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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

#241

Post by 999900000999 »

polski-g wrote: post #133
999900000999 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should cover everyone. No body goes to the doctor because they want to. I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented. Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you. This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's ano…

> No body goes to the doctor because they want to. I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own. Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.

Imagine it doesn’t go away on its own, it’s something serious and you caught it early.

For working class people , the skin in the game is having to miss a day of work, etc. Theirs still an opportunity cost

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

#242

Post by Spivak »

hammock wrote: post #179
beowulfey wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an intractable issue. It's just a matter of economics.

Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem. Wait a minute… that sounds like…

Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.

Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.

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

#243

Post by loeg »

tbrownaw wrote: post #215
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).

Where does mass trustworthy behavior (ie, "a high trust society") come from?

From the perspective of 2025, it's pretty incredible how much of a higher trust society we had as recently as 2019.

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

#244

Post by vlovich123 »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #188
outside1234 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably because they are actually measuring hyperactivity when there is universal care versus 40% of it going unmeasured.

I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.

Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.

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

#245

Post by dmix »

Demiurge wrote: post #155
rs186 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tired of the argument. Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.

Yeah, it’s like forgetting that the point of money in life is living, rather than the money itself.

Life is not about checking off boxes on how much free stuff you can hypothetically get from the government either. That has tons of costs and risks just like everything else in life. It’s all relative.

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

#246

Post by lordnacho »

g9yuayon wrote: post #223
siliconc0w wrote: post #113

My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.

> so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children. The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately ne…

I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?

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

#247

Post by abustamam »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #146
tbrownaw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the tax man can't see it, it doesn't exist. . Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery. Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids. The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".

The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial…

That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)

I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.

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

#248

Post by georgeburdell »

jimt1234 wrote: post #240

I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too…

Companies don’t want employees whose time is split between childcare and work. This is why egg freezing is a common perk but childcare is not.

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

#249

Post by czhu12 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #235
czhu12 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what its worth, the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children, citing a study from Quebec. > The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubl…

You'd think the Economist would care more about this study: https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/... Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.

I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.

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

#250

Post by programjames »

nradov wrote: post #149
godelski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that it's so hard to argue for care for children. The response is always "but it's the parents' responsibility". Which, okay, fair, BUT if the parent is failing their responsibility (which can happen for many reasons, many of which don't need maliciousness nor incompetence), then what? We let the child die? We let the child starve? That's what I don't get. A child doesn't have autonomy, so it shouldn't…

I agree with you. But to steelman the argument on the other side, their concern is that subsidizing care for children creates a moral hazard by encouraging irresponsible people to have even more children. It's a feedback loop which creates an escalating burden on the rest of society. I don't think that denying care to children is effective or morally justified; I'm just trying to explain what seems to be the underlyi…

I think a solution to fix this moral hazard is to take children away from their parents when the subsidies become too much. But for lots of reasons, society really doesn't want that to happen.
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