children love their parents. You seem to be conflating parenting with daytime childcare. This is a common misconception among people who romanticize stay-at-home parenting: it’s either “mom stays home during the workday with kids” or “the state raises the kids.” You may not be aware, since you say your mom stayed home with you, that parents whose kids are in daycare do still get a lot of parenting time in. They see their kids a lot. They feed them, clothe them, kiss their scraped knees, help them with homework, put them to bed, take them to the park and movies and church. Daycare isn’t 24/7. It’s also not some kind of robotic state-sponsored apparatus. Childcare providers are people who have chosen taking care of kids as their career, they often have a degree in early childhood education, and they love the kids they take care of.
And I do not apologize for the word “shunted.” No woman in a modern society should be forced to choose between having a child and being something other than a full-time childcare provider. Men don’t face that choice; women shouldn’t either.
I'm the one asserting that women have been forced into childcare for millennia. It's the default state in the absence of societal support.
> It comes naturally to parents.
_Love_ comes naturally to parents. Almost nothing else does, in my experience. You are extrapolating from an incomplete dataset. Again, your mom being good at the job of staying home with kids does not make other moms good at it. You are talking to a mom who isn't. I do, in fact, exist. I am asserting that my family, and society, are better off because I had a choice of career. I guarantee my kids would agree. It has nothing to do with how much I love them, and everything to do with my aptitude for homemaking and preschool childcare.
Those are nice feelings _you_ have, but they don't have anything to do with women being forced into childcare. You're romanticizing things you never had to do.
Surely parents should be giving their child(ren) the best, no?
Giving the economy your best only makes sense in Communism, and since that has never gone well, I'll assume that what was meant was "self-fulfillment via work" or "better standard of living". The first just seems like one of these modern lies. I'm neither a mother nor a woman, but I've never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling, although I have generally more or less enjoyed it. I've met no father (or mother) who say they wished they had more time at work rather than their children. I have heard both fathers and mothers say that it is the most fulfilling part of their lives. The second is just prioritizing the self. I've never met a child who was excited that his/her parent(s) are working and/or making lots of money instead of being with them. I don't think a goal of career or comfort/wealth is compatible with flourishing children.
Second, are the children actually taken care of? Assuming everything is well-run, then sure, their physical needs and safety are taken care of. They aren't getting love from parents during that time. They aren't living in a loving community. Instead they are getting socialized into being atomized, like the rest of us, where loneliness is epidemic. I'm really thankful my mother stayed home with us. (She started teaching part-time once we all got into all-day school)
> I’ve never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.
> I've never understood why women are so eager to go work
You're romanticizing it, that's why. Staying at home and not working makes you incredibly vulnerable. You're entirely reliant on the goodwill of someone else, and you can end up trapped, unable to leave a bad situation because you have no access to money. Or your husband just leaves you with kids to feed and no money to do it with.
It's fine if you choose to do it with a partner who treats you as an equal, but there's a reason why female suicides instantly dropped by 20%[0] when no-fault divorce was adopted by their state.
If you want another data point, ask your older female relatives what their mothers and grandmothers told them about money. Bet you more than a few will have a story where they were told to save money in a secret place and never, ever tell their husbands about it.
You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it so they can focus on bettering the economy, right?
> You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it
My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.
The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
This was surprising to me too. I think there was some guilt around having a child and not spending 100% of our time caring for them. The reality was that quality daycare teachers have a lot of experience and a support network that enables them to create a great environment for learning. Socializing with peers from a young age was a huge benefit. While I'm sure they'll catch up, when observing kids the same age who hadn't been to "school" yet, it was clear that these kids hadn't developed at the same rate.
Even if I had all the resources in the world, I'd still send my kids to a good daycare vs trying to replicate these learning opportunities at home.
> The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
People who stay at home and take care of their own kids aren’t skipping socialization. They still participate in various activities where there are other kids. But, the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford. If you stay at the daycare and observe things, you’ll see how difficult it is for the workers to split attention.
Oh and you get a lot less illness if avoiding daycare. And that regained time, is development time and time to go do fun things.
This is buying into the idea of rugged individualism when it comes to parenting. That all a child needs is their parents and that time away from children is a failure of parents. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many studies show that children raised in a cooperative environment where they are exposed to various people and practices from extended family, professionals, teachers, etc help reinforce social connectedness.
Not to mention parents have more to them to simply being parents. Their own desires, wants, and needs. Balancing these with being parents leads to the more fulfillment.
This feels like a strawman. I didn’t say that “all a child needs is their parents”. I am saying however, that parents in most cases will provide higher quality care and more attention to their child than what a daycare can provide. Have you tried watching 3 kids simultaneously? It’s just not possible even in the controlled environment of a daycare room. Kids that are raised by parents aren’t in a bubble - they’re still going out and meeting with other families and kids and doing things. The notion that children raised by parents are not exposed is itself a common myth used to diminish the value of parents.
Saying "that parents in most cases will provide higher quality care and more attention to their child" and that it's not possible to watch 3 kids simultaneously is reinforcement of "all a child needs is their parents". It's laughably false and shows your ignorance on this subject. Putting parents on a pedestal is not good for children or parents. Please take a look at research on this subject.
> the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford
Maybe, but definitely not always. There's a lot of variables with this logic. My wife and I aren't trained early childhood educators. We didn't spend years studying such things, we haven't been doing this for many years, and we aren't always as equipped with things like lesson plans and educational development attainment goals.
Without a doubt, every child is different, different kids grow in their own spurts and what not. But when we took our kids out of daycare for my wife to stay at home and tend to the kids after our youngest was born, we had our oldest remain in twice a week daycare so my wife could spend more time focusing on our infant at the time. His growth trajectory definitely fell. He wasn't able to keep up with a lot of his classmates, even though it had just been a single semester. He wasn't as happy, and his connections with his close friends he had known since he was barely able to walk were clearly fraying despite attempts to schedule as many play dates. Our youngest wasn't progressing as fast as others we knew from the daycare. In the end we put both kids back in full-time once my wife managed to find similar employment again. Once both kids were back in full time, it was almost night and day difference. Our oldest child was noticeably much happier. He quickly caught back up with the class and had those friendships restored. Similar story with our youngest.
We also tend to hang out with a lot of at-home families as well. Most of the kids I know from our school seem significantly ahead in logic and socialization skills compared to most of the kids I know who stay at-home. Not all, for sure, I know a few families who are exceptionally great at being educators for their kids. But I also know many families who try very hard but ultimately aren't that great in comparison. Not everyone is a good teacher, and that's OK.
In the end, we're not as effective of educators for our kids, it's just not what we're necessarily great at doing. So, they spend time with people who are. And we continue to try and do our best with them at home as well with things they aren't taught in school.
There are so many benefits to day care for the children. It’s hardly the prison camp people make it out to be.
I don’t know if these negative comments are because HN in general dislikes the wider educational system, or if it’s because they dislike governments handing out “charity” to help less affluent families. Maybe a touch of both? But daycare can actually be a really rewarding experience for children.
So much so, that I have parent friends who one of them is a stay-at-home parent and they still send their child to day care at least one day a week to help the child’s independence, social skills and comfort when away from home. And they’ve found their child has been better for the experience
Edit: and the fact that I’ve been downvoted within seconds of posting this shows how ridiculous people are on here when it comes this topic.
There probably are some pretty bad daycares out there, with overworked and burnt-out caretakers. But yeah my friends with kids mostly say the same thing, their kids love it.
For me at least, it's a general dislike of the wider educational system. My parents taught me to read, play chess, multiply, and write in cursive before elementary school. I didn't really learn anything at preschool or kindergarten, and I imagine daycare would be worse for my educational development. Maybe it's useful for social development? but at least for me I was always pretty independent (even in kindergarten) from the other kids. Not in an isolated way, I just preferred doing my own thing.
Preschools in the UK have curriculums they have to follow. That includes maths, reading and writing too.
I’m not going to comment on preschools in your country, but in the UK the kids who attended preschool are IN GENERAL the stronger students, socially, emotionally, and academically, when it comes to starting infants/ elementary school. Particularly in the less affluent areas. Though there might be some selection bias here too due to the kinds of parents who can sand their child to daycare verses those who cannot.
In the less affluent areas, I'd expect children not attending daycare to just not be getting anything at home. Presumably their parents are both working and cannot afford daycare. In the more affluent areas, I'd expect children only don't attend daycare if their parents prioritize their children over their jobs, and so they'd be getting much more positive attention than in a daycare. But, of course, we'd have to see a study differentiated by socioeconomic status to see what is actually the case.
We prioritized our kids. In the end, what worked better for our kids was for us to earn enough income to send them to really nice daycare/preschool for several hours a day.
I think this is a leading question and you should probably clarify why you're asking it. More specifically, what situation leads you to believe that it's not totally fine to spend a lot of time with your pre-adolescent children? I think there are a wide variety of living situations that all result in pretty well-adjusted children.
I think it's healthy for parents to have other pursuits. Not everyone is 100% fulfilled hanging out with young children all day, and that's perfectly fine.
Even with daycare, parents are spending a substantial portion of their time with their children.
Even if you’re stay at home unemployed person, a daycare will do more for your child’s development than you would be able to. Kids need socialization, they learn from their peers as much as they learn from adults.
You can also take them to events at the public libraries and other places, at least in my area. They're often called "Library Story Times" and they're free where we live. That's what my spouse does. There's a very wide spectrum of social activities available even for kids of stay-at-home parents. She will often get together with other parents and let our son socialize with their children too.
That’s fair and I’m sure your spouse covers the need for socialization, however these options aren’t available everywhere and not all parents are going to take their kids for these events every day. Having a venue that you don’t need to plan for 5x times a week is always going to be a great default.
With this option, they are now financially penalized for making that choice in order to subsidize those who don't. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
My wife and I have no interest in ever having children, yet we are happy to pay property taxes that go to local public schools. Why? Because an educated society is better able to make educated decisions. We are being "penalized" for making the choice to not have kids in order to "subsidize" those who don't.
Correct. It all comes down to whether you believe parents leaving home to work on their careers instead of staying home to raise their kids is an unambiguous good that needs to be subsidized the same way education is.
Assuming by education you actually mean schooling, this is the very same thing. The question is really only about at which age subsidized schooling should first start. This moves that age of first subsidized engagement to approximately birth, as opposed to waiting until age ~3-5 (varies by jurisdiction).
Historically it was considered a beneficial necessity to gather the children to write down knowledge so that it could be brought back home for the whole family to learn from, but in the age of the internet perhaps separating children and parents is never good at any (young-ish) age?
I think the biggest difference isn't age, it's that childcare also happens during the summer, not just during the school year. (And of course the lack of any particular educational curriculum.)
Is that a meaningful difference, though? Schools were originally open all year round, but the hot summer classroom eventually was deemed an unsuitable place to occupy, thus schools decided to compromise by closing during the hottest months.
Since the advent of air-conditioning, there really isn't any good reason to close schools during the summer. But, like the internet bit before, we've just never bothered to stop and actually think about what we're doing. We carry on with the status quo simply because that's what we did in the past. Not because it makes sense, just because that's what we do.
But in establishing subsidized daycare now, we don't have to think about the time before air-conditioning was invented. We only have to worry about the constraints we have today. Hot summers are not a practical problem as of right now.
People are going to respond to incentives whether you think they should or not.
I think it's less "mindsets" that have changed so much as the incentives themselves. People no longer need to have kids in order to have sex or to have a comfortable retirement, so many simply don't. Though I'd agree there's certainly a mindset shift that has developed along with that.
Tax $100 each from couple A and couple B. Couple A leave their kids at a daycare and work. They get $200 in childcare costs reimbursed by the government. Couple B has one parent stay home to take care of their kids. They get nothing.
Sure and under income taxes, Couple B probably pays much less since US income tax structure is gives massive benefits to couples with single income. It may not be enough to offset joint income. As with most economic changes, there is massive web of things.
> US income tax structure is gives massive benefits to couples with single income
It gives massive structural advantages to couples with low income, in the form of a lower marginal tax rate. Does it really discriminate between single and dual income though? I wasn't aware of that.
Yea and I think that’s great. OP makes it sound like every parent is pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism if only they didn’t have to worry about raising a child. It’s not so.
> every parent is pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism
People don’t want to work because they’re “pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism”. They want to work for income, for career development, or even because they like what they do.
This is such a dismissive way to phrase it that doesn’t even acknowledge why people work. Reducing everything to “capitalism” is missing the point.
They should give money that can be used on anything instead of specifically for healthcare. That way you can choose to take care of your kids yourself and put that money towards food than having to work and then outsource childcare.
I don't think it's quite accurate. Historically, lower-class mothers and a fair chunk of middle class mothers also did some work outside the home: as maids, nannies, teachers, gardeners, etc.
The 1950s USA "golden era" where lower-class mothers could afford to stay home was a statistical anomaly, gifted to this country by virtue of our unique position as the major economic superpower untouched by WWII.
You don't understand how economics work if you think this is actually going to be helpful.
By providing "universal" child care, you just moved the cost of childcare from the individual to the tax base so now everyone has to pay an ineffifient system that often eats up 30-50% of the incoming money in bureaucratic inneficiencies before it will even reach the child care system.
On top of that the increased taxes are going to raise prices of everything because the businesses don't just eat the cost of taxes, they pass it off to the consumer. So all these families that get free childcare are going to be paying more for their groceries, rent, unilities and everything else.
To top things off, you now have random strangers with no bond with your children looking after them in a ratio of maybe 1:8 or 1:10. So your children are going to be stressed out and anxious and are going to act out both at the childcare place and at home, so you're just going to be getting phone calls all day about your children fighting other children.
All in all, you might feel like you're better off but once you do the math you're at about the same place if not worse off.
Yes, surely the hyper efficient free market is much better here, not like we have decades of proof of the perverse incentives there. We should instead ensure every mother is crippled with life-long medical debt if their kid needs any help!
Also if we care so much about these inefficiencies, why is it that I still have to subsidize drivers? Why aren't we investing in better public transport infrastructure, rather than letting drivers take up 1000x the space on roads that I'm forced to pay for?
I don't see any mention of free markets in your post.
The healthcare industry is not a free market, they are handicapped by regulatiom and by law are required to provide health insurance to anyone that wants it and cannot reject anyone. Of course prices are going to be stiffling when they have to give you insurance no matter your pre-existing conditions and no matter the choices you make
> I just use my bike: why should I pay taxes for roads maintenance.
Most US states pay for a significant fraction of road maintenance from motor fuel taxes ("road tax"). You probably aren't paying those taxes if you're in the US and you don't buy motor fuel.
Increased EV adoption is likely going to change that regime.
You wouldn't have to if the government didn't own the roads. Plenty of examples of this, private companies creating their own roads and charging people a small fee to use them so they can maintain them.
Wouldn't be that hard give people a little device that tracks the roads they use and charges them $0.05 per mile that they drive and then have the company be a co-op that's owned by the people living in that town.
It's hard to compete against multinational conglomerates that get tax cuts and tax breaks left and right, but they do exist, eh: REI, Ace Hardware, Land O' Lakes.
It has not at all.
20% of high school graduates are reading at a 5th grade level, which when you consider the billions of dollars poured into public schools every year is just asinine
https://www.abtaba.com/blog/us-literacy-statistics
US school outcomes vary drastically. It really works out well in nice neighborhoods, and doesn't work out in some bad neighborhoods. Its down to cultural and familial expectations. Why does the same curriculum in say Scarsdale not have the same success in the Bronx? They are only like 15 miles apart in the same state.
The nice neighborhoods have parents that prioritize spending with their children, reading with them and helping them work through things they are struggling with and due to that they then score better on the standardized tests.
The curriculum is just a net zero, and could be argued that it's a net negative because it wastes the kids time with useless knowledge that they will never need or use.
That's the thing. Nobody ever does the math on what these kind of programs cost society. The long term economic impacts that this will put on other families due to increased taxes, the businesses that might go under because they had to raise prices to cope with increased taxes, the business that never get created due to increased taxes, the other families that are now going to be struggling because they're a 1 income family and they now have to pay for everyone else's kids in addition to the care of their own children that they provide for and don't want to offloat to be taken care of by strangers, etc. etc.
Oh no, society will have to bear the cost of the infrastructure to maintain itself rather than reap the benefits of a population without putting back into. How terrible.
It doesn't work that way.
The US Welfare programs have created multi generational families that have never worked and do not have any parents or grandparents that have ever worked a real job because if anyone did they would risk losing $100k's worth of free benefits to work a minimum wage job that would only pay them $30k.
It has created a permanant underclass of people with no job skills that are wholly dependant on the system for their survival.
Would love to know where you’re getting this figure from. I worked in the welfare field before moving into tech (and my wife still does) and the payout for TANF plus SNAP for a single mother with like 5 kids would be closer to your $30k than the $100k. Of course that begs the question why work for it if you can get it for free but I believe TANF has a lifetime payout of like 5 years meaning that if the kids get it as a child they will not qualify for that TANF for themselves as an adult.
Ok, now be genuine about the other benefits they're most likely receiving as well:
- Medicaid
- Section8
- WIC
- LIHEAP
- LIFELINE
Just to name a few.
I also worked for a non profit that helped people get government assistance and got an inside look at what these families are like and what they prioritize.
It may not be means tested, but it will be utilized primarily by families on welfare, and lower income families and in the long term by middle class families who become lower income due to government subsidized programs like these forcing them to pay more for their daily necessities through an increased tax burden.
You have clearly not shopped for childcare on the open market. Highly paid professionals still struggle to get childcare. Putting more resources into the system will be a net positive for all parents who need childcare.
No it won't. Just like putting billions of dollars into the Public School System has not led to any real increase in test scores. And just like Universal healthcare has made healthcare plans just about unaffordable for anyone not working a corporate job and just like government student loans have made the price of college asinine and I could go on and on.
Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads? I know several stay at home dads who by all reports do a very good job of raising their kids while mom works. (granted the vast majority of stay at home parents are mothers). Fathers are people too, and they should be treated like the great parents they can be (until proven otherwise).
>> when women are allowed to work to their full potential
> Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads?
That's... not even remotely what the sentence said? Or are you offended because you believe childcare obligations have historically prevented men from working their full potential?
Women was used in several different places. Each is offensive, because in each case a man could do the same work, and the work could be done. I have no opinion on if a man or woman should be caregiver - I've seen both cases work well - every situation must be taken case by case.
What does full potential even mean? If someone wants to do something, but they have to do something else or they would starve (that is play vs work) which is living up to their full potential - what they want to do, or what they must do?
I mean, I’m a gay dad, so I get that what you are saying is a real problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem in this thread. If you had a goal of improving women’s ability to participate in the workforce you’d likely come up with a policy like this (that would also help some dads too, even if that weren’t the primary goal).
Women are far more likely to be the primary, stay at home caregiver if one exists and face a lot of discrimination in the workforce as a result of those expectations (on top of already facing other workplace discrimination issues).
> it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
Why bring gender into it? There are plenty of families who choose to have stay at home Dads while the mother goes back to work full time. We are not in the 1950s any more.
Even if it is only 5% stay at home fathers, that is still 5% that is ignored. Staying at home as a parent isn't the right choice for everyone, but when society assumes that it is only mothers that is a disservice to the fathers who want to (and in some cases the couples who want a parent staying at home but it never occurs to them that it could be dad)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'm hopeful that the parent comment simply didn't think about Dads because it's not in their "worldview", and perhaps also not in many others'. Nonetheless, I think your point is completely valid.
Childcare doesn't end at 1 year though. If you look at public schools as child care, most don't start until kindergarten (about 5 years old). What do you do for the remaining 4 years? And during summer break? And after-school care? This program covers all of those.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
> This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
How is your solution any different from the US student loan policies that have increased the price of college in the US? Won't subsidizing demand with a stipend significantly increase the price of what it can be spent on?
We kind of do both in Germany. I say "kind of" becaue that year of parental leave (14 months total, shared between parents as desired) is capped at the lower of 1800 EUR/mo, or 2/3 of previous year's net monthly salary - that was significantly lower than either of our net pay, but we did it anyway.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
strong protections for parents choosing to work part time
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
About two years ago - it is possible that the policy has been loosened since then, but I'm not in human resources.
The really strong protections are the first three years after a child is born - you have to be allowed to work anywhere from 15 to 30 hours/week, and be allowed to change it with a few weeks' notice ("Elternzeit" - covers both parental leave and this part time working arrangement).
I had to give a reason for wanting to do the next five years part-time, but "child" resulted in no further questions. I had to commit to only being allowed to work part time, and for the weekly hours I requested for those five years; my employer could choose to accept a request to change them or to go back to full time before the five years is up, but they're not legally obligated to.
ah, right, there are two independent regulations. i forgot about Elternzeit which includes a lot of flexibility in adjusting your worktime as needed, whereas the other regulation simply allows you to request a fixed reduction of your worktime. which is a change of your contract, whereas Elternzeit isn't.
This sounds like something I would have written before I was a parent.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
I think you're talking about parental leave which is a different thing and another area where the US falls short compared to other developed countries. This is to provide care for your kids after you would have gone back to work in any regular scenario until the kids are old enough to start school.
As a parent I’m going to disagree with your disagreement.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I wonder if there is room for disruption here. Like, a NextDoor for childcare. I guess that's just group chats with your neighbors who have kids, but many people don't even know their neighbors. Maybe this is something that needs to be solved organically, not with an app.
Your presumption is that the parent is the only appropriate person to guide a child as they absorb their world. I disagree. I think teachers and peers play a valuable role too.
(In fact, judging by the way you conduct yourself online I’d say the more influences t your child has beyond you the better)
More importantly it would give parents options:
- stay home with your child and take the income
- hire a babysitter
- hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash
- take your child to daycare
- take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
>I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
The western idea of individualism and the villification of the lower-class has really fucked American society. "I don't wanna pay taxes for [insert thing that doesn't benefit me]" or "if you're poor it's your fault" in a country where costs of basic necessities like medical care, insurance, food, housing, school, are skyrocketing is insane to me.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
Honestly reading comments in these types of news on HN makes me lose some hope in humanity. People are actively against anything that's not helpful for them and salivate at the idea of somehow profiting on top without a care for the human needs underneath it all.
They cite government inefficiencies when they just want to "fix them" by pocketing the difference.
It's depressing how much capitalism propaganda is deeply ingrained in so many supposedly smart people.
Yeah the govt has its inefficiencies, but an inefficient program that helps people is better than no program at all. So what if it means that I pay a few extra (hundred, thousand) dollars a year in taxes? If that's the cost for housing people, I'd gladly pay it.
And as if the appeal to humanity weren't enough, how about the fact that it'll keep the streets of SF and other cities cleaner?
It's a pretty nice consolation prize considering the almost total lack of parental leave in the United States. When someone throws me a lifeline I'm not going to complain that it isn't a certified life preserver.
> provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).
Capitalism historically depends on the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the domestic sphere, work that is socially undervalued and made invisible, which supports capitalist systems rather than liberates women. Instituting a paid stipend for home parenting, while superficially supportive, risks reinforcing this systemic isolation by formalizing the separation of caregivers (mainly women) from the workforce and political arenas where power is exercised and negotiated.
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Kids are social and like playing and learning from other kids. Daycare lets them do just that. It’s a great thing and every toddler I’ve met who wasn’t in daycare was behind in something. Especially verbal skills.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
Your anecdote is just that. All of it is highly dependent on the child, their environment, and the 'educator'. Please don't make assumptions based on your limited exposure; it's not helpful.
Your "it depends" argument is that some kids aren't social, don't like playing with other kids, are better off not having exposure to social interaction with peers and practice talking.
If this is the criticism then it's a glowing endorsement of daycare and school.
No; it depends on the 'educator'. A daycare that doesn't have kids interacting in a positive way could be just as detrimental as a parent that doesn't socialize their children externally to the home.
I'm just gonna throw this out here: Well-off kids who barely know their workaholic parents have different but equally bad issues for society, than the poor kids do.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
You aren't wrong but calling it being "Student #642 in a government childcare facility" the wrong way of looking at it. Children grow up best when they are allowed to play with other children. Modern society robs kids of that and helicopter parents are bad for society.
I agree with you vigorously on both those points. I am skeptical however that NM will be able to create a lot of healthy, play-based environments for so many kids.
