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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.
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 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.
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...
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".
If you remove the cost of regulating a benefit, then there will be more money available for people to get this benefit.
> 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.