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.
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.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
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
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
Also, the daycares typically have structured programs that are fun and helpful for toddler development.
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’m confused; how does your preferred policy solve this problem?
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.
And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.
It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.
Geeks are as emotional and irrational as everybody else. They are even worse in fact because they can rationalize their behavior even harder.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
From the government's point of view, they want more people out in the workforce, so it probably doesn't make sense that way.
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.
They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?
They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.
From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.
So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.
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.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
And no it's not a free lunch. If stay-at-home in a family isn't reimbursed, they are actually worse off, because now they have an additional tax they are paying that they did not have before. So now even more people like you who wanted a parent to stay at home are driven out of it because their family budget comes upon this tax.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
> With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.
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.
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.
> 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 don't expect every tax dollar I spend to come back to me in the form of a direct benefit.
> Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?
I would be 100% open to this sort of taxpayer-funded educational enrichment for families who can't afford it themselves, depending on the usual criteria, like how well-run/efficient it is and so on.
If 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.
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.
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.
What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/che/swi...
Any sustainable policy would obviously result in a TFR of at least the replacement rate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No complexity can make a $1 billion expense able to be paid with $1m of revenue.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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?
Therefore a waiver would help with this?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
> 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.
Americans are stupid enough without stripping them of what little education we do offer them.
so, no, extremely limited compared to what's being discussed.
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
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.
- 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.
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.)
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.
But the lack of that subsidy should not cause someone to oppose a paid-childcare subsidy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I rarely find this to be the case for anything big or important.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.
If you remove the cost of regulating a benefit, then there will be more money available for people to get this benefit.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> I just don't understand this mentality.
I don't understand. Wasn't your original comment opposing an equal value waiver?
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.
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!
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 $1k per month isn't on a "level playing field" with childcare that doesn't. It's not putting something on a pedestal to remove the bill.
Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...
> It is the argument for eliminating all child subsidies / welfare / public schooling which I think would be the absolute best thing for children we could possibly do
The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?! Sorry you managed to complete nearly two whole posts of pointless nitpicking in the guise of being pro-family and then you hit me with this!?
I mean, I get the people that think it's so important to incentivise stay-at-home parenting or to avoid any child being even slightly poor that the government should pay every infant's parent at least as much as daycare centres currently cost... that just happens to be very expensive. Don't get self professed ancaps who freely admit they don't care how/if the kids get looked after arguing the system that costs the taxpayer significantly less and doesn't disincentivise participating in labour markets is a worse one than the alternative of handing out max_childcare_costs to every parent...
Yes. And no. The gov gives the child X$ 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
> "Other reported benefits of attendance at high-quality child care include less impulsivity, more advanced expressive vocabulary, and greater reported social competence (Belsky et al. 2007)."
You probably thought they were comparing high quality daycare to parental care, because that's certainly what they're implying. Here [1] is the paper they're referencing, which unsurprisingly they chose to not provide a link to. They are comparing high quality daycare care against poor quality daycare! Both had overall negative effects relative to parental care! In particular all non-parental childcare was directly associated with lower social competence, poorer work habits, conflicted relationships with teachers (and their mother!), and so on.
That paper itself is based on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development series. You can find a more casual overview of that study's findings here. [2] And an opinion piece, 'daycare - yes or no', based on an overview of the available evidence (including the NICHD study) here. [3]
[1] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007....
[2] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-beyond-intelli...
[3] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/20...
I don't entirely understand the fetishism of expertise among a certain segment of society. Don't you realize that most of all teachers and other educational institutions are staffed by those who would be considered nominally experts? And this has even been taken to the next level by widespread adherence to a national curriculum (common core), again composed by even greater ostensible experts. And all of this has been complimented by the 5th highest spending per student in the world. And the result? Educational outcomes are falling off a cliff.
Obviously this isn't to say that anti-expertise is the answer, but rather that motivated people of reasonable intelligence and objectivity, regardless of expertise, are a [measurably] excellent source of value in just about everything. And, by contrast, expertise itself does not guarantee good results nor effective performance, especially in the context of other issues that might otherwise impair performance like large class sizes, minimal motivation, poor work environment, etc.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effec...