The market already has incentives to create them -- a ton of good places have waiting lists nationwide, showing unmet demand even at the current price. This suggests the price will need to go higher to attract enough people to do this job. It seems their "$12,000 value" estimate is based on an optimistic belief that they will be buying childcare for their citizens at current prices. When they realize there aren't that many slots available at current rates of pay, will they be okay significantly increasing the costs of the program?
So, my expectations for these facilities are very low and that's a big part of my concern.
> Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
Perhaps there is something about the environment of an economically disadvantaged household that could be improved by a stipend which allows at least one parent the breathing room to dedicate full time attention to the child instead of a job (or multiple jobs). I don't think the findings you mentioned cut against that idea at all.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
My daycare was called preschool. It allowed my mother to focus on my infant brother during the day while I was literally two blocks away running around, coloring and learning shapes. Show and tell was my favorite.
The most obvious example is the children of addicts. It’s hard to imagine a kid is better off stuck at home with druggie parents than spending the day in daycare.
A good example of bottom quintile policy. Because the bottom quintile has a better outcome with a certain approach, it becomes standard care for everyone else.
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Those are still options? The state isn’t going to force parents to use public daycare. However you might keep in mind that not everyone has an available spouse, and grandparents might not always be available either.
The incentive alignment of a stay at home mom who's taking care of 10-15 kids (which is typically what these operations are) to add some extra income is way better than a "real" operation that's got one manager and some min-wage employees running around herding 15 kids each while simultaneously trying to keep the state off their back.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect the former to have ADA compliant doors or hot water that meets state regulations but the "give a fuck factor" is just so, so, so much higher when someone is working out of their own home, one of their own kids is in the mix, the rest of them are kids of a friend or friend of a friend, etc, than it is when your kid is being looked after by some 20yo college kid who's doing this part time.
just flag it, and child comment below, and move on with your life. if it really bothers you, email hn@ycombinator.com. any ignorant mothertrucker can create an account and just spew hate. it's, ah, a design choice.
It's easy to promise things, but hard to deliver them. How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"
Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
As someone who grew up homesteading and seeing the benefits of it, I find it wild that people want to not only send their kids away to school full-time but also institutionalize them afterwards just so they can spend seemingly excessive amounts of time at work. The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently.
Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income in the US [1] [2]. Half of American renters are cost burdened [3]. I find it wild someone thinks "Why don't you just stay home with your kids?" looking at the macro. Can't all just live on a farm and homestead to raise kids in an unfavorable, punishing macro. Parents work because they have to work. To work, they need childcare and flexible work arrangements.
> "The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently."
Indeed. Is the solution to sacrifice for it? Or tax it to care for the human? [4] We can make better choices, as New Mexico shows. I'm tired of hearing its impossible. It isn't, it's just a lack of will and collective effort in that direction, based on all available evidence.
Nobody said homesteading is the solution. Allowing a parent of young children to care for them is not a radical idea though. It should not be hard to imagine a society that is more flexible to childcare being performed by parents, because that was the norm for all of human history prior to industrialization. People should seriously consider the ways in which their imaginations on this subject (and others!) are constrained by their post industrial upbringing, and importantly, why the current norms exist and who they benefit.
Indeed, this only occurs with unions and rising wages, where a single income from a secure job can support a family while a parent stays home to perform childrearing. Are we there? When will we get there? These are important questions to ask if this is a dependency to improving household financials to encourage the outcome in this context (a stay at home parent).
If jobs are tenuous or insecure, long term financial obligations will not be made (the cost to raise a child in 2023 dollars is $330k, not including childcare or college). If jobs do not pay enough, people will need to put their kids in childcare (which will have to be subsidized) or they will forgo having children [1] [2].
Regulation, my man. Doesn't require fitting into the existing framework that was invented to as a stopgap for dangerous factory working conditions. The barrier is people's preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like.
Can you expound on this? What regulation? What "preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like"? Unions and higher wages enable people to afford families, and I am an aggressive proponent of a 4 day work week at 100% pay considering productivity gains over the last half century, but I'd be interested in your thoughts.
There are infinite ways to do this and we could riff all day on it. The simplest as I see it would simply be giving individuals with young children the autonomy to dictate their work schedules, allowing them the option to make up the hours later, or even choose not to. In a way this already happens informally in nicer companies.
Portland OR is trying to do something similar ("Preschool for all") and is running into the exact problems OP identified, to the point that the Democratic governor is sending warning messages to the county: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
Yes, but can you find any that work well when the branch of the government that’s running it refuses to process paperwork from daycare providers or issue checks to pay those providers, and where its leader has prioritized getting the system shut down on the grounds that it’s “broken”?
(Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.)
Governance is hard. People are hard. I can show you examples across the world where policy works, and where it doesn't. Success is not assured, but if we're not willing to try, why even get up in the morning? If it sucks in Oregon, my apologies; states are where experiments can take place, and there are 49 other states we can give it a go in.
No, clearly, if it doesn’t work when 100% of the people administering it are intentionally sabotaging it from within, it must be a bad idea. /s
(I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.)
I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.
There are bad public services and fairly good public services. There are also some great private services and some bad ones.
There's no public roads where I live. They're all private easements, but you can pass through them no problem for miles and miles and get most the way to town without ever touching a taxpayer dime. I first built my bit of the road with a shovel , a 4x4 truck, and a hatchet which blows away what it would have cost my neighbors in taxes. If I tried to explain this to someone with no real concept of anything but a public road system their brain would probably explode trying to understand how this works out better than even many public road systems.
There are a lot of people with exploding brains who can never get to the point of realizing our private road system is working as well as public road systems, and other exploding brains not realizing the public roads are working as well as their private roads.
The main pain point I have tends to be that when the option for peaceful voluntary trade is available, I strongly prefer it over the violence of forcing others via taxation. Therefore I much prefer the situation of my community -- i.e. basically no police/fire, no public roads, and no public utilities. It works great but the pride point is the very low level of violence / involuntary funding necessary to make it happen.
Americans have been brain washed, these are deeply rooted belief systems like religions, that have an immune response when challenged. Steep climb ahead.
It's amazing how much of the opposition isn't a specific conceptual problem with the rightness or wrongness of the ideal behind the policy but re-litigating assumptions that are already accepted and baked into routine investments we already make to service and infrastructure.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
> Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result?
Paid for child care frees up some stay at home parents to enter the labor force; it's kind of circular, but some of those parents will work in child care. This won't fill the whole gap, but it will fill some of it.
We're likely 5-10 years out from a world where tappy-tap computer keyboard jobs are in a death spiral and caregiving jobs are one of the only fields untouched by automation.
You could've answered 80% of these questions for yourself by just reading the linked press release.
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
+1. That being said, universal k-12 schooling works because it is publicly run. A subsidized private sector model has a lot of bad incentives and issues to work out. As an example, I've sent my kids to a private school for the past five years, and last year our state introduced a voucher program to help subsidize private education. The school responded by raising the prices by almost the amount of the voucher, just for the age groups that it covered.
I'm not in charge, but if I were, I'd just have the government provide the services. I don't think middlemen, especially for not-very-specialized services, provide a lot of value vs 'just buy/lease some space and hire some folks'
Like I always said to my friend complaining you can't reserve a table at the Border Cafe: they don't need a reservation system if there is always a line around the block
I would've thought we'd eventually move past the point of accusing people of "concern trolling" whenever they have a legitimate counterpoint, but here we are.
Childcare is a great way to kick this off - it's politically hard to fight against anything "for the children" and it's not a stretch at all to extend coverage gradually, as people see the benefit and want it elsewhere / just one more year / etc.
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
If you want a quick response, you need either dedicated quick-responders (how are they paid when not responding) or you need a lot of slack in the system (caregivers are allowed 4 kids, say, but most have two or three).
“This time will be different!” announce the proponents. Watch now, class, as the economic calculation problem works out as predicted in yet another instance.
The majority of New Mexico is either not employed or only barely employed enough to count towards employment participation. The states employment participation rate is like 58%.
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
markets have criticism too. this is why we have nothing, neither roads nor businesses, and are currently hallucinating this conversation while scratching at the ground with sticks.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
Well, for the next century we'll keep pretending kids don't matter. We've done it for the past 50 years, already. Let's see how far that gets us as a species.
i’m down but i think there needs to be a recognition that this would require tax increases, not just on the ultra wealthy because there is simply not enough income up there to fund this.
>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.
How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care
child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.
State + local tax burden in NM is 10.2%[1]. Revenue neutral would mean those taking the child care would instead take a job with average salary $120,000. But as another comment points out this policy attracts new jobs to the state, which complicates the math
This is actually kind of smart: any other kind of social welfare like free housing or free healthcare could be gamed by people moving in state to exploit it without providing much in return. But free child care...this could genuinely attract jobs and people to work them for the benefit of the state as a whole.
They already have an income limited program. This is just going to cover the remaining kids. Honestly, programs like this are usually a net benefit for the entire state. Just like public schooling, housing, and transportation programs.
I wouldn't take these Truth in Accounting reports too seriously. They're linked to ALEC and take a very hard-right stance on fiscal issues, and in particular, this report on NM (which is also nearly five years old) seems to ignore the permanent funds---as best I can tell they are lumping them all under "restricted" and ignoring them, even though the land grant permanent fund, the largest of them, is totally at the discretion of the legislature and the others are very broad. The permanent funds are also now significantly larger than that report shows.
While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.
One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).
If I look hard enough, I can find a study that ranks New Mexico at every single ranking from 50th to 1st.
In particular, the study you linked ranks on a lot of factors outside the control of the school - which is largely affected by the huge number of poor people in New Mexico (#1 in the country... Which is why they got the rating they did).
New Mexico is filled with poor people, news at 11. But seriously, a lot of things go into your state's education outcomes: state of the kids coming into the system is actually very important, as is parent participation, before we even get to funding by the state. As the only poor blue state, New Mexico has a lot to make up for, and it can't just magic its problems away.
We have something similar in Quebec, $7 CAD per day. It's one of the coolest societal things in the province. Yes we pay a lot in taxes, but we have stuff like this.
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
Apparently until now they've been providing this only to families below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. FPL is $32,150 for a 4-person family, so $128,600 combined family income (2 people working for $64,300 each -- and that's before fed and state taxes are deducted). Since that is far from being wealthy enough to "just" spring for expensive care, I'm glad to see this.
My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.
Not sure where in California you are, but the SF Bay Area’s economy is heavily distorted by intentionally bad roads and artificial housing shortages.
Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.
That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.
For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.
Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.
On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)
Providing such benefits to those below poverty level doesn’t make sense to me. People are that level of economic value need to improve their situation before taking on the burden of children. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the poorest to have large families they can’t take care of. The opposite should be happening - we should subsidize households with demonstrated capability to be successful (which in our society does mean economically) to have more children.
That might sound attractive at first[1], but when we consider that there isn't a practical way to stop those poor people from having children anyway, what such a policy amounts to is that we punish such kids[2] for their parents' "sins" -- which is a great way to breed a generation of sociopathic miscreants bent on destroying your society.
[1] (if you can avoid thinking of the class-based eugenics that such a policy would amount to, if it were actually obeyed)
[2] punish by impoverishing them further, or by making it more likely they'll be neglected by those parents that you already suspect aren't responsible
That's wild. New Mexico is fairly notorious for having terrible medical and social safety net stuff.
I have a friend that had a daughter that lived there, and had serious mental health issues, and I'd hear nightmare stories about how bad the state was for that.
I have family with similar issues, in New York, and they get an amazing amount of state support.
I went on a road trip through Southern NM a couple years ago. Highly recommend stopping at Gila National Forest - it's a certified "dark park", remote enough from sources of light to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
One thing that struck me - towns down there had a template. 90% of towns we drove through were just a blood plasma "donation" center, a dollar store, a gas station, and a cemetery. Very bleak existence out there, oil and gas boom notwithstanding.
I haven't seen anything like that. The biggest factor you can clearly point to is that NM has some of the lowest salaries for doctors combined with some of the highest medical insurance premiums.
If you live there, and don't agree, then I stand corrected. I was told this by someone that lives there, but that's a sample size of 1 (from Albuquerque).
I live in rural New Mexico and medical services are very bad here.
I took my GF to the emergency room once with chest pains (turned out to be a lung infection). After an hours long wait we got to see the "doctor". The doctor came in in street clothes which were wrinkled jeans and a frumpy polo. He was not smart and from appearance, speech and thinking patterns easily could have been the janitorial mid level manager (no disrespect meant to janitorial staff). They did a chest scan, he said he would review it, then told her to go home and take a Motrin and then she got mysterious bills for the next year from the event.
I would go to Texas which isn't far if the emergency permitted it, and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Heh, I had a discussion with a security guard about rattlesnakes once while working in rural NM. "If you get bit by a rattlesnake, man, get on the radio and call me. I'll get you to the hospital. But we're going to Cruces... I'm not taking you to the hospital in T or C... you'll fuckin' die there."
>and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Just to be clear for those not familiar with the relative position of cities in Texas, imagine getting hurt in Illinois and the EMT's being like "the hospitals around here are shit, we're going to Gary".
I mean... as someone living in rural-lite, the hospitals in my county are crap; going to a big city nearby is a better choice. I don't know about hospitals in Chicago, and I wouldn't think Gary is big enough to be a hospital magnet, but it doesn't seem that out of the norm. Of course, Mr. Willson ruined Gary for me; I'd die if I went to a hospital there.
Important context here is that New Mexico's state income tax rates are in the "red state" bracket. Notably, they are lower than states like Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Montana.
Im probably in the minority on this opinion but I think its crazy to entrust your children to low paid strangers with no stake in their development during critical times in their lives.
Just as a general aside - The amount of hubris when it comes to Early Childhood Education is always astounding to me. So many people assume they are experts because they were a toddler once or can become an expert just by reading a couple books. How many people on HN are even aware there is an entire specialty in Education devoted to preschoolers for very good reason? ANY program that attempts to put kids in a good daycare with trained professionals is a win for everyone.
I'm very unfamiliar with New Mexico (having only been a tourist in Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a few days), but according to U.S. News it ranks 50 out of 50 for education: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education. Given some level of geographic mobility it doesn't seem like a place I would want to raise a child.
50 out of 50, plus the District of Columbia, for 8 consecutive years. I recently spent a few weeks as a instructional assistant in a New Mexico high school classroom. I saw nothing but highly dedicated professional teachers doing their best. But student performance is astonishingly low. I felt like running through the halls screaming like my hair was on fire, but there is very little in the way of alarm or anything but a few changes around the edges.
I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.
If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.
You have to look at variability. The cities are doing ok, but it is out in the rural areas, and the reservations specifically, where there are going to be extreme negative outcomes. There are areas on some of the reservations that are yet to be electrified as an illustration of just what kind of challenges NM is up against.
This is so important when looking at any statistic from an area bigger than "what affects you" - the schools in Roswell have basically no effect on those in Albuquerque.
The thing to keep in mind about New Mexico is that there are totally fine public schools here and there - Rio Rancho maybe, Las Cruces has some maybe, maybe some random ones in a few more remote small towns, Los Alamos, etc., but the state as a whole is extremely poor and has lots of reservations and pueblos which have huge complicated histories to overcome.
I will say that (and this is 20+ years out of date) coming from a good for New Mexico public school put me about a year ahead of everyone else in a decent California public school when we moved.
So overall my main point is that you probably want to look at schools on some kind of basis other than the state overall, especially in states like NM and AZ.
Ignoring the complicated history of the rural areas, I periodically drive Route 66, Since the early 2000’s, the bit in New Mexico has basically been eaten by climate change. I can’t imagine how much damage the encroaching desert (badlands? What’s the word for a desert that’s drier and dustier than before?) has done to the local economies.
They weren’t doing well before, but it’s not been trending well.
Having said that, Albuquerque is nice. Props to the Navajo nation for helping out with early COVID vaccine testing.
I'd also not want to move there to raise a child, but turns out people live there non-the-less - and the people who'd qualify for this program are the people who can't just pick up and move to California or New Jersey.
New Mexico is a very strange beast. It wants to be progressive and green, but is basically an oil state. There is a widespread poverty mindset of low expectations which prevents change because people are used to the way things are and don't want change. Crime is high, education is bad, health care is bad. Stupid drivers. Lots of corruption.
But you can have a pretty nice, affordable living in places like Taos, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and parts of Las Cruces and Albuquerque.
The state certainly has an impact on local schools. In California for example the State Board of Education sets standards for education, and recently it published a framework whose first version discouraged students from taking Algebra I in middle school. Delaying algebra to high school and delaying calculus to college are opposite of my own upbringing and seem very wrong to me. It also had other guidelines that I vehemently disagree with, such as de-tracking in favor of heterogeneous student grouping.
The reason we need this is because both parents need to work because wages are so low families cannot live on a single income. I wish we could fix that rather than allowing even more people to work putting more downward pressure on wages.
Where is the money coming from to keep these services afloat? The federal funding environment seems less magnanimous these days, plus as other have pointed out, New Mexico is not an economic powerhouse.
The NM state government has had surplus revenue for a few decades due to taxes on natural gas and oil, first in the northwest, which has since dried up, and now in the southeast. Previous state governments had the foresight to structure things such that this money goes into a trust fund from which the state draws interest. Of course all that money is a very tempting source to fund programs, and every session there are debates about increasing the amount drawn from the fund, for something or another.
I have to admit that with everything else that has been going on politically, I haven't followed this latest push for universal child care, and don't know if the way they are funding it is sustainable. But previous pushes for preschool funding, etc weren't IMO; they were based on pretty optimistic estimates of both fund performance and economic returns from the preschool programs.
Oklahoma has had free pre-K for years now. If a red state like Oklahoma can figure out how to fund child care, it should be easy for New Mexico to do something similar.
Perhaps this is one of those issues that gains momentum amongst enough states to become nation-wide phenomenon like other government-solutions/decision-for-social-issues do.
I think DC has the start of a really good system here. There's universal Pre-K 3 and 4. Most elementary schools offer it, but you can also get a large subsidy to go towards a private daycare. I'd love to see that expanded to all ages. Day cares here are super heavily regulated (and thus expensive) and apparently the paperwork is a nightmare for the day care, but in practice it's super easy for parents.
I see all these comments in the vein of 'why should you force people to work in the mines and not get to love their child' and I wonder if any of these people have ever had toddlers. I love my kid, and love spending time with her. But she really likes daycare (and now school). Not only does she get better socialization than me taking her to the park for 2 hours, but she learns skills that I wouldn't be consistent about teaching. It turns out, being taught by people who have years of practice and degrees in childcare is a pretty good idea!
We did Prek-4 at our public school and you could immediately tell the difference between the daycare kids, the nanny kids, and the home-parent kids. The daycare kids were much more prepared and able to cope, and this is at a school where parental involvement was quite high. I don't think the different approaches are universally better or worse, but it's clear to me that the quality of the daycare and the parent matters a lot more than which one you choose.
> New Mexico has expanded access to no-cost child care to families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, reducing financial strain on tens of thousands of families.
This is confusing me, is this the same as "at or below the federal poverty level" or is there something I'm missing with that 400%? Do you have to be 400% below the federal poverty level to qualify?
The federal poverty level is unrealistically low ($20k for two people, which would be difficult to make rent and eat three meals on even in LCOL areas), so they set their own “poverty line” to 4x the federal one.
It means that the current system provides free child care if your household income is less that 4x the federal poverty level. The new scheme doesn't restrict by income.
Many programs use that, or variations on like (like this 400%) - to index. So if the poverty line for a family of four is 32,150$ - then this program is available to your family of four until you make over 128,600$.
Others will say "below 200% FPL OR qualifying condition" (think newborn, pregnant, etc). So some programs are open to baseball player families, as long as the qualifying condition is there.
at or below 400% of the poverty level. so if the povertly level is 1k/month for a family of 4, anyone making 4k or less with the same size of family is included
The federal government has a very different relationship to states, than states do to their municipalities. This law couldn't be passed, even if "they" wanted to.
I've been told since at least 1980 that small, local government was best. I was given the impression that state level government was probably the optimum level to decide things, cities and counties could go off the rails in various ways.
I haven't see a coherent rationale for reversing course on this doctrine, which was extremely strongly held, and cited a lot.
That has never been true in practice. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court said that ICE can detain people solely if they are Hispanic and where they are.
I also think smaller administration cells are more efficient, but when the president of the federation can just reshuffle the congressional districts and meddle with universities internal politics we gotta rethink how independent these states really are. There is no silver bullet, specially in politics.
There is a rule of subsidiarity -- problems have to be solved at the lowest level possible, because it has the most information. If it's not, it bubbles up to the next level upwards. EU, US and Catholic church all do this to the various degree.
It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.
This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.
The vast majority of the EU does not offer anything close to free universal early childhood care like this. None of Western Europe. I can think of only Latvia and Romania off the top of my head.
> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.
It's not quite free in every state, although it's closer to that than many people here probably realize.
At least until 2025 (unsure how the July budget cuts will affect this longer-term), Medicaid provides free or low-cost insurance to eligible children/families, which in theory should apply to everyone who isn't eligible for health insurance through other means. Emphasis on in theory, though - in practice, there are plenty of people who aren't covered.
It's probably more accurate to say that almost all children are eligible for healthcare coverage, and that coverage is free or low-cost for millions of people who meet various income thresholds. (People who are covered on private insurance almost always have copays or deductibles, so it's not truly free for them because there is some out-of-pocket cost).
In Berlin I enjoy exceedingly cheap daycare for my kids (80€ for 2 per month, would be lower if I didn't pay the optional extra costs), as well as generous parental leave in the year after a child is born, with salary subsidy from the state.
This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.
Is it really "universal"? Bottom of the sea has subsidies for childcare for certain income threshold when both parents are working. It's pretty close to free childcare practically speaking.
> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state.
Whaaat?
I have 2 kids and I can assure you healthcare is far from free unless you are low income; cutoff varies by state but it's not high -- around $80K/year household income[0], which is pretty middle-class. We're not at all wealthy, but a few years ago we started making more than threshold for our state's Medicaid/CHIP program, and we now spend >10K a year for our kids' healthcare (granted we have a child with a disability so he's the bulk of that).
> It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.
This post is about childcare - ie daycare/preschool/babysitting - not child health care.
The point of the US has always been to make it easy for people to accumulate a lot of money, so that they can independently purchase things like child care if they need it, but if not, they can freely invest their money into other things.
Prioritizing cashflow over social safety nets results in a very liquid lifestyle, that can change quickly according to your own individual desires. Since you are not depending on any government handouts, you can simply take your money to wherever you see fit and live how you want. This appeals to many American individualist values.
If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you. Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
Unfortunately though in the US, this entire concept collapses when people are no longer able to accumulate a lot of cash. They will live in the worst of both worlds: broke and the government isn’t helping them.
> If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you.
You don't have to live any specific kind of lifestyle, but it is true that a sizable portion of your income still goes to the public institutions. You can send your kids to private schools or (in some countries) homeschool them, but you're still paying for everyone else's public education.
Same with savings and pensions funds, a portion of your income goes to the state pension fund, no opting out of that, but you can also invest in private funds or whatever else.
Nobody's, for example, forcing you to work a 9-5 like everyone else, you're free to start a business, be unemployed, work and also run a business on the side etc.
As for moving countries, you can freely move around EU member states while keeping the benefits. You are also still entitled to the benefits of your country of origin even if you move across the globe as long as you keep your citizenship and tax residency there (which might be more impractical than just forgoing the benefits though).
> Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
The wealth inequality varies quite vastly depending on which European country you're looking at. Also note that European does not automatically imply them being an EU member state. Overly general statements like these are totally pointless.
It looks like it's 1:6 until kids are 27 months, at which point the ratio becomes 1:10. When kids are 3-4 the ratio is 1:12, and when they're 5 and up, the ratio is 1:15. These are numbers from 2011, so not sure how that's changed over time.
> Programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate. New Mexico estimates an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals are needed to fully achieve a universal system.
Is this a reasonable wage in New Mexico? Here in Southern California you could not find qualified candidates for that but I know general cost of living is higher.
$18/hour is a really good wage in New Mexico for every city except the richest ones... mainly Santa Fe. It's really high for smaller towns and villages.
If AI does actually lead to large economic gains but also high unemployment, then we should be able to invest most in social programs like this and let people make a good living providing them. (as well as all other workers, through wage subsidies)
That said, if you don’t have a job… do you need childcare? But I’m assuming there will still be enough demand from those employed
I just want to +1 this post before it gets flagged for being "political" or whatever.
