Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-...
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064...
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?
> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead
Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
See also: US healthcare.
Of course they are gone now but point stands. :-)
They aren't just theoretical concerns.
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.
> "The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently."
Indeed. Is the solution to sacrifice for it? Or tax it to care for the human? [4] We can make better choices, as New Mexico shows. I'm tired of hearing its impossible. It isn't, it's just a lack of will and collective effort in that direction, based on all available evidence.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...
[3] >>43119657
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paaen3b44XY
(I am once again asking to think in systems)
(Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.)
(I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.)
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...
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.
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.
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.