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In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

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Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#111

Post by usaar333 »

Eextra953 wrote: post #83
HarryHirsch wrote: post #2

It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.

Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best. I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the numbe…

In Quebec it was a 20% jump in mother employment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...

And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#112

Post by zeroonetwothree »

macintux wrote: post #85
terminalshort wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?

I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits. With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.

There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#114

Post by meagher »

macintux wrote: post #46
roughly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.

I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.

This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.

Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#115

Post by Retric »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #109
Retric wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved. The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically po…

How can trust be irrelevant? Why would anyone want pretenders and deceivers to have better families?

If you yourself alongside everyone else in your country benefits why should you care if you happen to dislike some of those people?

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#116

Post by zeroonetwothree »

watwut wrote: post #49
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.

Maybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.

Turns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors.

Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#117

Post by jack_h »

gfiorav wrote: post #34

This is one of my pet peeves. If you believe in the welfare state concept, you should never refer to anything that’s subsidized as “free.” It’s a recipe for disaster. As a European who was uprooted and settled in the US, I’ve become painfully aware of how little we Europeans comprehend the workings of the economy. I believe this is partly due to the propaganda surrounding the welfare state as “free.” Of course, nothi…

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.

The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#118

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ryandrake wrote: post #15
softwaredoug wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US will kick into gear at certain emergency times (WW2, Covid, etc) but not so great outside of then.

I don't see how the US's feeble and lackluster response to COVID counted as "kicking into gear".

We developed vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. If that’s “feeble” then I guess I’ll take it every time.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#119

Post by Aurornis »

gfiorav wrote: post #34

This is one of my pet peeves. If you believe in the welfare state concept, you should never refer to anything that’s subsidized as “free.” It’s a recipe for disaster. As a European who was uprooted and settled in the US, I’ve become painfully aware of how little we Europeans comprehend the workings of the economy. I believe this is partly due to the propaganda surrounding the welfare state as “free.” Of course, nothi…

The narratives on this topic are hard to pierce through. Economic literacy is low among the public. Politicians take advantage of this to pretend that solving everything is as simple as taxing the people you don’t like (billionaires, corporations, or even completely incorrect narratives about how we’ll use tariffs to make other countries pay us, which we all know is false). These groups are all represented as infinite money wells that just need to be tapped by electing the right person.

This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.

Re: In a U.S. First, New Mexico Opens Doors to Free Child Care for All

#120

Post by zeroonetwothree »

kittensmittens5 wrote: post #88
terminalshort wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until very recently in human history 100% of childcare operations were unlicensed, and this was better in every way than a government bureaucracy run system.

Until recently in human history 100% of humans were illiterate.

“Recently” seems to mean something different in your comment than the one you replied to. As in at least an order of magnitude difference, maybe two.
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