I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.
We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.
If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).
I don't think that's an accurate recounting of the reasons for the American Revolution. That '/' is doing a lot of work, and "wealth inequality" was not a topical notion at the time.
That said, this is a fine thing for a state to experiment with. From other comments, it sounds like NM's ability to try this out is related to a recent oil and gas boom. We'll see how it goes.
What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
Universal healthcare is similar. You want to support small businesses? Lack of affordable healthcare stops a lot of people from leaving corporate America to start their own business.
>What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
That's what happens when party doesn't have an actual policy stance and min-maxes their pooling numbers based on target audience instead.
Another more cynical take is "childbirths" is just a code for racism and "pro-life" a code for religious types.
It’s not just pro-life - even though it might encourage more women to not have abortions - it’s also they want to stave off the country from becoming “majority minority” to “preserve their culture”.
The minute they even think that minorities are help by pro child policies they will be back to the “welfare queen” dog whistles that Reagan did.
But to be fair, a few of the religious non MAGA conservatives did understand that the best way to reduce abortions were to support new mothers and children. But now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, they don’t seem to care about it anymore.
> What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
Didn't the Big Beautiful Bill include $5K for newborn babies? I thought I saw a headline that said that. But anyway, yeah, 5-grand is gonna solve everything. /s
I suspect that for every one job the government would subsidize for a daycare professional, that we’d see three women enter the workforce.
That’s a net of four people employed.
I have no proof of this aside from my own experience watching parents struggle to find care for their kids. Even well off ones where I live. In Massachusetts!
What's even better is this isn't costing New Mexico that much and it removes income restrictions for daycare. I think the total budget is something like $36 million extra with about $20 million of that being capex to build new facilities.
New Mexico has some serious generational social issues. Extreme poverty, lack of education, lack of work (or most anything else) ethic are very common. Drugs and alcoholism are endemic.
I wonder if some of the intent behind this is to reduce some of the generational effects by exposing children early to at least some semblance of order and sobriety? Then when they enter school they have more of a chance.
I'm not by any means "socialist inclined" but I can't say I'm against this program because the situation is dire enough something must be done.
I support my tax dollars going to pay for universal child care. This is likely the second or third largest expense for young families. To be honest, I do not know how people can afford to have multiple children in daycare in any major metropolitan area.
When I lived in Norway 35 years ago, I’m pretty sure they had this. Little kids went to barnehagen. I think as early as 1. Can anyone from the Nordic states chime in? Is that still the case? Does it work? I would guess Sweden and Denmark were similar.
This is is honestly an economic nobrainer. Of course it needs to be tuned correctly for the context. I hope they they look at the long history of this in the Nordics. There's an insane amount of economic research readily available.
Slightly tangent. At some point in future I can imagine humanoid robots will be doing this job. Of course, the robots need to be super reliable before we hand over the our kids
This still happen at daycare. If you have sent your kid to daycare/preschool, you'll know that kids become friends wit nother kids there, and parents can become friends withnother parents. A community forms because playdates are necessary when daycare/preschool is out.
> parents
Sometimes economic realities are such that both parents have to work to make ends meet. There are single-family households that also exist. Childcare is a necessity in these and other situations.
No one does because everyone needs to have a job to survive in the US today. It used to be that many couples could survive on a single income. Not only did that allow them to better care for their kids, it also allowed them to help their siblings, parents, other family members, friends, neighbors, and community.
> It used to be that many couples could survive on a single income
Historically, this is not true - women have always taken in work. Living on someone else's dime was for the wealthy only. The post-war years were a historical anomaly.
Imagine if we saw mostly headlines like this rather than things like "Trump threatens war on Chicago" or "Supreme Court approves racial profiling", or "Columbia students deported for protesting" or "Trump delays tariffs for 90 more days".
It's off topic to mention this, but I've become convinced that the richest among us really don't care about improving the systems and institutions that would really elevate humanity and unlock tremendous human capital.
Why would they? They’re wealthy enough to weather nearly anything. They do lack total power though, which is why you see Silicon Valley flirting with Yarvin.
This is fantastic! I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential. Families who were previously in poverty because the mom would struggle to pay for childcare to work can now have assurance kids are ok while the mom can pursue jobs, start her own small business (huge chunk of businesses are small businesses ran by women) and prosper. If you pose your child’s safety vs another dollar, most parents would vote for their children. But if the children are taken care of, parents can give the economy their best and the taxes paid and GDP gained will pay back for the expense manyfold.
Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare. Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers. This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
I just don't understand this mentality.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
There's two things I think you've overlooked. One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits. Additionally, when you don't have means testing, the bureaucracy is a lot more straightforward and politicians can't mess with it by effectively cutting the program by increasing the administrative burden.
> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.
This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.
I addressed your second point in another comment. If voters thought there was a societal advantage to financially encourage stay-at-home parenthood with a subsidy, I'd be open to listen to the pros and cons of that, too, but that's kind of a separate issue. This one is about easing the burden for those who already pay for professional childcare, including those on the margin.
The first point is just unfortunate humanity crab bucket mentality. "Others shouldn't benefit if I don't." I don't think there's anything we can do about that :(
It's not a crab bucket mentality. Subsidizing one group that competes in the same markets (e.g. only dual income families, who compete with single income families for housing in desirable areas to raise kids) actually increases costs for the unsubsidized group. It doesn't just make them relatively worse off, but absolutely worse off. It shifts the margin of who can afford a single family lifestyle, all else equal.
Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.
My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.
Yea, more dual-income families means:
- Bidding up the price of housing
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
The number of people in this thread workshopping their libertarian edge cases on an item of immediate importance strongly suggests the crab bucket. The comments don't reflect an understanding of the situation people are in or a grasp of the dynamics that led to it.
How is advocating for a larger unconditional child credit libertarian? As someone else in the thread pointed out, it's effectively UBI for children. It's literally advocating for more people to receive government subsidies. It's not even a crazy proposal since we already have a refundable child tax credit, so it's a matter of making it bigger.
Anything that might lead more towards decentralizing societal structure away from the state and quasi-state subsidized institutions back towards family units is considered "libertarian" on HN. Truly universal childcare "UBI" puts the power back into the hands of parents, rather than society taxing then lording over the head of parents as to which people are allowed to care for their children with it, just not funded in a libertarian manner. This is seen as a reduction in the power of the state which is a libertarian aim.
So we've come to a crossroads where something profoundly un-libertarian is viewed by the anti-libertarians as libertarian because it incidentally achieves some of its aims.
> One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits.
It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it and why is that a better place than where this policy is currently drawing it?
If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.
Yes, but that should be the point. Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. Subsidies fail these conditions. On what grounds should we delegate nonpublic goods/services be provided by the government and not the private sector?
The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
I’m unable to get the electric car tax credit for this year because my income is too high. However I’m likely to be laid off next year. Seems like I should get the benefit as my group status will change.
Yes.
Childless people are free to start businesses to provide services that can take advantage of those rebates.
The argument you’re making in general is a valid one about subsidies, it’s a weird argument to make regarding children since having children is the only way society survives. Unless your claim is that we’re overpopulated but generally people in developed countries are not reproducing, and a meaningful part of that does appear to be the cost.
So the answer is that this specific subsidy is net beneficial as we want to make it easier for people to have and raise kids, not least of which because it produces better adults when those kids grow up and makes society healthier.
This is a great point, and the obvious answer is the government should provide zero subsidies or welfare programs. Every single program creates moral hazard and deadweight loss. Iterate your question to conclusion, and you will arrive there.
What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.
Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.
I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.
This strikes me as part of the disease of thinking like a tax payer and not a citizen. It's about the service/resource availability, not the money. And your system seems to create more perversion than what you're reacting to - a bunch of people keeping score to make sure they get theirs.
In AZ we offer ESA to homeschoolers, vouchers to charter or private school kids, and then normal tuition free public schools.
That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.
I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.
+1 This whole mentality of voucher system is selfish.
Even if we consider it as an "efficiency" problem, it is far cheaper for a person to be paid to take care of N children (where N is not too large), rather than have the have the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field, take care of just their children.
It’s not any more selfish than wanting subsidy for childcare. A voucher system is about choice. Parents get to have some financial assistance to make it possible for them to stay at home and be with their kids, or to provide their children with experiences that aren’t just sitting in the daycare center’s room. If they want to do things differently, why shouldn’t they be able to? Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
> the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field
Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids. And their qualifications in some other field doesn’t mean that working that field is better for them or their kids or the country. Having strong family structures and time together is pretty valuable.
If I as a taxpayer am going to subsidize someone else's activity, then why shouldn't I get a say in how they perform that activity?
If it costs $100/child at a daycare facility, but $200/child for someone to be a stay-at-home parent, and you're asking me, a random taxpayer, to pay for one of those for someone else, from a financial perspective I will likely prefer to pay for the former.
Now, I personally don't get to decide where tax dollars go, but I could easily imagine there are enough people with this preference that it could influence public policy.
Having said that, if it's actually significantly better for a child to have a SAH parent, I might change my tune. (My mother was a SAHM, and I think that was great for us growing up.)
The ask isn’t for more for the parents who stay at home, it’s for the equal amount.
In your system you’ve created a messed up incentive where parents are better off just sending the kid to the daycare and having the mom sit at home and do absolutely nothing.
> Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
I generally agree with you, but often the reason that these programs work economically is that those who don't choose to use them still contribute. There are (at least) three different categories: (1) caregivers who will care for their child themselves regardless of whether or not free care is available elsewhere, (2) caregivers who will find care elsewhere regardless of the cost, and (3) caregivers who will make use of free care if available, or otherwise, care for their child themselves.
I think the group (1) has a tendency to be higher income. It's certainly not true of everyone in that group, but I would wager that a significant number of people in that group do not need the financial assistance. Those people not using the free resource, but still contributing to funding it is what makes it economically viable.
Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.
"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.
People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.
> Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids.
Are they really though? I mean, I was raised by mine, and I've done well enough for myself, so that system can't be too bad, and most of the rest of humanity has also been raised by parents, for since... before there were humans. But if we look at this from first principles, it doesn't actually make sense. First, we let just about any random pairing of two humans, one of which has a uterus, can be a parent. Think of the most average person you know, then realize that half of everyone is dumber than them. Then put them with someone else that's just as dumb. Now give them a baby. And then add sleep deprivation on top of that. Seriously, it's a wonder that the human race has managed to survive this long.
Experience is another thing. Even the most talented brilliant person needs to practice to reach their full potential. Raising a child as a skill is no exception. So we're gonna have absolute amateurs each raise a child, and then, most likely, throw all that learning and experience they did away and not have 10 more. Practice makes perfect, so let's not do that.
What sort of training do we give parents before and during their parenthood? Before we send people off to do a job, non-stop for 18 years, how much training do we give them? Four dedicated years of college with plenty of lab and field work? Not in the slightest. Parents are expected to fund their own education for this job.
Finally, the incentive structure is misaligned. Children don't make any financial sense, since the passage of child labor laws. Don't get me wrong, those laws are a good thing! But from an economic intellectual standpoint, it doesn't make sense to fuck up your life like that. Birth rates in the developed world reflect this. It's obviously a problem though, because children are our future and without them, humanity dies out in a generation. So omg holy shit, have kids. Societally, we need them. Society's only allegiance is to it continuing, and it doesn't without kids. Unfortunately they can't show an ROI in a single quarter, so we'll have to figure out a better mechanism for it, but for something so important, our future, shouldn't we want our best and brightest people on the problem? Yet we don't spend rationally. In the US, the school shooting industry (what schools spend on security in response to school shootings) is a multi-billion dollar industry. That money would be better spent on counselors and on the teachers. But back to my point, we'd rather have unpaid amateurs raise children on their off hours, instead of hiring professionals to do it? And make them pay for it as well? Make that make sense!
The failure modes are known. Children get molested, abused, killed. Raised wrong. Those are corner cases, for sure, but I wouldn't argue that those parents are qualified to raise kids.
Still, that's how we've always done it, and holy shit kids are cute, and you love yours, so of course we think parents are qualified to take care of kids, but we don't actually do any qualification except in the worst cases that we know about. Everyone knows somebody that knows somebody that had a bad childhood and didn't get the government called on them though.
Children being raised by parents we assume are qualified is how we always done it, so the system works well enough, because humanity hasn't ended. But if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it that way.
Good government policies generally avoid step functions otherwise you get perverse incentives.
For example, if you lose too many benefits when you get a job, it can easily make getting a job yield negative expected value, this is bad because often it stunts future career potential.
There may be families that cannot quite afford to be a stay-at-home mom even though they want to. Providing the waiver also increases the overall fairness. In rural areas there are generally far fewer childcare options, so this becomes a benefit that accrues to those that live in cities. Not very fair.
My house has never been on fire, should I get a tax rebate for never needing service from the fire department?
Government services exist to help people who need them. The idea that government services need to have the same net effect on every citizen is unusually popular in the US and is part of the reason we have worse government services than our peer nations.
Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.
The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
>Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.
The same is true for things like childcare and education. Improving outcomes for the next generation doesn't only benefit them and their parents, it improves the entire society.
>The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.
You're just debating whether "everyone gets the same" is a better definition of "fair" than "everyone gets what they need". The only way for the government to satisfy the former without UBI (which I would support) is for the government to offer extremely limited services. That's the situation we're in. Because as I have said in another comment, the same argument that applies to stay at home parents applies to childless people so offering any childcare support is unfair according to the "everyone gets the same" definition.
Need is ill-defined. People have all kinds of different ideas for what they need.
I think it's worth considering what has significant majority support. For example I believe it's something like 80%+ support some kind of childcare subsidy or tax credit. Some childless probably make up the 20% just as some would prefer not to have a fire brigade.
At that level of support just pass the subsidy / tax credit and let the families figure out how to apply it (paid daycare or homecare).
This is more like saying you'll get a tax rebate if you move from your family home you built with your bare hands into a megacorp built condo complex of equal value and fire risk.
> My house has never been on fire, should I get a tax rebate for never needing service from the fire department?
If you live in a city, there's a good chance your house hasn't been on fire because of the work of the fire department.
Isn’t the idea that many families want to have a stay at home mom, but can’t afford to and are forced to work.
Therefore a waiver would help with this?
In most of those other households, it's highly probable that they wish they could have a stay-at-home-parent but can't afford it. A small payment can help nudge people over the line where it suddenly becomes financially viable. A voucher type solution would also work great for families that would also prefer to e.g. hire a private nanny instead of sending their child to daycare.
Also, stay at home mums often like to sometimes be able to use child care facilities. I doubt they feel cheated that they don't use it on the majority of days they prefer to spend with their kids...
But why not let them go to child care on those days, get those reimbursed, but also use the funds for other things (like supplies for raising kids at home, or to pay for other activities you take them to that aren’t just daycare)?
Because the point of subsidising care is to remove cost barriers to parents getting back into work or dealing with other stuff or socialising kids in a day care environment, not to turn parenting into a profit centre
Why would providing vouchers turn parenting into a profit center? That’s a cynical way to portray one side of this when you probably don’t take the same harsh view of the other side. The point of subsidizing care isn’t to get parents “back into work”. It’s to help people raise children. That’s it. You’re gatekeeping what this is for as a way to justify unnecessary centralization and a lack of choice where choice is possible.
Providing vouchers to pay for daycare doesn't turn parenting into a profit centre. Providing parents with $12k per child per annum which they can either spend on daycare or anything else they want if they don't need daycare does (and has the opposite effect of the current policy: it keeps the opportunity cost of daycare the same and lowers the relative value of going back to work)
I'm still lost as to why it's OK for daycares to be taxpayer subsidized profit centers but it's bad for a parent to receive the subsidies instead because some other parent may hypothetically be turning a profit on the kid if they just feed them pork and beans and stuff them into a closet.
I'm still lost as to why you think taxpayers need to pay people who don't need free stuff for not using the free stuff? I mean, if parenting during the daytime is so unpleasant or expensive parents need a $12k subsidy to stay at home, they can just use the daycare... right?
So your position is what, the people who currently weren't getting free daycare don't need it because they were already getting by? You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it.
I'm willing to accept that position, I'm not necessarily for free childcare, only believe that if childcare is to be free it should follow the child. I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child. What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back -- trying to track to which caregiver the money goes instead of just providing the resources for the child and let the parents decide what works best for their family.
> You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it.
Nope, I'm the one explicitly not ignoring the major rationale behind providing universal free childcare, which is that it removes a massive disincentive to using childcare (it's expensive), with the result that parents are less likely to work or take on other responsibilities some of the time and less likely to take their kids to nurseries to help socialise them.
People who mostly look after their own kids still benefit from the free care when they do need it, and those who would prefer to look after their children 24/7 regardless are essentially unaffected[1], unless of course they are the sort who upon seeing others enjoying a free lunch, become preoccupied by the thought the food supplier should probably pay them for having a full stomach.
[1]I mean, someone's paying a little more tax at the margin, but that's spread over a lot more people and the stay at home mums barely feature...
> I don't see at all how a mom taking care of a child "needs" the money less than a daycare worker/company taking care of the child.
You don't understand why daycare centre employees would like to earn a living? Or you don't understand that paying some trained professionals to look after your kids in a big building might cost a bit more than staying at home with them and maybe buying an extra meal or two?
I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
> What you're proposing is just yanking the money away from them in a tax, then lording it over them that they have to take the latter if they want the cash back
Nope. Actually, when it comes to yanking money and telling people they can get the cash back if they do something (have an infant kid and quit their job to look after it) that sounds rather more like your proposition of giving indiscriminate cash handouts to parents. I am pointing out that subsidising the amount of third party childcare parents actually want to consume requires considerably less tax money to be yanked away and has a different set of incentives.
> I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
The fact that you argue for daycare workers to be paid but not parents is honestly astonishing.
“No, we will not give you $100/day for your kid but we will happily give $100/day to BabyCorp to watch your kid” is a really fucked up policy stance unless you explicitly want to break children apart from their families. If that’s the goal, just explicitly say it.
> The fact that you argue for daycare workers to be paid but not parents is honestly astonishing.
I think it's even more astonishing that you are arguing that it's normal for parents to have so little love for their own child they should bill the government for time spent with them.
If my stay-at-home mum was like that, I'd definitely have preferred the full time daycare. It was even possible for her to send me to daycare some of the time without breaking the family up!
They are arguing the exact opposite, that parents love their kids enough they might move mountains to take care of the kids themselves if only they get get a bit of the taxes the state is sucking dry from their family back, enabling it to economically happen.
>Nope, I'm the one explicitly not ignoring the major rationale behind providing universal free childcare, which is that it removes a massive disincentive to using childcare (it's expensive), with the result that parents are less likely to work or take on other responsibilities some of the time and less likely to take their kids to nurseries to help socialise them.
The major incentive for providing childcare subsidies to everyone but stay at home parents (who now have net negative in this whole scenario post-tax) is to disincentive stay at home parents. If the idea was just to aid with childcare the aid with go with the child. You're purposefully excluding stay-at-homes from the definition of childcare, which is false and disingenuous.
>You don't understand why daycare centre employees would like to earn a living? Or you don't understand that paying some trained professionals to look after your kids in a big building might cost a bit more than staying at home with them and maybe buying an extra meal or two?
No I don't understand why daycare employees would want to "earn a living" any more or less than anyone else. I also don't understand why the fact their expenses are higher means a larger value was provided. If I dig for gold for 10 hours with an expensive machine and you dig for 1 with your bare hands, and we both end up with the same amount of gold I haven't created more value than you.
>I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare.
All well and good until you have men with guns showing up to tax the cash and force that incentive, the same men magically saying it is childcare when anyone that the parent does it. Goal here is clear, destroy the family unit as equal playing field in consideration of what is considered childcare, and put childcare corporation on a pedestal instead.
>Nope. Actually, when it comes to yanking money and telling people they can get the cash back if they do something (have an infant kid and quit their job to look after it) that sounds rather more like your proposition of giving indiscriminate cash handouts to parents. I am pointing out that subsidising the amount of third party childcare parents actually want to consume requires considerably less tax money to be yanked away and has a different set of incentives.
This is essentially the argument against taxation -- I actually 100% agree with you here and it's part of why I'm an ancap who is staunchly against this yanking. It is the argument for eliminating all child subsidies / welfare / public schooling which I think would be the absolute best thing for children we could possibly do. However if we have them, I'd like to see them apply equally rather than just payments to places like your proposed "profit-centers" of childcare corps. I will say you've handily played into the hands of the intertwining of the rich business owners with government to enrich themselves at the expense (via threat of violence of armed revenue collection agents) of stay at home moms.
> The major incentive for providing childcare subsidies to everyone but stay at home parents (who now have net negative in this whole scenario post-tax) is to disincentive stay at home parents. If the idea was just to aid with childcare the aid with go with the child. You're purposefully excluding stay-at-homes from the definition of childcare, which is false and disingenuous.
The objective of providing free childcare to anyone that wants it is to enable people to avail themselves of free childcare. Just like free firefighting and police services; it's not "false and disingenuous" that I don't get to define myself as emergency services and invoice the government for my services if I manage to keep my home crime and fire-free without their assistance. Nor is my tax bill and other people getting their fires put out at taxpayer expense a disincentive towards using a fire extinguisher if I think I can handle it myself.
> No I don't understand why daycare employees would want to "earn a living" any more or less than anyone else. I also don't understand why the fact their expenses are higher means a larger value was provided. If I dig for gold for 10 hours with an expensive machine and you dig for 1 with your bare hands, and we both end up with the same amount of gold I haven't created more value than you.
Value is also determined by the fact that stay-at-home mums are willing to look after their own kids for free, and childcare professionals are not. I'm not sure why a self-professed ancap is having such a great difficulty understanding that markets enable people and companies to charge to look after others' kids (with or without government intervention), but do not enable people to charge for looking after their own.
As for parents who want to earn a living as much as childcare staff, now they can go and earn that living without having to pay most of their salary to someone else to look after their kids...
> All well and good until you have men with guns showing up to tax the cash and force that incentive, the same men magically saying it is childcare when anyone that the parent does it. Goal here is clear, destroy the family unit as equal playing field in consideration of what is considered childcare, and put childcare corporation on a pedestal instead.
In between the tedious cliches, you seem to be ignoring the fact that childcare that costs $1k per month isn't on a "level playing field" with childcare that doesn't. It's not putting something on a pedestal to remove the bill.
Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...
> It is the argument for eliminating all child subsidies / welfare / public schooling which I think would be the absolute best thing for children we could possibly do
The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?! Sorry you managed to complete nearly two whole posts of pointless nitpicking in the guise of being pro-family and then you hit me with this!?
I mean, I get the people that think it's so important to incentivise stay-at-home parenting or to avoid any child being even slightly poor that the government should pay every infant's parent at least as much as daycare centres currently cost... that just happens to be very expensive. Don't get self professed ancaps who freely admit they don't care how/if the kids get looked after arguing the system that costs the taxpayer significantly less and doesn't disincentivise participating in labour markets is a worse one than the alternative of handing out max_childcare_costs to every parent...
>The objective of providing free childcare to anyone that wants it is to enable people to avail themselves of free childcare.
The objective of excluding the parent from that has been made pretty clear at this point, which is a deliberate choice to destroy the family unit.
>Value is also determined by the fact that stay-at-home mums are willing to look after their own kids for free, and childcare professionals are not.
The free market value of taking care of 1 child under some arbitrary standard of care is not meaningfully impacted by the fact an arbitrary person might do it for free, anymore than the fact I might be willing to search for gold for free reduces the value of gold. It will have some effect in aggregate, but that effect would impact the whole market so is meaningless in the context of differentiating a universal payment.
>Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...
It indeed does make it easier to decide to work if you're now getting taxed to cover $12K per child of every child in the whole state going to daycare, and you get none of that for your own kid unless you put them into daycare yourself because magically your own childcare doesn't count.
>The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?
I said from the beginning I wanted a waiver. i.e. reduction of taxes. I would put taxes at 0% and free up lots of jobs and returned tax money to low-earning families so they could afford more for their children, which I think is the best thing possible for them. With the added effect they can spend that money freely rather than having a state lord over them what one public school they can spend it on or lording over them with their own stolen money what childcare provider they can use.
