zlacker

>>toomuc+(OP)
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.

>>Nifty3+t7
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...

>>toomuc+88
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.

>>evantb+Mi
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] >>43119657

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY

(I am once again asking to think in systems)

>>toomuc+Qk
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.