The reason why I would argue for equal subsidies if they're provided is I believe either no tax, or equal subsidies is the most liberty minded solution. The solution where the state forcibly taxes and then lords the money over you depending on whom provides the childcare is the lowest-liberty solution of all of them. That is why I'm a temporary ally of the policy alternative I reference.
Got it, family units are destroyed by kids spending some time at nurseries. Free market values aren't determined by what the free market actually pays for services (absolutely nothing for parenting your own kid, potentially a lot more for looking after someone else's) but by weird analogies to gold (children of course also being a commodity). Parents are of course, famously transactional in their relationships with children, with the key priority being maximising how much the government spends on their care. If daycare is subsidised absolutely everyone will claim the maximum amount (just like the alternative you propose!) because otherwise all the burden of paying for it will fall upon stay-at-home mums (I dunno, maybe the income tax on their massive parenting salaries?) and not spread across the wider taxpaying base, the highest paying segments of which generally aren't parents of infants. Putting up taxes is bad, but putting up everyone's taxes much more to subsidise -checks notes- people who enjoy looking after children so much they'd prefer it to free daycare is better. But the best possible thing for low-earning families is for them to have to lose all benefits and pay for care, schooling, medical bills etc, because if there's anyone that pays more into the system than they get out of it, it's low income families...
Not gonna lie, if it requires this much compounded nonsense to construct an argument against childcare vouchers, the case for it is much better than I thought :)
The act of subsidizing childcare doesn't only help stay-at-home parents work, it forces everyone in the market to work more to maintain their same standard of living.
Flooding the market with new labor increases the supply Against a fixed demand, this lowers wages. So everyone not getting the subsidy feels pressure from stagnating wages plus the increased tax burden.
Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes.
All this does is modify the equilibrium of supply and demand in the market such that those not receiving the subsidies (or evem those not receiving as much subsidies as others) are negatively impacted through lifestyle discrimination.
> Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes
Let's not make the absurd assumption that parents continuing their careers and more daycare centres in operation must be net negative for economic growth.
Even if that was the case, the alternative proposal to subsidise parents equally large amounts whether they use it to pay for childcare or not would result in a larger tax burden paid for from a smaller economic pie.
Because processing reimbursements and extra record keeping is exhausting and adds to the mental load for Moms. Keep it simple, safe, and reliable.
> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.
> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it?
This is rather noble of you, but the reason is obvious. If the playing field were "levelled" then you wouldn't have to be lucky. It is all well and good that you are lucky, but there is a certain population who want to emulate your choice but are unable to, because they are missing precisely the marginal amount that the childcare provision costs. It is a political choice to say that those people should not be able to pursue home-care of the children in order that we can avoid giving out a rebate.
I never said I opposed a subsidy to encourage stay-at-home parenting. By all means, we should propose it and study its pros and cons.
But the lack of that subsidy should not cause someone to oppose a paid-childcare subsidy.
>> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.
> I just don't understand this mentality.
I don't understand. Wasn't your original comment opposing an equal value waiver?
Right. I agree, but I think you are appealing to generosity when it works just as well if you appeal to greed and selfishness.
If I'm a parent who does not intend to take advantage of the program and therefore not to get any benefit directly, and I assume the program is done well and not rushed, I could reasonably expect:
- More parents able to be in the work force (immediately) - Better metrics for the young children entering. Especially for at risk. - Savings from less crime in the future. - Higher attainment of students when they enter the work force later. - Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)
My understanding so far is that this leads to spending savings in addition to QOL of life improvements. And that's just for me. I want to live with less crime and less tax liability.
Asking for additional waivers imo just increases the cost in areas that will not as directly achieve the benefits of the program as stated. The only reason to ask for it is as a negotiation tactic.
I think the most important thing is to focus on the quality of the program and make sure the resources are there. And to make sure opportunities persist to prevent "fade out". I think that might have been the difference between Oklahoma's success in pre-k vs a program in Tennessee.
> Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)
Why probably not? Childcare before primary school is a huge expense in the US, I think the largest for a healthy kid, around 24k$ per year where I live, so basically every other child is another 24k$ to the budget, or one parent not working. With this approach, having 2 or 3 children is more feasible, and the money saved from universal childcare could be in part invested for college or the child's future.
Let's go with this (I pay a little more than $24k/yr/kid for care now).
Does the influx of gov mandated childcare centers reduce the annual expense for parents? If so, it does so at the cost to the current workers by reducing their salaries.
If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.
The benefit is lower wages for those competing against the new laborers and likely higher government tax inflows?
> If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.
Sure, you have that short term impact, but it seems NM society has chosen to take on the burden for this.
Long term impact for this measure however is worth it, as the state children will be better educated, and will commit less crimes, at least that's what research says. So long term you will have more taxpayers, and maybe hopefully have to spend less in security.
Why wouldn't you want your friends to better be able to afford what you have, by getting an equal value stipend to stay at home if you're for universal childcare? There are many families that might be only one or two tuitions away from being able to stay at home with their child like they had wished, and assigning the waiver/voucher to the child instead of to the daycare can make that happen.
And no it's not a free lunch. If stay-at-home in a family isn't reimbursed, they are actually worse off, because now they have an additional tax they are paying that they did not have before. So now even more people like you who wanted a parent to stay at home are driven out of it because their family budget comes upon this tax.
Let it go. Everyone gets some tax benefits that others don't. Childless people get many fewer social benefits than people with children. We don't need to quibble over microgrievances.
We shouldn't provide any welfare services. Then we will all be equal. For as much as you Elsa folks quible about people being against giveaways, what is so harmful about not giving thigs away involuntarily?
I'm not sure I follow, but I'm open to being wrong. The point of this subsidy is not to encourage people to move from paid-childcare to stay-at-home. That's a totally separate economic decision. The point of it is to ease/eliminate the burden of those who require paid-childcare.
If we think there is a societal advantage to financially incentivize parents to stay-at-home with a subsidy, I'd be open to looking at the cost/benefit, but it's a different issue.
And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted. Not every tax dollar I spend needs to come back to me in the form of a benefit.
> And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted.
This seems like an unrelated consideration though. You may be significantly worse off. Maybe the government that provides this raises taxes considerably to make this work. Or maybe they take on crippling debt. Maybe their credit rating goes down.
So if I pack my kids lunch but other kids get a "free" lunch I'm worse off? Yes there is no "free lunch" I'm paying a tax for something I don't need. The comment you are replying to already anticipates this. How is it not the same argument? Your budget comment also puzzles me. What if my existing family budget is put under stress by the "free lunch tax" so now I'm even further away from being able to pack my own lunch? How is it different? Because it's a "new" tax? You can make the same argument for any tax then. At the end of the day are your children better or worse off if their future fellow citizens are growing up under roofs that can't afford childcare or healthcare or food? For someone that seems to know enough about costs and incentives and tradeoffs you seem to have quite a constrained view. Also, I'm curious about your waivers claim re costs because I would think given the scenario you laid out that would make the program more expensive. Your taxed for things other people use more than you. That's what society is. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people obsess over this as if they are being personally violated when really it is often just greed in the face of the common good.
It's very convenient that it is greed when the stay at home mom wants an equal voucher, but not greed when a mom joins a capitalist for-profit enterprise for whatever wage she can avail herself of with the childcare bill footed by everyone else. Which is precisely what we are discussing.
Your argument smacks of insincerity due to its limited scope of viewing SAHMs as moms providing childcare.
1/ You haven't mentioned how that SAHM must get a cooking credit, healthcare, retirement or house management credit or anything else in the litany of jobs required outside of immediate childcare and costs incurred by simply existing as a woman. Just a voucher for the hours, I assume, at which childcare would be open and none of the other hours
2/ A SAHP (thats stay at home parent) should be incentivized by raising wages and allowing life to be more affordable but your argument seems to be very focused on "moms" and "capitalist enterprises" and does not consider the reality that when SAHMs were more economically viable, it was not viable for all families.
Make it a progressive tax then? The point was many people can afford to help others to make society better for all. But you only want to pay taxes for what you're personally interested in? If you think stay at home needs to be prioritized in some way, as another comment mentioned, that's a separate argument. You are also relying on scenarios that don't even sound plausible. If someone can barely afford stay at home and this tax makes it that painful for them, then make it more progressive. Then again I'm not sure they are equivalent. At the end of the day a majority deciding something like this is in the common interest and you having a problem because you won't personally take advantage of it sounds like greed to me. No one should be going broke because of this tax. If you think capitalist mommy is making too much while you foot the bill then wouldn't the remedy be to tax her more? Are you worried about people who can't afford the tax or do you just resent some people for getting societal benefits while also making more than you?
I'm not talking about "prioritizing" stay at homes, I'm talking about just giving them the same thing the company/entity that would be taking care of their kid would get paid for doing it. I'm speaking of removing the prioritization for commercial childcare.
Semantic games. At the end of the day if x is prioritized more than y and you want x and y to be equal you do want a relative boost in the priority of y. So fine. As I said I'm not sure they are equivalent or how this specific objection can't be applied to any other tax in a way that feels implausible. Should I get a voucher if I pack my kids lunch? Why are we "prioritizing" commerical food preparation?
>Should I get a voucher if I pack my kids lunch?
Yes. And no. The gov gives the child X$ per week/month/year. The child parents use that money to take care of the child.
Society benefit from children that are well taken care of. Mechanisms to ensure that they are well taken care of are needed. Well funded daycare centers are one of the mechanism. A well funded household with a parent/grand parent/uncle is another one. In both case, an agency is in place to ensure the wellness level of the child.
> I just don't understand this mentality.
It is bad faith reasoning. If you imagine a person that does not want women to participate in the workforce but wants to express that in a way that doesn’t sound repugnant, it is pretty easy to see how someone would come up with that.
The way you can tell that it’s bad faith is by looking at the context that “pay women to stay out of the workforce” gets brought up. In this case it is framed as an alternative to providing childcare, but those two ideas have nothing to do with each other. As a society we could do both. The “pay women to stay out of the workforce” or “pay for childcare” dichotomy is completely made up, and folks that engage in that particular type of make-believe are either profoundly intellectually lazy or being intentionally disingenuous.
because your wife (and in turn your household yes) deserves to be compensated for the socially valuable labour first of all?
> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it
It affects you like if your neighbor got a $5000 tax credit and you didn’t.
It’s community money paying for it so it impacts you because it is your tax dollars being spent.
If my neighbor already gets a $5000 tax credit remodeling his bathroom or installing a new/greener boiler. Should I get $5000 for not remodeling?
You have demonstrated the point of the policy.
What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.
No.
Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home?
This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table.
The conversation on this table is: Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not own, an apt and live, not save for the future. Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
We cannot continue to expect people with choices to have children given this economic situation.
Trust me. You want people to continue having children, and you'd prefer them to be positive additions to society, for your own well-being in old age.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear initially. The point is that women should not stay home. Yes, this is “fully gendered” because reality is fully gendered. Far and away the majority of childcare is performed by women. Always has been. Always will be.
The emphasis on jobs over children as where we want women’s energy, time, and attention to go is what is being demonstrated by this policy. We will pay you to leave your children with others. We will not pay you to take care of your children.
Why anybody thinks this will result in more children being born is beyond me. Sure, it might make it “easier” in some sense to have children, but what it teaches is job > children, and that is going to result in people learning to deprioritize children. As intended.
"We want women's energy and time" seems to indicate "not women" want women's energy in time.
If you will not pay "women" to take care of "their children" rather than, say..."the future of society" or "our children" then women will not have a child.
And that is exactly what you're seeing happen. Women worked in all times. Every single time period you can think of. Population is dropping because
a/ we have rights as women and are outstripping men on every measurable term within just a couple generations of access
b/men are not stepping up to create something more equitable
Men have been offered the chance to step up and change the current (and yes its current, not a "natural state" of affairs) dynamic.
The idea that you're striking on is defining my life for me and quite frankly, with your benefit in first position.
That's not going to work.
> Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
This is a major statement, and I don't think it's fully qualified.
Why have childcare expenses imcreased by 30% in the past few years? There should be an arbitrage opportunity if costs have stayed fixed. If costs have increased, is it due to general economic pressures or increased regulatory burden? If the former, wages should catch up (and flooding the market with additional labor likely will exert downward pressue market wages). If the latter, then why on earth are we passing such nonsense regulation?
In either case, moving out of a major metro is always an option.
Hi Jesus
According to a quick google and the census: || Approximately 3 in 4 Americans (or about 86%) live in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA), with the percentage of the U.S. population in these areas reaching an all-time high. As of 2024, nearly 294 million people—or about 86% of the total population—resided in a metro area, a trend that continues to grow.
If we think the wage differential will keep up in less populated areas, that is no longer occurring either. We do not live in a perfect capitalist system and many trades, activities and services are given benefits and protections for a variety of reasons.
There are other places - outside of the US - that have provided this tax credit. Its not shameful to learn from other countries and adopt things that are going well and are beneficial both to the freedom of people and the economy.
> What is it that is being incentivized here?
Getting all children early education, which has been shown to have huge effects later on in academic performance (better) and criminality (less).
Let's say college is optional for the individual, as the child/teen decides.
Why is primary/middle/secondary school free and public, but daycare/preschool not? The child can't decide for itself, and there is data showing that having early education benefits everyone.
Does this provide education or care? Being in childcare in and of itself is not correlated with better outcomes. Only high-quality care produces such results, and greater hours in non-family-member childcare results in long-term negative outcomes in for example impulsivity and risk-taking, regardless of the quality of the care.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2938040/
Exactly. If the incentive was to take care of children, the money would go with the child whether they are taken care of by a stay at home or someone the state can tax income from.
100%. This is also why it makes sense to have money move with the child regardless of whether they’re in public schools or home schooled or at a private school.
If I'm already benefiting from a new boiler, I don't need another new boiler just to get the $5000 tax credit. This is silly. There are benefits to being a working parent vs a stay at home parent and if you have access to stay at home care you simply don't need it.
This is like getting mad that my workplace offers pet insurance when I have no pets so I demand the money anyway. Or demanding a trophy for not participating in a competitive sport.
Of course it affects your situation. It’s paid for from taxes so it takes away from other things you as a taxpayer could have, right? But also if the goal is to incentivize raising children, someone who wants to raise their child in a family centric way rather than outsourcing it should have help too right?
But leaving those arguments aside, I also think that only subsidizing daycare is too one size fits all, just like with public schools. If people want to raise their kids differently, they should be able to get assistance. Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
> It’s paid for from taxes so it takes away from other things you as a taxpayer could have, right?
I don't expect every tax dollar I spend to come back to me in the form of a direct benefit.
> Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
I would be 100% open to this sort of taxpayer-funded educational enrichment for families who can't afford it themselves, depending on the usual criteria, like how well-run/efficient it is and so on.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives.
But this is true in the other direction, too. Means testing costs money, time, and ensures some needy folks fall off the program.
For example, Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/no-savings-found-in-fl...
It’s a red state, so the goal was probably to waste as much welfare money as possible, while also reducing benefits.
They’re doing this on the federal level now. Most popular government programs have been cut or sabotaged, and as a result the debt is increasing by $4T.
Well, it's not wasting money when you redirect it to a drug-testing company your friends own.
> Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved
It's more complicated than that. Of the 6352 people who applied for TANF, 2306 dropped out during the process. Then of the 4046 TANF applicants remaining, only 2.6% tested positive for drugs. The vast majority of media coverage focused on the 2.6% being less than the ~8% drug-use rate in the general population.
What we don't know is of the people who dropped out, was this due to unintended reasons (privacy concerns, the inconvenience of the drug test, missing deadlines) or due to the intended reason (people self-selecting out because they knew they would test positive and become ineligible for 12 months). We'll never know the real breakdown, but it's misleading to say "it cost more than they saved".
The state tries to take kids away from people who use drugs, so I would expect custodial parents to be below the average drug use of the general population.
Nah, the article addresses that theory too.
> An internal document about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, caseloads stated that the drug testing policy, at least from July through September, did not lead to fewer cases. “We saw no dampening effect on the caseload,” the document said.
Please read the article. Since 2019, they had a program that was means tested. The new proposal is to expand it to all parents
> With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.
You're entirely missing the point of my example.
> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.
It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling problem, they will probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with a paying their rent problem, they will also probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash. And then everybody's rents will go up because families with children have more capability to pay.
Nothing is ever a perfect system, but there are many more things wrong with the current system than concerns about the equity BETWEEN different working class families in different situations. Some of those dysfunctions will happily consume most of an incrementalist policy solution to an arbitrary problem. Direct provision or vouchered provision of necessary goods and services has a lot of minor problems, but it happily mitigates our ability to let one problem eat an unrelated solution.
> rational geeks
Geeks are as emotional and irrational as everybody else. They are even worse in fact because they can rationalize their behavior even harder.
It’s referencing rational geeks and not all geeks or geeks who believe they are rational but just actual rational geeks.
Oh, oh okay, okay, wow, well, that's an important clarification then.
In Poland, they have a "universal child benefit" that pays a stipend for every child you have.
They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.
From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.
So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.
The US has a similar thing with the child tax credit. It looks like Poland pays out the equivalent of about 220 a month while the child tax credit pays the equivalent of $180 per month. If you only count the refundable portion it is $140. Relative to the cost of living its worse, but the concept seems similar.
There are also state-level subsidies in virtually all states, depending on things like your income.
> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay ...
By your own argument, this policy dilutes the value New Mexico / Feds were prior giving to the poorer parents who met the means testing New Mexico used before, then, no? Because this isn't the beginning of "free" childcare in NM, they are just expanding it beyond the prior poverty-line times 'X" means testing.
Ergo per your logic "real outcome would be reduced benefits" to the poorer parents who already had subsidized childcare.
Edit: accidently switched "childcare" to "healthcare" a few times, flipped back
"But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care."
And that's the argument against many of these policies - removal of the needs based testing. Odd to see you defend the policy on the very basis others attack it on.
I would very much be considered someone who doesn’t “need” the funding, but when deciding between having a 3rd child or just sticking with 2, I wasn’t comfortable enough to afford 3 in daycare and helping 3 through college. However, I expect my offspring to be significantly greater economic contributors to society than the average. It would have made sense for society to fund my childcare to incentivize me to populate the earth.
>Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?
"it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care". Looking at data like 77% of US workers would face financial difficulty if a paycheck was delayed by just one week. I would imaging % of people with kids who don’t need it for child care is fairly tiny.
> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
This exists. It’s called the Child Tax Credit.
If the children have any parent that is working, whether it is one or two, by definition they need more money.
The real reason this is “bad” is because the policy actually being implemented is, as the GP comment demonstrates, to get women into the workforce. This requires the goal to be getting them out of the home away from their children. Thus, you must relatively penalize mothers who stay home and care for their children, which is what this policy does. Of course, it is worse for children, worse for families, worse for mothers, worse for just about everything except “business.”
Edit to add: It is only better for the business and the economy short term, because ultimately it results in a lower birth rate and below replacement level fertility is the main problem we currently have for the near-future economy
You're reading waaaay too much into this. Nobody is getting penalized, this is a crab bucket mentality.
Yes they are. If you stay at home you now pay an additional tax on top of everything else.
Nobody's being targeted for additional tax. But correct, benefits aren't being spread evenly across the population. That's how pretty much all social benefits work.
Hell, think about how childless people must feel about this. Or the child tax credit. Nothing is "perfectly fair", but sometimes public policy is good enough.
Childless people are getting the best deal of anyone. They get new social security payers with a better invested upbringing, all for paying out a pittance and offloading most of the cost onto parents -- all the meanwhile having their social security payout almost completely untied to making the investments needed to get their payment.
Childless people basically get their cake and eat it too under the social welfare scheme of most western countries, getting the benefits of children without having to deal with much of the drawbacks.
s/women/men/g and do you still think your argument holds?
Literally what Canada did under Harper, and then grew substantially larger under Trudeau.
End result is that Canada's child poverty rate was cut in half over the aughts.
https://x.com/trevortombe/status/1100416615202533377
And yes, it hit the same political hurdles you'd expect. A Liberal-party aide helped lose the 2006 selection by saying parents would burn it on "beer and popcorn". He's still around as a consultant and professional trash-talking commentator. This is ironic considering how the party championed it's success after they (rightly) expanded the program.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/liberal-apologizes-for-saying...
I guess Youre not a fan of UBI?
That feels like an entirely separate policy. This one is about making sure small children have care, not whether or not people deserve a minimum guaranteed income
This is basically UBI for parenting, so it's hard to see it as "entirely separate".
A core tenant of UBI is the universal part: everyone receives the benefit. High income, low income, rich, poor.
If you remove the cost of regulating a benefit, then there will be more money available for people to get this benefit.
I'm not the user you're asking but the same logic holds true for UBI, yes. The societies with the most effective social welfare programs do it via a robust and de-stigmatized social safety net. I think most of the common criticisms of UBI (it will make people lazy, its not fair, it will cause inflation etc) are silly, and I also generally support universal programs over means testing or exemptions. Still, I will be a skeptic until I see a somewhat large scale successful rollout of a UBI program beyond just studies and pilots.
Many of the Persian Gulf GCC nations essentially had a form of generous UBI since the early 80s. It has certainly made people far less enterprising and productive. Inflation hasnt happened since they import the vast majority of their requirements. It has led to increased religiosity etc since people are freed up to engage in religious activities all day long and don't necessarily have to develop skills like social competency or engage with others.
Many north African and middle eastern states tried to switch to democracy and that did not go as planned either, would that mean that democracy does not work?
Any policy (UBI or others) must take into account the state and potential of the country. Based on the Gulf state UBI example (if correct, I did not check) it would mean that with their initial conditions UBI will not result in developing skills (although, thinking of it, maybe their purpose of giving UBI was close to the one observed, their ruler don't strike me as very progressive).
In a world where we produced so much that we have caused climate change and mass extinction, I can't imagine people being less enterprising and productive being a truly bad thing.
A weird side-effect of this is UAE/Dubai, and to a lesser extent some of the other gulf states, have become far more open to relative free trade and immigration as a result now that the citizen's cake is assured and immigrants are not much a threat. Now Dubai is a burgeoning hub of relative "free trade" and international commerce, with pretty lax visa rules for people from surrounding more trade hostile countries to run a business in a more business friendly environment, in a region that prior was fairly impenetrable.
There are many things that may be better overall, but because they're not financialized, they don't show up on GDP and so are deemed "worthless."
Breastfeeding doesn't move money around, but formula does; things like that.
Cooking your own meal doesn't raise GDP beyond the cost of supplies, but door-dashing from a restaurant does.
In the book 'Double Entry' the author explains that the guy who created GDP was actually in favor of having family caregiving and household activities accounted for in GDP. If that had happened, different world
This actually DOES occur at the margins, in some cases.
If you have a severely disabled child (who is on SSA), you often can get certified by the state and get paid as the caretaker. Then the action appears on the GDP.
Thanks for mentioning this book. I just bought it, looking forward to reading it.
More realistically here, there’s a limit to the funding any individual state can come up with to fund benefits. Tradeoffs have to be considered and increased workforce participation increases the tax receipts that fund these programs. It’s not much more complicated than that.
It's sometimes surprising to read a comment like this, which applies just common sense, basic math, and logic, instead of the typical online comment mixture of hysteria, panic, and portraying one's non-favorite "team" as a bunch of mustachio-twirling cartoon villains.
You read a lot of books about economics, history, and political science and suddenly everything starts to look like it's complicated. The recent trend of commentators shouting "it's actually not complicated" is troubling. I try to present commentary with some nuance and humility. I have a perspective, but I endeavor to leave room for the possibility that I don't have a full understanding or that my model of the world doesn't fit every set of circumstances.
The key I realized is that there is always complexity, but the "simple" understanding is still "mostly" right.
No complexity can make a $1 billion expense able to be paid with $1m of revenue.
> but the "simple" understanding is still "mostly" right.
I rarely find this to be the case for anything big or important.
I find it dubious that adding the people who don't find it financially feasible to use childcare to cover working hours will generate tax revenue to cover this due to the low income and low tax nature. Not to mention the addition of the cost from all the current paying families.
> I find it dubious that adding the people who don't find it financially feasible to use childcare to cover working hours will generate tax revenue to cover this due to the low income and low tax nature.
You can actually think through your belief. The announcement provides a concrete number: $12,000 per child. Do you generate $12k in tax revenue? Note that this means direct and indirect tax revenue, not only from your job and what your employer earns from your work but also with your own expenses that you can cover by having a job.
Yes, I understand that and still don't think that adds up. Things like SNAP for a family of 4 would be less than $12k per year. And that increased tax revenue would have to offset the currently working and paying families that will now use the program. We would have to wait for the experiment to conclude to see what the increased earnings for participants will be.
> generate tax revenue to cover this due
That's not the claim I'm making. Someone entering the workforce has tax implications for a local government far beyond their individual tax receipts and will increase their future earning potential.
You imply an overall net netral to net positive. I find it hard to believe that would total $12k per year. If there are complicated n-order effects, then perhaps you should call them out instead of saying it's not complicated.
> I find it hard to believe that would total $12k per year.
Again I didn't claim that. The tradeoff is generating some percentage of X benefit in economic activity vs some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger.
I fail to understand what value your initial comment holds. The grandparents of that comment was talking about financial feasibility of the program in the context of a proposed waiver. This necessarily implies that on-topic responses to that should be weighing financial feasibility of the program with and without the waiver. Your most recent comment seems to just be clarifying that your initial comment is just the same generalized explanation for the current expansion - expanding the benefit to the currently working higher earning parents where the return is unclear and logically dubious, thus providing some much lower percentage of X while X is much larger. The only way to claim what your comment is trying to is to also display some evidence that this current expansion will provide economic activity benefit beyond the previous program that had 4x poverty level means testing. Otherwise, it's simply "some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger" vs the same thing with X being even larger.
The idea of extending the program to pay people who aren't using the benefit directly sounds nice in theory but would cost way more and incentivizes people to not work. This necessarily makes the broader version of the program even more expensive than it appears at first. A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care. This offsets the cost a little. Giving essentially cash payments to people who stay at home has no such offset. So it is much more expensive and disincentivizes people working which might slightly offset the cost.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare
There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.
"A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care."
This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.
"and incentivizes people to not work"
This would only incentivize low income individuals to not work, which could actually be beneficial as it could drive a living wage increase in that labor segment if employers had to compete against the benefit.
>This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.
I don't think the benefit is even contingent on the parent working, and it definitely isn't contingent on the value of their current and discounted future earnings appreciation being greater than the cost of sending the kids to daycare. From what I can tell you can put the kid in daycare then lay on a beach if there is anything of that sort in the New Mexican desert.
I'm open to the argument that by certain measures "free" childcare leads to increased economic output, but they've certainly not crafted the program in a way I would expect someone with that aim to do it.
> There are many things that may be better overall, but because they're not financialized, they don't show up on GDP and so are deemed "worthless."
I think you're confusing GDP with a measure of worth or quality. It is not. Just because you can earn money doing double-shifts in a coal mine that doesn't make it better than spending the same time at a beach doing nothing.
It's a confusion the whole world seems to have, even if you ask everyone and they'd deny it.
GDP of a country is flat for 10 years, but everyone is happier and healthier and feels better? Bad country!
GDP is soaring for ten years, but everyone is depressed, suicidal, deep in debt, overweight, and dying early? Good country!
I'm not sure there is equal value, in economic terms at least. A stay at home parent caring for 1-2 children comes at the opportunity cost of a full time worker, which would typically be a lot more than 12-24 thousand dollars this is saving them in childcare costs. On the flip side, a childcare worker in NM can care for the children of ~6+ such stay at home parents (depends on randomness of ages and number of children each had).
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
and these $12-24k are net dollars so the parents needs more like $20-40k of gross income to pay for it, but now they can have a small job or small business that nets them even as low as $15k and still come out ahead
In Sweden we value equality and everyone working. If someone is wealthy enough to have a stay-at-home parent it's their choice to do so, we shouldn't subsidize the rich.
It is good for children to go to a place where they learn to interact with others early. We give 480 days off to the parents to share (90 "mandatory" per parent), then they go to childcare.
Individualism breeds privileged shits, if you want your kid to be one of those then you pay out of your own pocket. We subsidize childcare so everyone can afford to work.
You don't subsidize the rich, yet you subsidize rich child care corporations (or high-level bureaucrats in the event it is public) at the expense of not subsidizing stay at home moms.
You don't want people paid for taking care of their children, but it's OK if other people are paid for taking care of their chidlren.
None of this makes sense. Especially not this false dichotomy that either you send your kids to daycare or they don't learn to interact with others early.
We live in different societies, yours is extremely on the individualism spectrum and ours is on the "common good" spectrum. We don't subsidize the childcare corporations here, we do what's best for society.
I might be wrong, but I believe in Sweden salaries are able to be publicly found. Find some high level people in the public or private childcares in your nation who are beneficiaries of these subsidies and then tell me how rich they are compared to the average stay at home mom.
There are barely any stay at home moms because it's socially detrimental, the ones who are are either social outcasts by lack of capability or religious oppression.
We should not subsidize stay at home moms or dad's because it's bad for society, if they can afford to do it or stretch their economy to do it for other reasons it's their bad choice, and we allow free choice even if it's bad, that's why cigarettes are still allowed.
I don't know who to look up, but if you have some suggestions I could look it up through ratsit.se
I appreciate your honesty, there are not many willing to admit it's really about viewing stay-at-home parents as morally deficient. I have no interest in refuting the argument, it might be true, merely to point out I think why we're having so much trouble getting straight answers is that the underlying motivation is going unspoken.
Depending on how they structure the childcare, women who want to stay with their kids can be childcare providers at one of the centers, so they take care of not just their kids but also others. Similar to the Israeli Kibbutz system.
One of the reasons to care for your own kids is you can give them individual attention. Unless you have so many kids that you are only caring for your own anyway your plan diverts their attention away to other kids (or those other kids get less attention)
The argument is that stay at home parents should get the same credit as childcare providers because they perform the same service to society. If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids. You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
> If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids.
I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.
> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.
If you're trying to be efficient, you could also put 100 kids in a room with an adult to do whatever as long as the adult can keep them alive, but most people would recognize that the services are not equivalent. It's not more efficient; it's lower quality.
That's literally the exact same argument. 100 being too many doesn't mean 1 is ideal. No one is saying there isn't some threshold beyond which quality drops, just that the threshold is higher than 1.
Your characterization of the service provided is "adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues". That sounds to me like a lower quality "service" than what e.g. my wife provides, which is actually raising them, teaching them, giving them emotional support, taking them on errands around town, etc. Even with your own kids it's way more difficult to give them as much attention when there's 1 vs 2, so I find the assertion that quality of care doesn't drop after 1 to be dubious as well.
> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults).
In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.
>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.
In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care.
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. An interesting one is that children who spend extensive time in daycare even end up less socially competent which is quite interesting since it runs contrary to one of the typical arguments in favor of daycare. But it's also not surprising if you think about it, because at home a child is getting vastly more attention and interaction than he would in daycare.
And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=long+term+outcomes+of+dayc...
> You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur."
These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization.
> Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more.
You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly.
> Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on.
Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim.
[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/learning-deve...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...
Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).
Would you mind providing a link to one of these studies?
One reason to send your kids to daycare is so they can socialize and make friends.
Also, the daycares typically have structured programs that are fun and helpful for toddler development.
I don't know if that's what they had in mind, but "stay at home mom" is probably not just men/women who solely watch their kid all day long. A full remote worker keeping their kid nearby would probably fit the same criteria, especially if the couple is both remote and they can split dealing with the chores.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
> With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed.
And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy. A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work. Is this really what you want? If it is the poor your care about why not subsidies just them?
> And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy.
That's fine.
> A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work.
I don't get what point you think you're making. Do you believe that not offering universal child care changed that?
> A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work.
I’m confused; how does your preferred policy solve this problem?
I don't have a stated preferred policy here. I'm questioning if the post I replied to really preferred this policy.
Policy is a constant battle of unintended consequences. I clearly understand that nothing isn't immune from those consequences, and so I'm constantly adjusting my preferred policy trying to find the least bad compromise.
This isn't a perfect solution. If you want the most equitable then you go the UBI route. Otherwise you have to do fixes like this in order to make things better. Also you have to do the ROI on means testing
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
It does no such thing. If you could afford to be a stay-at-home mom before, this isn't going to make any significant difference to that.
Think of whether it would make sense if you applied your logic to other areas -- do public schools disincentivize people sending their kids to private schools? That would be absurd to say. Creating choice where there wasn't any before doesn't "disincentivize" anything. It gives people options to make the choices that are best for them.
I totally get the reasoning behind that, but the majority of women are not stay at home moms, and most families don’t have the resources to make it happen. Society is just not oriented to family creation, and both women and men (to a lesser extent) take a hit when they decide to start a family. The entire world is in a fertility crisis now that could easily endanger the very society we live in, with all the ideals and principles we take for granted, and that calls for solutions that may not end up being absolutely fair to everyone in it. If the tradeoff is between childcare that actually works versus a watered down version because we are also paying people who don’t avail of it, I think the former option will do most to support families.
I agree with you except the part about the policy making a dent. Scandinavian countries have all sorts of "universal childcare" and benefits, and their TFR is still going straight into the shitter. All this talk about expanding the GDP and going towards total workforce participation IMO is why family formation is slowing to a crawl (I mean look at South Korea, where it's all about being a workaholic and they basically will cease to exist in maybe 50-100 years, literally). If we want to continue as a nation or entity of people, I believe the people and the government are going to need to put their thumb on the scale in a way more aggressive way, including both childcare credits for all, paying stay at home parents a salary, major cultural changes (including our own version of the Soviet Mother Heroine/Order of Parental Glory that carry real status with them, perhaps), and economic and cultural pushback on being a DINK or similar. We have no future the way we're going, and these sort of policy interventions have been tried elsewhere and they don't do shit. We really have got to rethink a lot of things, in a way that's probably painful or irritating to the readership here, otherwise we're basically done.
You don’t want just kids, you want well raised kids. Badly raised kids are easily a net negative, so just paying people to be parents isn’t going to work.
The only thing that might incentivize people to think about the long term is getting rid of all old age benefits (including continuous bail outs of broad market assets by the federal government by sacrificing the purchasing power of the currency).
Right now, we take productivity from people who sacrifice to raise kids well and give it to those who don’t raise kids well, or not have them at all.
This obviously leads to an arbitrage opportunity (as evidenced by DINK lifestyles).
I do not see any other way other than to remove this arbitrage opportunity. Which probably will not happen in any democracy due to old people’s voting power.
I beg to disagree. In Switzerland, a lot of emphasis is put on assimilation to a Swiss identity via pre-school and school. Now this eventually raises the bar for parents to raise their kids, but it also acts to Swissify immigrant kids quickly as well (and 25% of the residents in Switzerland are not born as swiss, many of those are refugees from African countries that America has problems dealing with). America's DIY hands off parent-focused system consistently has the worse results of all the world's developed countries, and is proving to be worse than even developing country systems.
Switzerland has not achieved a replacement rate TFR since 1970.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/che/swi...
Any sustainable policy would obviously result in a TFR of at least the replacement rate.
I have no idea what TFR has to do with anything here. So Swiss people aren't having kids like they were before, that is not relevant to education outcomes, maybe they are just really good in teaching sex education.
A sub replacement rate TFR leads to extinction, not to mention wreaks havoc on government policies that have long been dependent on growth.
Switzerland has a high immigration rate, so they aren't going to be hit by this in the short term, and in the long term I don't think they are going to sweat some population loss.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.
From the government's point of view, they want more people out in the workforce, so it probably doesn't make sense that way.
Sure. Right after I get all my tax money back from all the userless wars we've fought in the last 20 years because I was against them.
Weird to assume people who support an increased child credit aren't also against devoting resources to pointless wars.
That's clearly not the assumption at all. The idea that we can pick and choose what we pay taxes for is not a reality. That's not how this works. There are tons of subsidies, pork, and other ways my tax dollars get used that don't benefit me at all. Just because you don't have a kid or choose not to use the new system, doesn't mean you shouldn't pay your share of taxes, just like everything else in this country.
No one said they're not going to pay taxes. They advocated for what they consider to be a better policy. What you're saying is like responding to someone who thinks we shouldn't start random wars with "we don't get to choose what we pay taxes for". Uh, yeah, we do get to advocate for and vote on how the government spends our money. We can and should point out that starting pointless wars is bad and we should encourage others to support a policy where we stop doing it. Arguing against specific uses and for other uses of taxes to build consensus for your point of view is exactly what people are supposed to do in a democracy.
I agree.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
This is how it works in Finland, but with some adjustments based on family income. You are eligible for up to 500€/month if you take care of your child. The other option being childcare costing up to 300€/month.
I see benefits for stay at home Moms, universal childcare means she has somewhere safe to drop her kid off while she goes to her own doctor appointments, or when she needs a break, or if there’s a family emergency she needs to attend to or even if she’s going into labor to bring kid number 2 or 3 into the world. There are a lot of stay at home parents that don’t have family near by or a reliable sitter and this can help plug some gaps.
In what way does this disincentivize anyone? If you want to stay home with your kids, stay home with your kids. This is literally not preventing anyone from being a stay at home parent.
Lots of two-parent working families do the maths, and realize they would pay more in childcare than the income from a second job. This incentivizes one of them to stay at home. Here, the incentive is gone. This is worse for the economy and probably the family.
I can see arguments that it's worse for the family, but why is it worse for the economy to have two parents working?
Suppose childcare is $15k/year and you work minimum wage making less than $15k/year. Then there's less wealth to go around, just more in your pocket. But actually, you probably don't take home all the wealth you create, so it can actually still be better for the economy. It is still worse for the economy, but not for that reason. Probably because labor has a backward-bending supply curve, and most people are already working more hours than is optimal. As another commenter said, it would probably be better for the economy to make a 30 hour work week.
Your taxes pay for the public service whether you use it or not. Take a look at your property tax statement and I bet you can find all sorts of things you may or may not use: parks fees, library fees, health/hospital fees, schools, etc. Should everyone who reads but doesn't use the public library get a book voucher? I'm a stay-at-home-reader, why shouldn't I get the government to subsidize my reading?
As a resident of New Mexico I can tell you that it is a miracle that we can afford to launch this program at all. Perhaps when the long-term economic benefits begin to pay out, we'll be able to pay people to support their personal preferences. As it stands, while I don't have kids at home anymore, I can see the long-term economic benefit to the state, and am very pleased that my tax dollars are helping to get this done.
I don’t get a voucher for not receiving medicaid or food stamps. Fairness is a concept meant to tame unruly preschoolers, let’s just solve problems.
Absolutely.
Nothing is free. This means less resources for something else, marketed as "compassion".
Mothers generally take much better care of their own children than childcare. Childcare was already previously available for low-income families. To incentivize women to work when they can afford to care for their children is very bad for a country in the long term.
Norway does this. Kindergartens are nearly free ($120/mo), but with a "cash-for-care" benefit for parents who choose to stay at home with the child ($750/mo).
https://www.nav.no/kontantstotte/en
> You can receive cash-for-care benefit for children between 13 and 19 months, starting the month the child turns 13 months, up until and including the month the child turns 19 months. You can receive cash-for-care benefits for a maximum of 7 months.
so, no, extremely limited compared to what's being discussed.
I wonder why they don’t have the same allergy to a voucher program that is prevalent in the US on the political left. For some reason, letting people exercise their agency and do things their own way is seen as a threat here.
It's not an allergy to vouchers. It's an allergy to diverting tax payer dollars away from public schools and into subsidizing religious indoctrination centers. There are good religious schools: I've been largely impressed by the Jesuit-run schools I've seen. But most religious private primary and high schools in the US are run by weird little cults that fundamentally fail to meet muster in the whole "not being thinly-veiled excuses for indoctrination" side of things.
Americans are stupid enough without stripping them of what little education we do offer them.
> It's an allergy to diverting tax payer dollars away from public schools and into subsidizing religious indoctrination centers.
All schools are indoctrination centers. Some very progressive cities push a lot of political programming into their curriculums. Why does it matter if someone wants their child’s education to have THEIR flavor of religious indoctrination? The money follows the child. The money for kids staying in public schools stays with them. So it doesn’t divert anything away.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
They are strictly less efficient than commercial daycare because the adult-child ratio is much higher. How many women would be of out of the work for if they were taking care of children?
Also, it prevents trickle down and the lifting of the poorest in society.
Less efficient? No they aren’t strictly less efficient because they provide MUCH better quality of care.
To less children. Even if the area under the curve was the same (and I suspect that there very much are diminishing returns) they have a very negative effect on the Gini coefficient and that is a negative externality that should not be incentivised.
If your position is that people should not be compelled to contribute to overall society and the lifting of the boats of others, than there isn't enough alignment of values for a meaningful conversation.
It does offer a potential backdoor to UBI while also encouraging desirable outcomes -- increased birth rate for wanted children, more people willing to foster, optionality for women to enter workforce, etc.
I suspect there will be some fraud (I have 30 kids, wheee!) as well as foster/adoption abuse -- probably AZ's experiment with paying parents to home school would be instructive.
At the median: probably. At the tails: probably not.
However, they provide superior level of childcare.
While true, social policies do not need to provide an equal benefit to everyone. People who can afford to stay home with the kids are not the ones who need this sort of policy.
This makes sense. If something objectively good happens, it is not actually that good if a completely different good thing did not happen.
I’m sure people will find creative ways to scam the system where I watch your kids and you watch mine, and both of us get paid for it.
Nonsense. Absolute Fucking nonsense.
because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
Not sure about your point. I live in Europe, and State pays for the first 1 year or two. Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).
From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?
Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
> I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
Actually, any job she likes? In this case, it's not for the baby, it's for her. Being with a child 24/7 has its toll, and people are social animals, they like being with others. In this case, work - especially white collar - is a kind of rest for parents. At least this is the attitude of many fresh mums (and dads) around me.
Taking care of a baby can be very social ... as long as the other mother's aren't all at work.
And what exactly are these jobs that are a rest compared to taking care of a baby? Are they actually economically productive or are they bureaucratic fake jobs?
I have noticed that many of my peer parents make parenting more stressful than it needs to be, and don't invest enough in learning techniques to make it less stressful. Like, some parents don't even invest in baby-proofing and then they are constantly chasing their toddler around. But, the first year of baby is always going to be stressful because everything is so new, just as the first year at a brand new job is always going to be more stressful than a job one is highly experienced at.
> Who gets to be sleep deprived?
The live-in nanny. A high-paid lawyer and a sr software engineer together make, let's presume they make $500k/yr combined. They should take some of that money and hire someone else to do it for them. The question shouldn't be to compare one mom's job vs taking care of two children, there should be a team of professional adults taking care of a cadre of children. Amortized over that, the numbers look a bit better.
> there should be a team of professional adults
Look up how much housing costs, and how much professional nannies cost, in a location where the software engineer and lawyer are making $500k combined. And you'll need at least two nannies, one overnight, one during the day. I don't think the math is going to work out very well. Also, there are a lot of greedy jobs that don't pay nearly as well as $250k, especially early in career.
Family is not the point of life. Family is a chore we put up with to get to the point of life, maximizing profits for employers.
I was with you til the end, so now I need to ask what you really mean by "greedy jobs". I took it to mean jobs that are all-consuming, no fixed hours, high pressure, high stress. If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy. The vast majority of jobs are non-greedy by this definition, unless the US has really regressed so far from Europe as to be unrecognisable.
If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.
What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.
In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.
1 greedy job + 1 non-greedy job + daycare is surely better for the economy than 1 greedy job + no job, isn't it?
If the economy is what you're trying to optimize for.
I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...
Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.
That only works if you have at least 5 kids. Otherwise the ratio of kids to caregivers is higher at the daycare than with a stay at home parent.
No, because you have to count all the employment going into running and supplying the daycare, which includes facilities, equipment, administration, extra staff, etc. You have to look at the all-in cost.
I've never seen a daycare with more than 5% of staff doing admin. Either it's a small daycare with a handful of workers and everybody doing care, or it's a large one with one person doing admin.
It all adds up. On average, daycare in USA costs $18k a year per child ( https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/ ), which is the best measure of the total resources that it takes up, all-in. Median income for a 30yo man is $55k and for a woman $45k. So even with just two kids, the lower earning parent with the non-greedy job is not clearing much if anything over the cost of the daycare.
i just got laid off 1 week after coming back from paternity leave.
Agreed. We should have been freed a long time ago:
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Unfortunately late capitalism made sure we went in the opposite direction.
There are more important things women - and other people - can do than simply grow the economy.
One of the reasons you must have a two-income household to be economically middle-class in most American metros now is because two-income households became the norm. When I was growing up 25-30 years ago, that made you comfortable. Then people realized that there was "untapped" value in that extra income and raised prices accordingly. If you're looking to buy the things that make up the "American Dream", you are now competing to buy against people who are willing to throw two incomes at the problem.
Now that there are two incomes, the only way to grow is to start shedding other things that keep people from creating more value for their employers. Kids, home improvement, community involvement, all are - or have been - going by the wayside.
If I'm not mistaken, Elizabeth Warren has literally written a book about this problem, so it's not some reactionary desire to keep women in the kitchen.
This would solve a lot of Republican’s problems as well. Israel has the kibbutz system and they have the highest birth rate of developed economies. They also have amazing tech and women participation and excellent contributions even in the military. If you raise the country’s children well, you get more GDP and less prisons and less need for policing, and less need for welfare programs. Plus you get quality workers for those american-made factories.
Only about 1-2% of Israelis live on a kibbutz, and unsurprisingly that number has recently fallen. You actually see the elevated birth rates even in Tel Aviv. There’s a broader cultural expectation that would be impossible to recreate elsewhere.
Israel's current birthrate has more to do with the ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities and nothing to do with the kibbutz system. The ultra-Orthodox communities are also exempt from those "excellent contributions even in the military". While female ultra-Orthodox participation in the workforce is around 80%, that's largely due to males not participating (50%).[0]
0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-mens-employment-growth-...
The problem with more people entering the workforce is that the people never end up better off. Prices just go up and people end up working more for the same result.
Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
Making mortgages with a > 20 year term illegal, putting limits on the total principal allowed to loan as a multiple of income, and barring entirely non-human (i.e. any business entity) ownership of single family homes would do far more for families and children by removing the burden of ridiculous housing costs by removing the ability for people to compete for ridiculous housing prices.
> Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
You want to change what now? The dictionary definition does not specify any particular time. There is no legal definition for full-time. The IRS uses the term full-time, but they actually use it exactly like you wish: 30 hours per week.
People out on the street often casually use full-time to refer to 40 hours per week. I anticipate that is what you are referring to. But that usage is simply used to refer to how many hours they are working. 40 hours under that usage is an observation, not a commandment.
Sigh. Nobody reasonable would think I was suggesting that a dictionary definition change would be helpful.
In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and an amendment in 1940 established the minimum wage and the 40 hour work week by requiring overtime pay beyond 40 hours for non-exempt employees. [1] Many other countries have many similar things.
What I'm talking about is amending the FLSA down from 40 to 30 hours per week for mandatory overtime and reducing the scope of exemptions so that many more people in professional positions are covered by this or a similar set of requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19...
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
That last part is just going to make more housing cheaper for landlords and force more people into renting.
No I think there should be extreme limits on anybody owning a single family home that they don't live in. With enormous tax penalties for those who do.
Don't let people get 30 year mortgages. Don't let people own houses they don't live in.
Not if the tax rate is base_rate*phi^n where n is the ordinal number of property the person owns.
Worker productivity has consistently increased, yet workers are struggling to support their families or delaying having a family, because they cannot meet the cost of living. Instead of looking towards the inflation of the monetary base as a driver of price inflation, families are supposed to let the state raise their children. Pricing parents out of the house and into the workforce is instead marketed as "liberation". Liberty implies that a choice is given. Mothers or fathers should have the ability to choose to stay home and benefit from the increases in productivity.
Citing GDP growth is cute, but as nothing has been done to address the underlying drivers of price inflation, we can reasonably expect that socialized child care will become an economic necessity. Any potential benefits of productivity gains will continue to be eaten by those who are first to drink from the monetary spigot. While GDP and hours worked may increase, living standards may not.
And what choice do you have regarding rising cost of living?
There are many public services we already rely on and there are many countries that offer free child care already in some form. What you call (forced) liberation is just societal specialization and not bad per se.
Focusing on fiscal/wage issues is a big and important topic though. I bet over time, budget hawks will reduce this public service like others and like in many other countries too. We are so many humans on our plentyful earth, we could achieve many things, yet, "we" lack money.
I’m 100% on board that GDP is increasingly becoming a poor proxy for well-being. That being said I can’t really think of many other things a state can do. The trends you are describing are national if not global.
Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
I appreciate your optimism but I’m skeptical. I dated someone who worked in child care (with a degree in ECE). She was quite miserable caring for a dozen screaming babies all day. I think the burnout and turnover for such a job (which requires a degree but still paid minimum wage) is likely to be extremely high.
The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is the economics of it. The pay for the staff is very low but the cost of service to parents is very high. That means so much of the cost is overhead which would make the whole thing quite unsustainable, even when ostensibly covered by the government.
I live in Canada and a similar issue is occurring with our universal health care system. The costs are skyrocketing even as wait times are increasing.
This is some weird logic. "I dated someone that didn't like to work on child care and therefore I don't think universal childcare is a good idea".
Yeah, I dated someone that was a teacher and didn't like her job. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide education to kids.
Burnout and turnover for teachers are also like that, so it's what you'd expect? maybe they can unionize like teachers though
It sounds like she was a poor fit, or the child care center sucked.
Try to find one that has long average tenure (10+ years, if possible).
Sure, if the place paid everyone a lot and had much higher staff:child ratios then everything would be great. Except it would cost an absolute fortune for parents thus even less viable under a government program.
Government programs almost universally have higher overhead and more waste than private businesses. There is no incentive for government employees to improve efficiency, reduce budgets, or cut costs.
We didn’t notice a positive correlation between teacher tenure and cost when we looked around.
If anything, there was a negative correlation: The big corporate ones had high teacher turnover, more levels of administration, and turned a healthy profit for ownership/shareholders. They were priced to match.
Also, government run programs usually are less expensive (take pretty much any privatization program anywhere as an evidence). The government programs don’t have to pay money to shareholders, and aren’t siphoning resources for expansion, marketing, etc.
If government leadership is corrupt as we see in the US right now, then, of course, prices skyrocket, though that usually comes hand in hand with outsourcing/subcontractors/privatization. It’s hard to collect bribe money from civil servants…
I feel like unionizing really hasn't done much for teachers. They're paid poorly, the conditions are still poor, they don't seem to get much help.
Yay teacher's union?
Teachers union(s) are some of the highest profile anti union targets in the US as well. There’s also issues on a structural level that leads to poor compensation for teachers vs other government positions.
Really school funding and public education in the US in general is in a very strange place across the board and has been for decades
Maybe I'm missing something but I haven't seen a lot of teacher unions being broken so I'm not sure what you mean.
The results for a given teacher are poor no matter what the reasons, it's a bad "hey get a union" rallying cry IMO.
Twelve is a quite high ratio of children to carer. In Sweden what is considered a healthy ratio is 5:1, and many places do meet that rate or are very close to it. 10:1 would be considered a very poor daycare, and most people wouldn't want to put their children on it — only if they have no other choice.
Regarding pay being bad this happens over here as well, unfortunately. Teaching in general is not paid as much as it is worth.
What sort of huge overhead is there that dwarfs the pay for low-paid staff?
- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting - Taxes - Insurance - Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance - Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own. - Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)
Most likely profits of the daycare owners + pay for the magagement (the director or whatever) + rent for the location.
Maybe babies aren't meant to be cared for a dozen at a time? But no, we have to "scale" child-rearing, just like we have to scale everything for greater growth numbers. \s
Babies, just like adults, are extremely social animals. And they absolutely need to interact with a bunch of other people their age, even more than us. Daily, and for a long period of time. An hour at the park doesn't cut it, and being all day with a sibling doesn't either.
So beyond everyone going back to a Neolithic way of life and living in a bunch of straw teepees all bundled close together, daycare is the best solution I've found to this need.
Just as an example, my oldest has been besties with another kid since they were both 7 months old.
As a counter-example, neither of my kids really acknowledged other kids in any way at that age (and other infants ignored them right back). A quick Internet search suggests it's normal for them to not interact with other kids until after 12+ months. This was a point of contention with my wife and MIL because my MIL would complain we weren't "socializing" our oldest enough when she was an infant despite clearly never having looked up anything about childhood development.
That and we did take her out all the time. She just wasn't in daycare. The thing about stay-at-home parents is they don't literally stay at home all day.
I would expect larger groups of young children to require more even ratios of care takers. I don't know if 3 care takers per 12 children is enough for instance, but I've got a feeling 9 care takers for 36 children is not enough.
Depends on the state. My state is 1:3 for under 2, 1:6 for 2-3, and then 1:10 for 3-5. Presumably after that you're out of child care and into school. Ratios get more complex when it's a mixed group, but most childcare centers are going to have children separate based on age.
These ratios seem reasonable to me. Much better than the 1:25 in elementary school.
> because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
This feels like the wrong goal. Why does it matter how much an economy can grow? Is that worth not having a parent raise the child? In my opinion, it’s important for kids to spend more time with their families not less. Having one parent at home is very useful for bonding, development, etc. And frankly no childcare, even one with good ratios of workers to children, can substitute for it. I think the notion that “if the children are taken care of” is perhaps not recognizing that there are different levels of “taken care of”.
I stayed at home with my mom until I was old enough for school. My wife and I sent our kids to daycare.
Our kids are fine.
Turns out kids need a lot of time with other kids.
It turns out that kids raised by their parents still get a lot of time with other kids though. Their parents don’t just keep them at home. They meet with friends. Go out and play. Their parents take them to classes and activities. Your view is “our kids are fine”, but most parents may say that about their own kids without knowing what the alternative could be. I’ve experienced both situations myself and also observed it as an adult. I think most childcare is a lot more of a free for all than parents think, rather than some sort of well designed experience. If you reduce the ratios significantly by having two kids per worker, maybe the quality improves to approach what a parent can provide. But that’s a lot more expensive.
> I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow
I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
It's similar with those studies showing hiring a diverse workforce is actually good for your business. It might be, but, like, it's also the right thing to do to not discriminate against minorities.
> I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
Unfortunately, this is how some people think, so phrasing things in this manner is a way to win them over ("paying a bit more in taxes is actually going to benefit you").
There will obviously be abuse and other issues. The question is, does New Mexico give up at the first sign of trouble like a bunch of losers, or do they push through, because of, or despite all the voters. It just takes one shitty person, in just the wrong place, and not enough good people fighting against him or her no matter, (or especially) how righteous he or she thinks they're being, to fuck it up for everyone else.
I suppose if maximizing GDP is the goal, your comment makes sense. But if feel this is more of a bandaid of deeper underlying labor/pay issues.
I think this just makes it harder for single income families tbh. Not a social or moral commentary, just unfortunate observation
How so? What do they have now that they will be losing under the new system? It seems like having childcare paid for would be beneficial to any single working parent.
Any system, program, or social group involving tens of thousands of people is going to have issues. But if you systematize it you can work to address them rather than ignoring them in search of the perfect system (which doesn't exist).
My mom was a full time mom and I wouldn't trade that for anything.
That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.
> Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents
That would be a rarity.
Just because women have been shunted into childcare for millennia doesn’t mean we’re naturally better at it. It just means we’ve had to do it. Do you similarly think it’s a rarity for men not to be cut out for subsistence farming?
The bond between a mother and her child is very special and intense. That doesn't happen with a paid caregiver. Heck, I was glued to my mom till I was 4.
I'm sad for you that you don't seem to understand this, with words like "shunted".
My parents are decades gone, but I miss them every day. Not so for any paid caregiver.
My grandmother died when my dad was 9. In his 90s, he forgot that she was dead, and would cry wondering why she didn't visit him.
The notion that this can be replaced with the state is absurd.
Firstly, I am a mother with two children, so no need to educate me about the bond between mother and child. Secondly, of course children love their parents. You seem to be conflating parenting with daytime childcare. This is a common misconception among people who romanticize stay-at-home parenting: it’s either “mom stays home during the workday with kids” or “the state raises the kids.” You may not be aware, since you say your mom stayed home with you, that parents whose kids are in daycare do still get a lot of parenting time in. They see their kids a lot. They feed them, clothe them, kiss their scraped knees, help them with homework, put them to bed, take them to the park and movies and church. Daycare isn’t 24/7. It’s also not some kind of robotic state-sponsored apparatus. Childcare providers are people who have chosen taking care of kids as their career, they often have a degree in early childhood education, and they love the kids they take care of.
And I do not apologize for the word “shunted.” No woman in a modern society should be forced to choose between having a child and being something other than a full-time childcare provider. Men don’t face that choice; women shouldn’t either.
> forced
Let me look ... I wrote nothing like that.
> they often have a degree in early childhood education
Nobody needs a degree in early childhood education. It comes naturally to parents.
Childcare professionals may develop a bond with the kids, but it's nothing like the bond a mom has.
I'm the one asserting that women have been forced into childcare for millennia. It's the default state in the absence of societal support.
> It comes naturally to parents.
_Love_ comes naturally to parents. Almost nothing else does, in my experience. You are extrapolating from an incomplete dataset. Again, your mom being good at the job of staying home with kids does not make other moms good at it. You are talking to a mom who isn't. I do, in fact, exist. I am asserting that my family, and society, are better off because I had a choice of career. I guarantee my kids would agree. It has nothing to do with how much I love them, and everything to do with my aptitude for homemaking and preschool childcare.
Those are nice feelings _you_ have, but they don't have anything to do with women being forced into childcare. You're romanticizing things you never had to do.
> parents can give the economy their best
Surely parents should be giving their child(ren) the best, no?
Giving the economy your best only makes sense in Communism, and since that has never gone well, I'll assume that what was meant was "self-fulfillment via work" or "better standard of living". The first just seems like one of these modern lies. I'm neither a mother nor a woman, but I've never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling, although I have generally more or less enjoyed it. I've met no father (or mother) who say they wished they had more time at work rather than their children. I have heard both fathers and mothers say that it is the most fulfilling part of their lives. The second is just prioritizing the self. I've never met a child who was excited that his/her parent(s) are working and/or making lots of money instead of being with them. I don't think a goal of career or comfort/wealth is compatible with flourishing children.
Second, are the children actually taken care of? Assuming everything is well-run, then sure, their physical needs and safety are taken care of. They aren't getting love from parents during that time. They aren't living in a loving community. Instead they are getting socialized into being atomized, like the rest of us, where loneliness is epidemic. I'm really thankful my mother stayed home with us. (She started teaching part-time once we all got into all-day school)
> I’ve never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.
> I've never understood why women are so eager to go work
You're romanticizing it, that's why. Staying at home and not working makes you incredibly vulnerable. You're entirely reliant on the goodwill of someone else, and you can end up trapped, unable to leave a bad situation because you have no access to money. Or your husband just leaves you with kids to feed and no money to do it with.
It's fine if you choose to do it with a partner who treats you as an equal, but there's a reason why female suicides instantly dropped by 20%[0] when no-fault divorce was adopted by their state.
If you want another data point, ask your older female relatives what their mothers and grandmothers told them about money. Bet you more than a few will have a story where they were told to save money in a secret place and never, ever tell their husbands about it.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w10175
> because it will show how much an economy can grow
bleak
You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it so they can focus on bettering the economy, right?
> You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it
My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.
The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
This was surprising to me too. I think there was some guilt around having a child and not spending 100% of our time caring for them. The reality was that quality daycare teachers have a lot of experience and a support network that enables them to create a great environment for learning. Socializing with peers from a young age was a huge benefit. While I'm sure they'll catch up, when observing kids the same age who hadn't been to "school" yet, it was clear that these kids hadn't developed at the same rate. Even if I had all the resources in the world, I'd still send my kids to a good daycare vs trying to replicate these learning opportunities at home.
> The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
People who stay at home and take care of their own kids aren’t skipping socialization. They still participate in various activities where there are other kids. But, the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford. If you stay at the daycare and observe things, you’ll see how difficult it is for the workers to split attention.
Oh and you get a lot less illness if avoiding daycare. And that regained time, is development time and time to go do fun things.
This is buying into the idea of rugged individualism when it comes to parenting. That all a child needs is their parents and that time away from children is a failure of parents. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many studies show that children raised in a cooperative environment where they are exposed to various people and practices from extended family, professionals, teachers, etc help reinforce social connectedness.
Not to mention parents have more to them to simply being parents. Their own desires, wants, and needs. Balancing these with being parents leads to the more fulfillment.
This feels like a strawman. I didn’t say that “all a child needs is their parents”. I am saying however, that parents in most cases will provide higher quality care and more attention to their child than what a daycare can provide. Have you tried watching 3 kids simultaneously? It’s just not possible even in the controlled environment of a daycare room. Kids that are raised by parents aren’t in a bubble - they’re still going out and meeting with other families and kids and doing things. The notion that children raised by parents are not exposed is itself a common myth used to diminish the value of parents.
Saying "that parents in most cases will provide higher quality care and more attention to their child" and that it's not possible to watch 3 kids simultaneously is reinforcement of "all a child needs is their parents". It's laughably false and shows your ignorance on this subject. Putting parents on a pedestal is not good for children or parents. Please take a look at research on this subject.
> the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford
Maybe, but definitely not always. There's a lot of variables with this logic. My wife and I aren't trained early childhood educators. We didn't spend years studying such things, we haven't been doing this for many years, and we aren't always as equipped with things like lesson plans and educational development attainment goals.
Without a doubt, every child is different, different kids grow in their own spurts and what not. But when we took our kids out of daycare for my wife to stay at home and tend to the kids after our youngest was born, we had our oldest remain in twice a week daycare so my wife could spend more time focusing on our infant at the time. His growth trajectory definitely fell. He wasn't able to keep up with a lot of his classmates, even though it had just been a single semester. He wasn't as happy, and his connections with his close friends he had known since he was barely able to walk were clearly fraying despite attempts to schedule as many play dates. Our youngest wasn't progressing as fast as others we knew from the daycare. In the end we put both kids back in full-time once my wife managed to find similar employment again. Once both kids were back in full time, it was almost night and day difference. Our oldest child was noticeably much happier. He quickly caught back up with the class and had those friendships restored. Similar story with our youngest.
We also tend to hang out with a lot of at-home families as well. Most of the kids I know from our school seem significantly ahead in logic and socialization skills compared to most of the kids I know who stay at-home. Not all, for sure, I know a few families who are exceptionally great at being educators for their kids. But I also know many families who try very hard but ultimately aren't that great in comparison. Not everyone is a good teacher, and that's OK.
In the end, we're not as effective of educators for our kids, it's just not what we're necessarily great at doing. So, they spend time with people who are. And we continue to try and do our best with them at home as well with things they aren't taught in school.
Exactly this.
There are so many benefits to day care for the children. It’s hardly the prison camp people make it out to be.
I don’t know if these negative comments are because HN in general dislikes the wider educational system, or if it’s because they dislike governments handing out “charity” to help less affluent families. Maybe a touch of both? But daycare can actually be a really rewarding experience for children.
So much so, that I have parent friends who one of them is a stay-at-home parent and they still send their child to day care at least one day a week to help the child’s independence, social skills and comfort when away from home. And they’ve found their child has been better for the experience
Edit: and the fact that I’ve been downvoted within seconds of posting this shows how ridiculous people are on here when it comes this topic.
There probably are some pretty bad daycares out there, with overworked and burnt-out caretakers. But yeah my friends with kids mostly say the same thing, their kids love it.
For me at least, it's a general dislike of the wider educational system. My parents taught me to read, play chess, multiply, and write in cursive before elementary school. I didn't really learn anything at preschool or kindergarten, and I imagine daycare would be worse for my educational development. Maybe it's useful for social development? but at least for me I was always pretty independent (even in kindergarten) from the other kids. Not in an isolated way, I just preferred doing my own thing.
This might be a difference between the US and UK?
Preschools in the UK have curriculums they have to follow. That includes maths, reading and writing too.
I’m not going to comment on preschools in your country, but in the UK the kids who attended preschool are IN GENERAL the stronger students, socially, emotionally, and academically, when it comes to starting infants/ elementary school. Particularly in the less affluent areas. Though there might be some selection bias here too due to the kinds of parents who can sand their child to daycare verses those who cannot.
In the less affluent areas, I'd expect children not attending daycare to just not be getting anything at home. Presumably their parents are both working and cannot afford daycare. In the more affluent areas, I'd expect children only don't attend daycare if their parents prioritize their children over their jobs, and so they'd be getting much more positive attention than in a daycare. But, of course, we'd have to see a study differentiated by socioeconomic status to see what is actually the case.
We prioritized our kids. In the end, what worked better for our kids was for us to earn enough income to send them to really nice daycare/preschool for several hours a day.
There is something sad about not spending as much time as you possibly can with your children in their younger years, though.
You can still have quality time with your children AND send them to day care.
It’s not like boarding school where you’d only see them during the holidays ;)
Are you open to the idea that spending every possible moment with your young child may not be the best thing for the kid?
I think this is a leading question and you should probably clarify why you're asking it. More specifically, what situation leads you to believe that it's not totally fine to spend a lot of time with your pre-adolescent children? I think there are a wide variety of living situations that all result in pretty well-adjusted children.
I think it's healthy for parents to have other pursuits. Not everyone is 100% fulfilled hanging out with young children all day, and that's perfectly fine.
Even with daycare, parents are spending a substantial portion of their time with their children.
Even if you’re stay at home unemployed person, a daycare will do more for your child’s development than you would be able to. Kids need socialization, they learn from their peers as much as they learn from adults.
You can also take them to events at the public libraries and other places, at least in my area. They're often called "Library Story Times" and they're free where we live. That's what my spouse does. There's a very wide spectrum of social activities available even for kids of stay-at-home parents. She will often get together with other parents and let our son socialize with their children too.
That’s fair and I’m sure your spouse covers the need for socialization, however these options aren’t available everywhere and not all parents are going to take their kids for these events every day. Having a venue that you don’t need to plan for 5x times a week is always going to be a great default.
And with this option they can have that choice. Right now, many don’t.
With this option, they are now financially penalized for making that choice in order to subsidize those who don't. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
My wife and I have no interest in ever having children, yet we are happy to pay property taxes that go to local public schools. Why? Because an educated society is better able to make educated decisions. We are being "penalized" for making the choice to not have kids in order to "subsidize" those who don't.
Correct. It all comes down to whether you believe parents leaving home to work on their careers instead of staying home to raise their kids is an unambiguous good that needs to be subsidized the same way education is.
Assuming by education you actually mean schooling, this is the very same thing. The question is really only about at which age subsidized schooling should first start. This moves that age of first subsidized engagement to approximately birth, as opposed to waiting until age ~3-5 (varies by jurisdiction).
Historically it was considered a beneficial necessity to gather the children to write down knowledge so that it could be brought back home for the whole family to learn from, but in the age of the internet perhaps separating children and parents is never good at any (young-ish) age?
I think the biggest difference isn't age, it's that childcare also happens during the summer, not just during the school year. (And of course the lack of any particular educational curriculum.)
Is that a meaningful difference, though? Schools were originally open all year round, but the hot summer classroom eventually was deemed an unsuitable place to occupy, thus schools decided to compromise by closing during the hottest months.
Since the advent of air-conditioning, there really isn't any good reason to close schools during the summer. But, like the internet bit before, we've just never bothered to stop and actually think about what we're doing. We carry on with the status quo simply because that's what we did in the past. Not because it makes sense, just because that's what we do.
But in establishing subsidized daycare now, we don't have to think about the time before air-conditioning was invented. We only have to worry about the constraints we have today. Hot summers are not a practical problem as of right now.
This exact mindset of minmaxing everything is how the society stops having kids.
People are going to respond to incentives whether you think they should or not.
I think it's less "mindsets" that have changed so much as the incentives themselves. People no longer need to have kids in order to have sex or to have a comfortable retirement, so many simply don't. Though I'd agree there's certainly a mindset shift that has developed along with that.
There is responding to incentives and there is adopting 10 kids to farm child subsidy/benefits.
Can you spell it out with math?
Tax $100 each from couple A and couple B. Couple A leave their kids at a daycare and work. They get $200 in childcare costs reimbursed by the government. Couple B has one parent stay home to take care of their kids. They get nothing.
Couple A: -$100 + $200 = +$100
Couple B: -$100 + $0 = -$100
Sure and under income taxes, Couple B probably pays much less since US income tax structure is gives massive benefits to couples with single income. It may not be enough to offset joint income. As with most economic changes, there is massive web of things.
> US income tax structure is gives massive benefits to couples with single income
It gives massive structural advantages to couples with low income, in the form of a lower marginal tax rate. Does it really discriminate between single and dual income though? I wasn't aware of that.
It does not. Filing jointly just saves some hassle in the case where the partners are in the same tax bracket.
Yea and I think that’s great. OP makes it sound like every parent is pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism if only they didn’t have to worry about raising a child. It’s not so.
> every parent is pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism
People don’t want to work because they’re “pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism”. They want to work for income, for career development, or even because they like what they do.
This is such a dismissive way to phrase it that doesn’t even acknowledge why people work. Reducing everything to “capitalism” is missing the point.
What an insulting way to phrase that.
For a single parent, providing the needed money to survive and eat requires working, and child care can be impossibly expensive.
They should give money that can be used on anything instead of specifically for healthcare. That way you can choose to take care of your kids yourself and put that money towards food than having to work and then outsource childcare.
It's an interesting way to divide up a country's labour.
50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.
If you did have such a large cohort engaged in that activity, there should probably be some kind of education where one could learn 'the best'.
Of course people with kids would be too busy to attend.
And the ones who did attend wouldn't have any kids to look after.
I work part time nights/weekends so I can raise my child during the day. Which 50% does that put me in?
>50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.
That's not that revolutionary; it's kind of traditional.
I don't think it's quite accurate. Historically, lower-class mothers and a fair chunk of middle class mothers also did some work outside the home: as maids, nannies, teachers, gardeners, etc.
The 1950s USA "golden era" where lower-class mothers could afford to stay home was a statistical anomaly, gifted to this country by virtue of our unique position as the major economic superpower untouched by WWII.
Yes and we should make that easier as well. Many people don't make enough money to have that choice.
A lot of parents think they are better at educating their kids than a trained professional. But are they right?
You don't understand how economics work if you think this is actually going to be helpful. By providing "universal" child care, you just moved the cost of childcare from the individual to the tax base so now everyone has to pay an ineffifient system that often eats up 30-50% of the incoming money in bureaucratic inneficiencies before it will even reach the child care system.
On top of that the increased taxes are going to raise prices of everything because the businesses don't just eat the cost of taxes, they pass it off to the consumer. So all these families that get free childcare are going to be paying more for their groceries, rent, unilities and everything else.
To top things off, you now have random strangers with no bond with your children looking after them in a ratio of maybe 1:8 or 1:10. So your children are going to be stressed out and anxious and are going to act out both at the childcare place and at home, so you're just going to be getting phone calls all day about your children fighting other children.
All in all, you might feel like you're better off but once you do the math you're at about the same place if not worse off.
Yes, surely the hyper efficient free market is much better here, not like we have decades of proof of the perverse incentives there. We should instead ensure every mother is crippled with life-long medical debt if their kid needs any help!
Also if we care so much about these inefficiencies, why is it that I still have to subsidize drivers? Why aren't we investing in better public transport infrastructure, rather than letting drivers take up 1000x the space on roads that I'm forced to pay for?
I don't see any mention of free markets in your post. The healthcare industry is not a free market, they are handicapped by regulatiom and by law are required to provide health insurance to anyone that wants it and cannot reject anyone. Of course prices are going to be stiffling when they have to give you insurance no matter your pre-existing conditions and no matter the choices you make
I just use my bike: why should I pay taxes for roads maintenance. Unfortunately, a society is not just about economics
> I just use my bike: why should I pay taxes for roads maintenance.
Most US states pay for a significant fraction of road maintenance from motor fuel taxes ("road tax"). You probably aren't paying those taxes if you're in the US and you don't buy motor fuel.
Increased EV adoption is likely going to change that regime.
You wouldn't have to if the government didn't own the roads. Plenty of examples of this, private companies creating their own roads and charging people a small fee to use them so they can maintain them.
Wouldn't be that hard give people a little device that tracks the roads they use and charges them $0.05 per mile that they drive and then have the company be a co-op that's owned by the people living in that town.
Perfect way to introduce new national road middlemen: the tracking device manufacturer, the road geolabeling software company, and each road owner.
A local co-op would never last. If it could, we'd see far more local co-ops.
It's hard to compete against multinational conglomerates that get tax cuts and tax breaks left and right, but they do exist, eh: REI, Ace Hardware, Land O' Lakes.
You could say all of this about public schooling, but that one worked out.
It has not at all. 20% of high school graduates are reading at a 5th grade level, which when you consider the billions of dollars poured into public schools every year is just asinine https://www.abtaba.com/blog/us-literacy-statistics
US school outcomes vary drastically. It really works out well in nice neighborhoods, and doesn't work out in some bad neighborhoods. Its down to cultural and familial expectations. Why does the same curriculum in say Scarsdale not have the same success in the Bronx? They are only like 15 miles apart in the same state.
The nice neighborhoods have parents that prioritize spending with their children, reading with them and helping them work through things they are struggling with and due to that they then score better on the standardized tests.
The curriculum is just a net zero, and could be argued that it's a net negative because it wastes the kids time with useless knowledge that they will never need or use.
Please post the math then, instead of wild conjecture and speculation about cause and effect.
That's the thing. Nobody ever does the math on what these kind of programs cost society. The long term economic impacts that this will put on other families due to increased taxes, the businesses that might go under because they had to raise prices to cope with increased taxes, the business that never get created due to increased taxes, the other families that are now going to be struggling because they're a 1 income family and they now have to pay for everyone else's kids in addition to the care of their own children that they provide for and don't want to offloat to be taken care of by strangers, etc. etc.
Oh no, society will have to bear the cost of the infrastructure to maintain itself rather than reap the benefits of a population without putting back into. How terrible.
It doesn't work that way. The US Welfare programs have created multi generational families that have never worked and do not have any parents or grandparents that have ever worked a real job because if anyone did they would risk losing $100k's worth of free benefits to work a minimum wage job that would only pay them $30k. It has created a permanant underclass of people with no job skills that are wholly dependant on the system for their survival.
This is just an extension of that.
Would love to know where you’re getting this figure from. I worked in the welfare field before moving into tech (and my wife still does) and the payout for TANF plus SNAP for a single mother with like 5 kids would be closer to your $30k than the $100k. Of course that begs the question why work for it if you can get it for free but I believe TANF has a lifetime payout of like 5 years meaning that if the kids get it as a child they will not qualify for that TANF for themselves as an adult.
Ok, now be genuine about the other benefits they're most likely receiving as well: - Medicaid - Section8 - WIC - LIHEAP - LIFELINE Just to name a few.
I also worked for a non profit that helped people get government assistance and got an inside look at what these families are like and what they prioritize.
I think you are using a whataboutism argument. In this case the childcare benefit will be universal, as in it is NOT means tested like your example.
It may not be means tested, but it will be utilized primarily by families on welfare, and lower income families and in the long term by middle class families who become lower income due to government subsidized programs like these forcing them to pay more for their daily necessities through an increased tax burden.
You have clearly not shopped for childcare on the open market. Highly paid professionals still struggle to get childcare. Putting more resources into the system will be a net positive for all parents who need childcare.
No it won't. Just like putting billions of dollars into the Public School System has not led to any real increase in test scores. And just like Universal healthcare has made healthcare plans just about unaffordable for anyone not working a corporate job and just like government student loans have made the price of college asinine and I could go on and on.
Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads? I know several stay at home dads who by all reports do a very good job of raising their kids while mom works. (granted the vast majority of stay at home parents are mothers). Fathers are people too, and they should be treated like the great parents they can be (until proven otherwise).
>> when women are allowed to work to their full potential
> Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads?
That's... not even remotely what the sentence said? Or are you offended because you believe childcare obligations have historically prevented men from working their full potential?
Women was used in several different places. Each is offensive, because in each case a man could do the same work, and the work could be done. I have no opinion on if a man or woman should be caregiver - I've seen both cases work well - every situation must be taken case by case.
What does full potential even mean? If someone wants to do something, but they have to do something else or they would starve (that is play vs work) which is living up to their full potential - what they want to do, or what they must do?
I mean, I’m a gay dad, so I get that what you are saying is a real problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem in this thread. If you had a goal of improving women’s ability to participate in the workforce you’d likely come up with a policy like this (that would also help some dads too, even if that weren’t the primary goal).
Women are far more likely to be the primary, stay at home caregiver if one exists and face a lot of discrimination in the workforce as a result of those expectations (on top of already facing other workplace discrimination issues).
> it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
Why bring gender into it? There are plenty of families who choose to have stay at home Dads while the mother goes back to work full time. We are not in the 1950s any more.
I would suspect the numbers show we're closer to the 1950's than you think. But I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Even if it is only 5% stay at home fathers, that is still 5% that is ignored. Staying at home as a parent isn't the right choice for everyone, but when society assumes that it is only mothers that is a disservice to the fathers who want to (and in some cases the couples who want a parent staying at home but it never occurs to them that it could be dad)
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'm hopeful that the parent comment simply didn't think about Dads because it's not in their "worldview", and perhaps also not in many others'. Nonetheless, I think your point is completely valid.
I'm going to take the reverse position. I don't like this policy.
I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
Childcare doesn't end at 1 year though. If you look at public schools as child care, most don't start until kindergarten (about 5 years old). What do you do for the remaining 4 years? And during summer break? And after-school care? This program covers all of those.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
6 years paid stipend would fix this problem.
Would 6 years paid stipend also help for the rest of the woman's life as she has to restart her career?
Before having our first child, I made a commitment to my wife that I would provide an 84+ year stipend.
> This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
Americans move significantly less today than they did in the mid 20th century, not more: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/03/14/why-might-ameri...
Student loans can really force this.
How is your solution any different from the US student loan policies that have increased the price of college in the US? Won't subsidizing demand with a stipend significantly increase the price of what it can be spent on?
This isn't just for babies. My coworker's 12yo is covered by this because he's got cancer and is too immunocompromised to go to school.
I'm not sure we want to treat this as a related issue unless you want this kid to be sent to their death at 18
Yeah not to be a downer here but if he's still on chemo in 6 years I don't think it's the lack of a baby sitter that's gonna kill him.
We kind of do both in Germany. I say "kind of" becaue that year of parental leave (14 months total, shared between parents as desired) is capped at the lower of 1800 EUR/mo, or 2/3 of previous year's net monthly salary - that was significantly lower than either of our net pay, but we did it anyway.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
strong protections for parents choosing to work part time
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
About two years ago - it is possible that the policy has been loosened since then, but I'm not in human resources.
The really strong protections are the first three years after a child is born - you have to be allowed to work anywhere from 15 to 30 hours/week, and be allowed to change it with a few weeks' notice ("Elternzeit" - covers both parental leave and this part time working arrangement).
I had to give a reason for wanting to do the next five years part-time, but "child" resulted in no further questions. I had to commit to only being allowed to work part time, and for the weekly hours I requested for those five years; my employer could choose to accept a request to change them or to go back to full time before the five years is up, but they're not legally obligated to.
ah, right, there are two independent regulations. i forgot about Elternzeit which includes a lot of flexibility in adjusting your worktime as needed, whereas the other regulation simply allows you to request a fixed reduction of your worktime. which is a change of your contract, whereas Elternzeit isn't.
This sounds like something I would have written before I was a parent.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
I think you're talking about parental leave which is a different thing and another area where the US falls short compared to other developed countries. This is to provide care for your kids after you would have gone back to work in any regular scenario until the kids are old enough to start school.
As a parent I’m going to disagree with your disagreement.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I wonder if there is room for disruption here. Like, a NextDoor for childcare. I guess that's just group chats with your neighbors who have kids, but many people don't even know their neighbors. Maybe this is something that needs to be solved organically, not with an app.
You're an idiot.
I have a toddler.
They are absorbing everything and gaining a personality from day one.
You are not the one doing it.
Your presumption is that the parent is the only appropriate person to guide a child as they absorb their world. I disagree. I think teachers and peers play a valuable role too.
(In fact, judging by the way you conduct yourself online I’d say the more influences t your child has beyond you the better)
> You're an idiot.
Really? You're starting your comment with that?
EDIT: my mistake, it's a troll account with negative karma.
More importantly it would give parents options: - stay home with your child and take the income - hire a babysitter - hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash - take your child to daycare - take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
>I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
Pick your poison.
The western idea of individualism and the villification of the lower-class has really fucked American society. "I don't wanna pay taxes for [insert thing that doesn't benefit me]" or "if you're poor it's your fault" in a country where costs of basic necessities like medical care, insurance, food, housing, school, are skyrocketing is insane to me.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
Honestly reading comments in these types of news on HN makes me lose some hope in humanity. People are actively against anything that's not helpful for them and salivate at the idea of somehow profiting on top without a care for the human needs underneath it all.
They cite government inefficiencies when they just want to "fix them" by pocketing the difference.
It's depressing how much capitalism propaganda is deeply ingrained in so many supposedly smart people.
Yeah. It's easy to feel powerless too.
Yeah the govt has its inefficiencies, but an inefficient program that helps people is better than no program at all. So what if it means that I pay a few extra (hundred, thousand) dollars a year in taxes? If that's the cost for housing people, I'd gladly pay it.
And as if the appeal to humanity weren't enough, how about the fact that it'll keep the streets of SF and other cities cleaner?
It's a pretty nice consolation prize considering the almost total lack of parental leave in the United States. When someone throws me a lifeline I'm not going to complain that it isn't a certified life preserver.
> provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).
It's not one or the other. Scandinavian countries provide ample parental leave and also universal childcare.
The most formative year is not 0-1. My daughter is 2 and it’s just now starting to be formative.
So, maternity/paternity leave in line with European systems?
Or did you have something else in mind?
Capitalism historically depends on the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the domestic sphere, work that is socially undervalued and made invisible, which supports capitalist systems rather than liberates women. Instituting a paid stipend for home parenting, while superficially supportive, risks reinforcing this systemic isolation by formalizing the separation of caregivers (mainly women) from the workforce and political arenas where power is exercised and negotiated.
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Kids are social and like playing and learning from other kids. Daycare lets them do just that. It’s a great thing and every toddler I’ve met who wasn’t in daycare was behind in something. Especially verbal skills.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
"Why do you want a thriving career?"
"So I can provide for my family"
"Why do you want to provide for your family?"
"So my children can have happy and fulfilling lives"
"What makes your young children feel happy?"
"Spending time with me"
A strong parent-child relationship is the biggest determination of life-long child happiness even into old age.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4784487/
You can have a strong parent-child relationship while still using daycare.
Also people work due to other reasons unrelated to providing for their family. Individuals are allowed to have lives outside their kids.
Your anecdote is just that. All of it is highly dependent on the child, their environment, and the 'educator'. Please don't make assumptions based on your limited exposure; it's not helpful.
Your "it depends" argument is that some kids aren't social, don't like playing with other kids, are better off not having exposure to social interaction with peers and practice talking.
If this is the criticism then it's a glowing endorsement of daycare and school.
No; it depends on the 'educator'. A daycare that doesn't have kids interacting in a positive way could be just as detrimental as a parent that doesn't socialize their children externally to the home.
I'm just gonna throw this out here: Well-off kids who barely know their workaholic parents have different but equally bad issues for society, than the poor kids do.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
Do you have any evidence for that?
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13230
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9119633/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7021583/
Like all things: the extremes are never good, and it's all about getting a healthy balance.
- Kids need lots of time with their parents
- Kids need lots of time around other kids
You can do that by sending them to daycare, and ALSO spending lots of time with them when they're home.
You can also do that by taking time off work, and then taking your kid(s) to places with other kids.
Both work; and it depends on your context which works for you.
You aren't wrong but calling it being "Student #642 in a government childcare facility" the wrong way of looking at it. Children grow up best when they are allowed to play with other children. Modern society robs kids of that and helicopter parents are bad for society.
I agree with you vigorously on both those points. I am skeptical however that NM will be able to create a lot of healthy, play-based environments for so many kids.
The market already has incentives to create them -- a ton of good places have waiting lists nationwide, showing unmet demand even at the current price. This suggests the price will need to go higher to attract enough people to do this job. It seems their "$12,000 value" estimate is based on an optimistic belief that they will be buying childcare for their citizens at current prices. When they realize there aren't that many slots available at current rates of pay, will they be okay significantly increasing the costs of the program?
So, my expectations for these facilities are very low and that's a big part of my concern.
> Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
Perhaps there is something about the environment of an economically disadvantaged household that could be improved by a stipend which allows at least one parent the breathing room to dedicate full time attention to the child instead of a job (or multiple jobs). I don't think the findings you mentioned cut against that idea at all.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
> that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So the children that do well in daycare comes from poor homes? So kids from rich home don't do well in daycare?
Every interaction I've ever had says the opposite. The disruptive bully at school usually comes from a broken home.
My daycare was called preschool. It allowed my mother to focus on my infant brother during the day while I was literally two blocks away running around, coloring and learning shapes. Show and tell was my favorite.
> Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
How so?
The most obvious example is the children of addicts. It’s hard to imagine a kid is better off stuck at home with druggie parents than spending the day in daycare.
A good example of bottom quintile policy. Because the bottom quintile has a better outcome with a certain approach, it becomes standard care for everyone else.
Once you see it, you'll see it everywhere.
…so?
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
Anyone would be better off being away from addicts though
Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Those are still options? The state isn’t going to force parents to use public daycare. However you might keep in mind that not everyone has an available spouse, and grandparents might not always be available either.
> Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".
Real businesses subject to real inspections and real assessments, you mean? With "strangers" who need to have qualifications and background checks?
To each their own of course but I'd prefer somewhere I know is actually judged to be a safe environment than some under the table option.
The incentive alignment of a stay at home mom who's taking care of 10-15 kids (which is typically what these operations are) to add some extra income is way better than a "real" operation that's got one manager and some min-wage employees running around herding 15 kids each while simultaneously trying to keep the state off their back.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect the former to have ADA compliant doors or hot water that meets state regulations but the "give a fuck factor" is just so, so, so much higher when someone is working out of their own home, one of their own kids is in the mix, the rest of them are kids of a friend or friend of a friend, etc, than it is when your kid is being looked after by some 20yo college kid who's doing this part time.
>no-habla cash only daycare
Yo, what the fuck HN?
You send your kid to the daycare run by foreigners to learn a language.
I send my kid to the daycare run by foreigners to learn cultural values.
WeAreNotTheSame.jpg
The whitewashed term for this is "Spanish immersion daycare"
I'm confused, what cultural values do you want them to learn?
just flag it, and child comment below, and move on with your life. if it really bothers you, email hn@ycombinator.com. any ignorant mothertrucker can create an account and just spew hate. it's, ah, a design choice.
It's easy to promise things, but hard to deliver them. How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"
Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-...
https://childcaredeserts.org/
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064...
As someone who grew up homesteading and seeing the benefits of it, I find it wild that people want to not only send their kids away to school full-time but also institutionalize them afterwards just so they can spend seemingly excessive amounts of time at work. The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently.
Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income in the US [1] [2]. Half of American renters are cost burdened [3]. I find it wild someone thinks "Why don't you just stay home with your kids?" looking at the macro. Can't all just live on a farm and homestead to raise kids in an unfavorable, punishing macro. Parents work because they have to work. To work, they need childcare and flexible work arrangements.
> "The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently."
Indeed. Is the solution to sacrifice for it? Or tax it to care for the human? [4] We can make better choices, as New Mexico shows. I'm tired of hearing its impossible. It isn't, it's just a lack of will and collective effort in that direction, based on all available evidence.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...
[2] https://lisep.org/mql
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY
(I am once again asking to think in systems)
Nobody said homesteading is the solution. Allowing a parent of young children to care for them is not a radical idea though. It should not be hard to imagine a society that is more flexible to childcare being performed by parents, because that was the norm for all of human history prior to industrialization. People should seriously consider the ways in which their imaginations on this subject (and others!) are constrained by their post industrial upbringing, and importantly, why the current norms exist and who they benefit.
Indeed, this only occurs with unions and rising wages, where a single income from a secure job can support a family while a parent stays home to perform childrearing. Are we there? When will we get there? These are important questions to ask if this is a dependency to improving household financials to encourage the outcome in this context (a stay at home parent).
If jobs are tenuous or insecure, long term financial obligations will not be made (the cost to raise a child in 2023 dollars is $330k, not including childcare or college). If jobs do not pay enough, people will need to put their kids in childcare (which will have to be subsidized) or they will forgo having children [1] [2].
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
Regulation, my man. Doesn't require fitting into the existing framework that was invented to as a stopgap for dangerous factory working conditions. The barrier is people's preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like.
Can you expound on this? What regulation? What "preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like"? Unions and higher wages enable people to afford families, and I am an aggressive proponent of a 4 day work week at 100% pay considering productivity gains over the last half century, but I'd be interested in your thoughts.
There are infinite ways to do this and we could riff all day on it. The simplest as I see it would simply be giving individuals with young children the autonomy to dictate their work schedules, allowing them the option to make up the hours later, or even choose not to. In a way this already happens informally in nicer companies.
Portland OR is trying to do something similar ("Preschool for all") and is running into the exact problems OP identified, to the point that the Democratic governor is sending warning messages to the county: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
They aren't just theoretical concerns.
I will find time to build an inventory of every example of where subsidized childcare works and reply with said inventory.
Yes, but can you find any that work well when the branch of the government that’s running it refuses to process paperwork from daycare providers or issue checks to pay those providers, and where its leader has prioritized getting the system shut down on the grounds that it’s “broken”?
(Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.)
Governance is hard. People are hard. I can show you examples across the world where policy works, and where it doesn't. Success is not assured, but if we're not willing to try, why even get up in the morning? If it sucks in Oregon, my apologies; states are where experiments can take place, and there are 49 other states we can give it a go in.
No, clearly, if it doesn’t work when 100% of the people administering it are intentionally sabotaging it from within, it must be a bad idea. /s
(I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.)
I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.
There are bad public services and fairly good public services. There are also some great private services and some bad ones.
There's no public roads where I live. They're all private easements, but you can pass through them no problem for miles and miles and get most the way to town without ever touching a taxpayer dime. I first built my bit of the road with a shovel , a 4x4 truck, and a hatchet which blows away what it would have cost my neighbors in taxes. If I tried to explain this to someone with no real concept of anything but a public road system their brain would probably explode trying to understand how this works out better than even many public road systems.
There are a lot of people with exploding brains who can never get to the point of realizing our private road system is working as well as public road systems, and other exploding brains not realizing the public roads are working as well as their private roads.
The main pain point I have tends to be that when the option for peaceful voluntary trade is available, I strongly prefer it over the violence of forcing others via taxation. Therefore I much prefer the situation of my community -- i.e. basically no police/fire, no public roads, and no public utilities. It works great but the pride point is the very low level of violence / involuntary funding necessary to make it happen.
Americans have been brain washed, these are deeply rooted belief systems like religions, that have an immune response when challenged. Steep climb ahead.
I’m also fond of civilization. I like your point that enabling parents to work helps drive the economy to everyone’s benefit.
> How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"
How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?
> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead
Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
It's amazing how much of the opposition isn't a specific conceptual problem with the rightness or wrongness of the ideal behind the policy but re-litigating assumptions that are already accepted and baked into routine investments we already make to service and infrastructure.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
> Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result?
Paid for child care frees up some stay at home parents to enter the labor force; it's kind of circular, but some of those parents will work in child care. This won't fill the whole gap, but it will fill some of it.
New Mexico government does things very very poorly compared to other states I've lived in. Corruption at various levels of government is very common.
I actually really like this idea (even though I'm red leaning) but hope they are able to effectively administrate it. I have my doubts they are.
We're likely 5-10 years out from a world where tappy-tap computer keyboard jobs are in a death spiral and caregiving jobs are one of the only fields untouched by automation.
Enjoy living on $14/h for the rest of your life.
> What industries will those workers come from
Tech.
Outside of US there is whole world and maybe they are already doing something like that.
Damn you're right, let's just not do anything good and useful for people
You could've answered 80% of these questions for yourself by just reading the linked press release.
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
you could sub in universal k-12 schooling and your concern trolling points would not need to be change. I applaud the versatile argument.
+1. That being said, universal k-12 schooling works because it is publicly run. A subsidized private sector model has a lot of bad incentives and issues to work out. As an example, I've sent my kids to a private school for the past five years, and last year our state introduced a voucher program to help subsidize private education. The school responded by raising the prices by almost the amount of the voucher, just for the age groups that it covered.
See also: US healthcare.
I'm not in charge, but if I were, I'd just have the government provide the services. I don't think middlemen, especially for not-very-specialized services, provide a lot of value vs 'just buy/lease some space and hire some folks'
Like I always said to my friend complaining you can't reserve a table at the Border Cafe: they don't need a reservation system if there is always a line around the block
Of course they are gone now but point stands. :-)
Is this a for-profit school or something?
I would've thought we'd eventually move past the point of accusing people of "concern trolling" whenever they have a legitimate counterpoint, but here we are.
Concern trolling? This isn’t 2015. You can leave out the insults.
I’m so sick of seeing people justify why we cannot have nice things, as though it were a fact of nature.
Childcare is a great way to kick this off - it's politically hard to fight against anything "for the children" and it's not a stretch at all to extend coverage gradually, as people see the benefit and want it elsewhere / just one more year / etc.
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
> months of delays for everything
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
If you want a quick response, you need either dedicated quick-responders (how are they paid when not responding) or you need a lot of slack in the system (caregivers are allowed 4 kids, say, but most have two or three).
And that also needs to be paid for.
“This time will be different!” announce the proponents. Watch now, class, as the economic calculation problem works out as predicted in yet another instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
The majority of New Mexico is either not employed or only barely employed enough to count towards employment participation. The states employment participation rate is like 58%.
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
markets have criticism too. this is why we have nothing, neither roads nor businesses, and are currently hallucinating this conversation while scratching at the ground with sticks.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
Private healthcare is barely a market at all - heavily distorted due to government policy.
1. What's the market economy solution for this?
2. What if not everything in life is about the economy?
Not everything is about the economy, but someone's gotta pay for it.
Well, for the next century we'll keep pretending kids don't matter. We've done it for the past 50 years, already. Let's see how far that gets us as a species.
I don't think we've necessarily "pretended kids dont matter" for 50 years. But I think we would both agree that we can always do much better!
> it's politically hard to fight against anything "for the children"
The entire incel and tradwife spectrum hates these policies.
Kick what off?
presumably universal care in general, up to and including healthcare.
i’m down but i think there needs to be a recognition that this would require tax increases, not just on the ultra wealthy because there is simply not enough income up there to fund this.
Universal access to essential services
By the time US decides it's a good idea, they would run out of money and the whole world will laugh and point fingers on em.
then the US will use it internally as "see what a stupid idea" and we'll end up with even worse leaders
Sounds great.
>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.
How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care
[1]https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...
child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.
State + local tax burden in NM is 10.2%[1]. Revenue neutral would mean those taking the child care would instead take a job with average salary $120,000. But as another comment points out this policy attracts new jobs to the state, which complicates the math
[1]https://taxfoundation.org/location/new-mexico/
Income tax is not the only revenue that the state and local governments capture when production increases.
This is actually kind of smart: any other kind of social welfare like free housing or free healthcare could be gamed by people moving in state to exploit it without providing much in return. But free child care...this could genuinely attract jobs and people to work them for the benefit of the state as a whole.
They already have an income limited program. This is just going to cover the remaining kids. Honestly, programs like this are usually a net benefit for the entire state. Just like public schooling, housing, and transportation programs.
I wouldn't take these Truth in Accounting reports too seriously. They're linked to ALEC and take a very hard-right stance on fiscal issues, and in particular, this report on NM (which is also nearly five years old) seems to ignore the permanent funds---as best I can tell they are lumping them all under "restricted" and ignoring them, even though the land grant permanent fund, the largest of them, is totally at the discretion of the legislature and the others are very broad. The permanent funds are also now significantly larger than that report shows.
While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.
One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).
Despite being 31st in educational funding, New Mexico has ranked 50th in juvenile education for 8 years in a row per the Annie E. Casey foundation:
https://www.aecf.org/interactive/databook?l=35
You can research for yourself and see other evidence that the educational outcomes for children in New Mexico is generally very, very poor.
Expect similar results with New Mexico's "universal" child care.
Why should we all go off of one ranking?
Quartz ranked New Mexico 5th: https://qz.com/early-childhood-education-by-state-ranking-20...
If I look hard enough, I can find a study that ranks New Mexico at every single ranking from 50th to 1st.
In particular, the study you linked ranks on a lot of factors outside the control of the school - which is largely affected by the huge number of poor people in New Mexico (#1 in the country... Which is why they got the rating they did).
Maybe they're trying to fix it?
New Mexico is filled with poor people, news at 11. But seriously, a lot of things go into your state's education outcomes: state of the kids coming into the system is actually very important, as is parent participation, before we even get to funding by the state. As the only poor blue state, New Mexico has a lot to make up for, and it can't just magic its problems away.
We have something similar in Quebec, $7 CAD per day. It's one of the coolest societal things in the province. Yes we pay a lot in taxes, but we have stuff like this.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-unive...
What kind of childcare you can get for 7 CAD a day? Where I'm right now it's something like 10 enlightenment bucks per hour.
The same or almost better than the privately funded one.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20170603
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
Doesn't that study compare the results with basically keeping kids at home? That's not an option for a lot of people.
Apparently until now they've been providing this only to families below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. FPL is $32,150 for a 4-person family, so $128,600 combined family income (2 people working for $64,300 each -- and that's before fed and state taxes are deducted). Since that is far from being wealthy enough to "just" spring for expensive care, I'm glad to see this.
My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.
Not sure where in California you are, but the SF Bay Area’s economy is heavily distorted by intentionally bad roads and artificial housing shortages.
Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.
That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.
For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.
Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.
On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)
Providing such benefits to those below poverty level doesn’t make sense to me. People are that level of economic value need to improve their situation before taking on the burden of children. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the poorest to have large families they can’t take care of. The opposite should be happening - we should subsidize households with demonstrated capability to be successful (which in our society does mean economically) to have more children.
That might sound attractive at first[1], but when we consider that there isn't a practical way to stop those poor people from having children anyway, what such a policy amounts to is that we punish such kids[2] for their parents' "sins" -- which is a great way to breed a generation of sociopathic miscreants bent on destroying your society.
[1] (if you can avoid thinking of the class-based eugenics that such a policy would amount to, if it were actually obeyed)
[2] punish by impoverishing them further, or by making it more likely they'll be neglected by those parents that you already suspect aren't responsible
That's wild. New Mexico is fairly notorious for having terrible medical and social safety net stuff.
I have a friend that had a daughter that lived there, and had serious mental health issues, and I'd hear nightmare stories about how bad the state was for that.
I have family with similar issues, in New York, and they get an amazing amount of state support.
This is paid for by the oil and gas boom in Southern NM.
The medical situation is getting worse by the year, though. I don’t think it’s just a matter of shoveling more dollars
I went on a road trip through Southern NM a couple years ago. Highly recommend stopping at Gila National Forest - it's a certified "dark park", remote enough from sources of light to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
One thing that struck me - towns down there had a template. 90% of towns we drove through were just a blood plasma "donation" center, a dollar store, a gas station, and a cemetery. Very bleak existence out there, oil and gas boom notwithstanding.
That is a very common pattern. Probably 90% of poor rural America is like that. And the lucky towns have those stores, others not even.
That sounds amazing. It is now on the travel list!
What I was told, was it was anti-undocumented stuff.
People don’t want immigrants getting help that residents pay for, so they turn the spigots off for everyone.
I haven't seen anything like that. The biggest factor you can clearly point to is that NM has some of the lowest salaries for doctors combined with some of the highest medical insurance premiums.
If you live there, and don't agree, then I stand corrected. I was told this by someone that lives there, but that's a sample size of 1 (from Albuquerque).
The icing on the cake there was that they just gerrymandered NM recently in a way that took all representation away from southern NM.
I know other states have as well, so nothing new there, but seeing as they basically fund all the state's social projects, felt a bit done wrong.
I live in rural New Mexico and medical services are very bad here.
I took my GF to the emergency room once with chest pains (turned out to be a lung infection). After an hours long wait we got to see the "doctor". The doctor came in in street clothes which were wrinkled jeans and a frumpy polo. He was not smart and from appearance, speech and thinking patterns easily could have been the janitorial mid level manager (no disrespect meant to janitorial staff). They did a chest scan, he said he would review it, then told her to go home and take a Motrin and then she got mysterious bills for the next year from the event.
I would go to Texas which isn't far if the emergency permitted it, and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Heh, I had a discussion with a security guard about rattlesnakes once while working in rural NM. "If you get bit by a rattlesnake, man, get on the radio and call me. I'll get you to the hospital. But we're going to Cruces... I'm not taking you to the hospital in T or C... you'll fuckin' die there."
Hahah. Probably should keep going another 45 minutes to El Paso in my opinion.
>and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Just to be clear for those not familiar with the relative position of cities in Texas, imagine getting hurt in Illinois and the EMT's being like "the hospitals around here are shit, we're going to Gary".
I mean... as someone living in rural-lite, the hospitals in my county are crap; going to a big city nearby is a better choice. I don't know about hospitals in Chicago, and I wouldn't think Gary is big enough to be a hospital magnet, but it doesn't seem that out of the norm. Of course, Mr. Willson ruined Gary for me; I'd die if I went to a hospital there.
Meanwhile, my worst experience with US healthcare was in a small town in Texas.
Important context here is that New Mexico's state income tax rates are in the "red state" bracket. Notably, they are lower than states like Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Montana.
Im probably in the minority on this opinion but I think its crazy to entrust your children to low paid strangers with no stake in their development during critical times in their lives.
Cool - then you can pay for daycare
Just as a general aside - The amount of hubris when it comes to Early Childhood Education is always astounding to me. So many people assume they are experts because they were a toddler once or can become an expert just by reading a couple books. How many people on HN are even aware there is an entire specialty in Education devoted to preschoolers for very good reason? ANY program that attempts to put kids in a good daycare with trained professionals is a win for everyone.
I'm very unfamiliar with New Mexico (having only been a tourist in Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a few days), but according to U.S. News it ranks 50 out of 50 for education: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education. Given some level of geographic mobility it doesn't seem like a place I would want to raise a child.
Am I mistaken? Thoughts?
50 out of 50, plus the District of Columbia, for 8 consecutive years. I recently spent a few weeks as a instructional assistant in a New Mexico high school classroom. I saw nothing but highly dedicated professional teachers doing their best. But student performance is astonishingly low. I felt like running through the halls screaming like my hair was on fire, but there is very little in the way of alarm or anything but a few changes around the edges.
I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.
If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.
You have to look at variability. The cities are doing ok, but it is out in the rural areas, and the reservations specifically, where there are going to be extreme negative outcomes. There are areas on some of the reservations that are yet to be electrified as an illustration of just what kind of challenges NM is up against.
This is so important when looking at any statistic from an area bigger than "what affects you" - the schools in Roswell have basically no effect on those in Albuquerque.
Los Alamos is doing well. That’s about it.
Los Alamos has a single high school in their district, and it isn’t even close to the top ranked school in the state.
As I said, the variability is the key metric.
It helps to have a super high percentage of nuclear physics PhD in town :-)
The thing to keep in mind about New Mexico is that there are totally fine public schools here and there - Rio Rancho maybe, Las Cruces has some maybe, maybe some random ones in a few more remote small towns, Los Alamos, etc., but the state as a whole is extremely poor and has lots of reservations and pueblos which have huge complicated histories to overcome.
I will say that (and this is 20+ years out of date) coming from a good for New Mexico public school put me about a year ahead of everyone else in a decent California public school when we moved.
So overall my main point is that you probably want to look at schools on some kind of basis other than the state overall, especially in states like NM and AZ.
Ignoring the complicated history of the rural areas, I periodically drive Route 66, Since the early 2000’s, the bit in New Mexico has basically been eaten by climate change. I can’t imagine how much damage the encroaching desert (badlands? What’s the word for a desert that’s drier and dustier than before?) has done to the local economies.
They weren’t doing well before, but it’s not been trending well.
Having said that, Albuquerque is nice. Props to the Navajo nation for helping out with early COVID vaccine testing.
I'd also not want to move there to raise a child, but turns out people live there non-the-less - and the people who'd qualify for this program are the people who can't just pick up and move to California or New Jersey.
New Mexico is a very strange beast. It wants to be progressive and green, but is basically an oil state. There is a widespread poverty mindset of low expectations which prevents change because people are used to the way things are and don't want change. Crime is high, education is bad, health care is bad. Stupid drivers. Lots of corruption.
But you can have a pretty nice, affordable living in places like Taos, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and parts of Las Cruces and Albuquerque.
Like with choosing to live anywhere you shouldn't be looking at state level education for your child's education. That would be stupid.
The state certainly has an impact on local schools. In California for example the State Board of Education sets standards for education, and recently it published a framework whose first version discouraged students from taking Algebra I in middle school. Delaying algebra to high school and delaying calculus to college are opposite of my own upbringing and seem very wrong to me. It also had other guidelines that I vehemently disagree with, such as de-tracking in favor of heterogeneous student grouping.
The reason we need this is because both parents need to work because wages are so low families cannot live on a single income. I wish we could fix that rather than allowing even more people to work putting more downward pressure on wages.
Where is the money coming from to keep these services afloat? The federal funding environment seems less magnanimous these days, plus as other have pointed out, New Mexico is not an economic powerhouse.
The NM state government has had surplus revenue for a few decades due to taxes on natural gas and oil, first in the northwest, which has since dried up, and now in the southeast. Previous state governments had the foresight to structure things such that this money goes into a trust fund from which the state draws interest. Of course all that money is a very tempting source to fund programs, and every session there are debates about increasing the amount drawn from the fund, for something or another.
I have to admit that with everything else that has been going on politically, I haven't followed this latest push for universal child care, and don't know if the way they are funding it is sustainable. But previous pushes for preschool funding, etc weren't IMO; they were based on pretty optimistic estimates of both fund performance and economic returns from the preschool programs.
Oklahoma has had free pre-K for years now. If a red state like Oklahoma can figure out how to fund child care, it should be easy for New Mexico to do something similar.
Perhaps this is one of those issues that gains momentum amongst enough states to become nation-wide phenomenon like other government-solutions/decision-for-social-issues do.
I think DC has the start of a really good system here. There's universal Pre-K 3 and 4. Most elementary schools offer it, but you can also get a large subsidy to go towards a private daycare. I'd love to see that expanded to all ages. Day cares here are super heavily regulated (and thus expensive) and apparently the paperwork is a nightmare for the day care, but in practice it's super easy for parents.
I see all these comments in the vein of 'why should you force people to work in the mines and not get to love their child' and I wonder if any of these people have ever had toddlers. I love my kid, and love spending time with her. But she really likes daycare (and now school). Not only does she get better socialization than me taking her to the park for 2 hours, but she learns skills that I wouldn't be consistent about teaching. It turns out, being taught by people who have years of practice and degrees in childcare is a pretty good idea!
We did Prek-4 at our public school and you could immediately tell the difference between the daycare kids, the nanny kids, and the home-parent kids. The daycare kids were much more prepared and able to cope, and this is at a school where parental involvement was quite high. I don't think the different approaches are universally better or worse, but it's clear to me that the quality of the daycare and the parent matters a lot more than which one you choose.
> New Mexico has expanded access to no-cost child care to families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, reducing financial strain on tens of thousands of families.
This is confusing me, is this the same as "at or below the federal poverty level" or is there something I'm missing with that 400%? Do you have to be 400% below the federal poverty level to qualify?
The federal poverty level is unrealistically low ($20k for two people, which would be difficult to make rent and eat three meals on even in LCOL areas), so they set their own “poverty line” to 4x the federal one.
It means that the current system provides free child care if your household income is less that 4x the federal poverty level. The new scheme doesn't restrict by income.
The federal poverty level is defined by the feds.
Many programs use that, or variations on like (like this 400%) - to index. So if the poverty line for a family of four is 32,150$ - then this program is available to your family of four until you make over 128,600$.
Others will say "below 200% FPL OR qualifying condition" (think newborn, pregnant, etc). So some programs are open to baseball player families, as long as the qualifying condition is there.
The federal poverty level is very low so typically means testing programs add multipliers that are appropriate for the incomes in their area.
I would assume take the poverty line and multiply by 4? if you earn less than that you get this program
at or below 400% of the poverty level. so if the povertly level is 1k/month for a family of 4, anyone making 4k or less with the same size of family is included
They'll probably just pass a law that states can't do this? Just like many states passed laws against municipal fiber.
There's no big money that wants otherwise. If anything, corporations are all for this.
Paid day cares probably have a big issue with this.
Maybe, but they may also get vouchers (that's what it sounds like).
I wouldn't be surprised if it encourages companies to have on-site daycare.
Probably richer taxpayers are the ones that won't like it.
The federal government has a very different relationship to states, than states do to their municipalities. This law couldn't be passed, even if "they" wanted to.
I've been told since at least 1980 that small, local government was best. I was given the impression that state level government was probably the optimum level to decide things, cities and counties could go off the rails in various ways.
I haven't see a coherent rationale for reversing course on this doctrine, which was extremely strongly held, and cited a lot.
> I was given the impression that state level government was probably the optimum level to decide things
I don't think government at any level should get to discriminate based on protected classes and I hope most people alive today will agree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
That has never been true in practice. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court said that ICE can detain people solely if they are Hispanic and where they are.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/supreme-court-ice-r...
I also think smaller administration cells are more efficient, but when the president of the federation can just reshuffle the congressional districts and meddle with universities internal politics we gotta rethink how independent these states really are. There is no silver bullet, specially in politics.
There is a rule of subsidiarity -- problems have to be solved at the lowest level possible, because it has the most information. If it's not, it bubbles up to the next level upwards. EU, US and Catholic church all do this to the various degree.
This is generally the position of politicians with power in state governments, yes.
> I've been told
By whom?
> since at least 1980 that small, local government was best. I was given the impression
By whom?
> extremely strongly held, and cited a lot
By whom?
Best for what purpose?
There are no principles here, no moral compass, only power. It is important to understand this.
And once you do understand -- then what? You stop complaining and decide to put up with whatever the powers to be are up to, right?
Incorrect, you keep complaining and decide to put up with the powers that be.
oh whew! I though we'd have to out you as having any.
It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.
This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.
The vast majority of the EU does not offer anything close to free universal early childhood care like this. None of Western Europe. I can think of only Latvia and Romania off the top of my head.
> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state. This is free babysitting.
It's not quite free in every state, although it's closer to that than many people here probably realize.
At least until 2025 (unsure how the July budget cuts will affect this longer-term), Medicaid provides free or low-cost insurance to eligible children/families, which in theory should apply to everyone who isn't eligible for health insurance through other means. Emphasis on in theory, though - in practice, there are plenty of people who aren't covered.
It's probably more accurate to say that almost all children are eligible for healthcare coverage, and that coverage is free or low-cost for millions of people who meet various income thresholds. (People who are covered on private insurance almost always have copays or deductibles, so it's not truly free for them because there is some out-of-pocket cost).
In Berlin I enjoy exceedingly cheap daycare for my kids (80€ for 2 per month, would be lower if I didn't pay the optional extra costs), as well as generous parental leave in the year after a child is born, with salary subsidy from the state.
This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.
Is it really "universal"? Bottom of the sea has subsidies for childcare for certain income threshold when both parents are working. It's pretty close to free childcare practically speaking.
> This is not child healthcare. That is already free in every US state.
Whaaat?
I have 2 kids and I can assure you healthcare is far from free unless you are low income; cutoff varies by state but it's not high -- around $80K/year household income[0], which is pretty middle-class. We're not at all wealthy, but a few years ago we started making more than threshold for our state's Medicaid/CHIP program, and we now spend >10K a year for our kids' healthcare (granted we have a child with a disability so he's the bulk of that).
[0] https://www.insurekidsnow.gov/coverage
> That is already free in every US state.
What?
https://www.insurekidsnow.gov/
read the article or even the title of the post. it's childcare.
In a US context "childcare" means "a place to drop your kids off so you can go to work".
right. We're not talking about healthcare.
> It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.
This post is about childcare - ie daycare/preschool/babysitting - not child health care.
You don’t understand the United States.
The point of the US has always been to make it easy for people to accumulate a lot of money, so that they can independently purchase things like child care if they need it, but if not, they can freely invest their money into other things.
Prioritizing cashflow over social safety nets results in a very liquid lifestyle, that can change quickly according to your own individual desires. Since you are not depending on any government handouts, you can simply take your money to wherever you see fit and live how you want. This appeals to many American individualist values.
If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you. Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
Unfortunately though in the US, this entire concept collapses when people are no longer able to accumulate a lot of cash. They will live in the worst of both worlds: broke and the government isn’t helping them.
> If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you.
You don't have to live any specific kind of lifestyle, but it is true that a sizable portion of your income still goes to the public institutions. You can send your kids to private schools or (in some countries) homeschool them, but you're still paying for everyone else's public education.
Same with savings and pensions funds, a portion of your income goes to the state pension fund, no opting out of that, but you can also invest in private funds or whatever else.
Nobody's, for example, forcing you to work a 9-5 like everyone else, you're free to start a business, be unemployed, work and also run a business on the side etc.
As for moving countries, you can freely move around EU member states while keeping the benefits. You are also still entitled to the benefits of your country of origin even if you move across the globe as long as you keep your citizenship and tax residency there (which might be more impractical than just forgoing the benefits though).
> Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.
The wealth inequality varies quite vastly depending on which European country you're looking at. Also note that European does not automatically imply them being an EU member state. Overly general statements like these are totally pointless.
Is there a mandated state ratio of workers to children? In Michigan, by law, it is 1:4.
It is great to offer free childcare to all citizens, but if those childcare facilities are inadequately resourced the quality of care will decline.
A quick glance at https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/child-care-...
It looks like it's 1:6 until kids are 27 months, at which point the ratio becomes 1:10. When kids are 3-4 the ratio is 1:12, and when they're 5 and up, the ratio is 1:15. These are numbers from 2011, so not sure how that's changed over time.
"child care available to all New Mexicans"
Does this mean a stay-at-home mom or dad can get a daycare license and get paid by the state to take care of their own children?
> Programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate. New Mexico estimates an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals are needed to fully achieve a universal system.
Is this a reasonable wage in New Mexico? Here in Southern California you could not find qualified candidates for that but I know general cost of living is higher.
That's really good pay for most parts of New Mexico.
$18/hour is a really good wage in New Mexico for every city except the richest ones... mainly Santa Fe. It's really high for smaller towns and villages.
If AI does actually lead to large economic gains but also high unemployment, then we should be able to invest most in social programs like this and let people make a good living providing them. (as well as all other workers, through wage subsidies)
That said, if you don’t have a job… do you need childcare? But I’m assuming there will still be enough demand from those employed
If you don't have childcare, how will you get a job?
I think I muddled my point, I think with abundance we should offer childcare to people who have jobs. Even maybe some hours for those that don’t too.
I just want to +1 this post before it gets flagged for being "political" or whatever.
I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.
We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.
If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).
I don't think that's an accurate recounting of the reasons for the American Revolution. That '/' is doing a lot of work, and "wealth inequality" was not a topical notion at the time.
That said, this is a fine thing for a state to experiment with. From other comments, it sounds like NM's ability to try this out is related to a recent oil and gas boom. We'll see how it goes.
What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
Universal healthcare is similar. You want to support small businesses? Lack of affordable healthcare stops a lot of people from leaving corporate America to start their own business.
>What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
That's what happens when party doesn't have an actual policy stance and min-maxes their pooling numbers based on target audience instead.
Another more cynical take is "childbirths" is just a code for racism and "pro-life" a code for religious types.
It’s not just pro-life - even though it might encourage more women to not have abortions - it’s also they want to stave off the country from becoming “majority minority” to “preserve their culture”.
The minute they even think that minorities are help by pro child policies they will be back to the “welfare queen” dog whistles that Reagan did.
But to be fair, a few of the religious non MAGA conservatives did understand that the best way to reduce abortions were to support new mothers and children. But now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, they don’t seem to care about it anymore.
> What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.
Didn't the Big Beautiful Bill include $5K for newborn babies? I thought I saw a headline that said that. But anyway, yeah, 5-grand is gonna solve everything. /s
This is awesome.
I suspect that for every one job the government would subsidize for a daycare professional, that we’d see three women enter the workforce.
That’s a net of four people employed.
I have no proof of this aside from my own experience watching parents struggle to find care for their kids. Even well off ones where I live. In Massachusetts!
Good for you, New Mexico. I’m rooting for you.
What's even better is this isn't costing New Mexico that much and it removes income restrictions for daycare. I think the total budget is something like $36 million extra with about $20 million of that being capex to build new facilities.
Every state should have universal childcare, however we should also be offering universal birth control as a compliment.
Nice! Illinois had something similar called AllKids but that was for lower income families [0]. More states need this in US.
[0] https://hfs.illinois.gov/medicalprograms/allkids.html
New Mexico has some serious generational social issues. Extreme poverty, lack of education, lack of work (or most anything else) ethic are very common. Drugs and alcoholism are endemic.
I wonder if some of the intent behind this is to reduce some of the generational effects by exposing children early to at least some semblance of order and sobriety? Then when they enter school they have more of a chance.
I'm not by any means "socialist inclined" but I can't say I'm against this program because the situation is dire enough something must be done.
I support my tax dollars going to pay for universal child care. This is likely the second or third largest expense for young families. To be honest, I do not know how people can afford to have multiple children in daycare in any major metropolitan area.
As I read the back and forth here…
When I lived in Norway 35 years ago, I’m pretty sure they had this. Little kids went to barnehagen. I think as early as 1. Can anyone from the Nordic states chime in? Is that still the case? Does it work? I would guess Sweden and Denmark were similar.
Everything about this thread sums up how brutal America is. It’s wild.
This is is honestly an economic nobrainer. Of course it needs to be tuned correctly for the context. I hope they they look at the long history of this in the Nordics. There's an insane amount of economic research readily available.
This is really great!!!
Most people are forgetting the sine qua non: No billionaires were harmed in the making of this law.
I wonder what other laws like this can be passed that do not harm billionaires.
Slightly tangent. At some point in future I can imagine humanoid robots will be doing this job. Of course, the robots need to be super reliable before we hand over the our kids
What a disturbing dystopia where the robots are at home taking care of the kids so the parents can go work in the factory.
May be when robots truly arrived. We don't have to work and we get to spend more time with our kids.
That's definitely the better alternative.
New Mexico also issued an order removing barriers to pharmacies giving COVID boosters.
https://www.nmhealth.org/news/vaccine/2025/8/
The states are stepping up.
what happened with socialization, friends and parents
> socialization, friends
This still happen at daycare. If you have sent your kid to daycare/preschool, you'll know that kids become friends wit nother kids there, and parents can become friends withnother parents. A community forms because playdates are necessary when daycare/preschool is out.
> parents
Sometimes economic realities are such that both parents have to work to make ends meet. There are single-family households that also exist. Childcare is a necessity in these and other situations.
Do you have a lot of friends who'd be willing to watch your children for 9 hours a day while you work, especially young infants?
No one does because everyone needs to have a job to survive in the US today. It used to be that many couples could survive on a single income. Not only did that allow them to better care for their kids, it also allowed them to help their siblings, parents, other family members, friends, neighbors, and community.
> It used to be that many couples could survive on a single income
Historically, this is not true - women have always taken in work. Living on someone else's dime was for the wealthy only. The post-war years were a historical anomaly.
Daycare involves all of those things.
Excellent, it's a start ... anyone else predicting this will be get cancelled by the dumpling for being too Communist. It's on my bingo card.
New Mexico is too small for Orange Julius to care about. If it was California, the story would be completely different.
Imagine if we saw mostly headlines like this rather than things like "Trump threatens war on Chicago" or "Supreme Court approves racial profiling", or "Columbia students deported for protesting" or "Trump delays tariffs for 90 more days".
Chances are you'll soon see something like "Trump threatens nuclear war against communist New Mexico".
It's off topic to mention this, but I've become convinced that the richest among us really don't care about improving the systems and institutions that would really elevate humanity and unlock tremendous human capital.
Why would they? They’re wealthy enough to weather nearly anything. They do lack total power though, which is why you see Silicon Valley flirting with Yarvin.
“No cost universal child care” Also: “savings of $12,000 per year”
So this will be financed by a voluntary election by those who support it, i.e., voluntary increase in the various taxes people pay in NM?