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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

#291
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then do it today so mothers can continue to work and help the economy.

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".

In Scenario B the government gets to collect more tax revenues, and also has additional levers to influence certain behaviour (the government will tax you, but give you a tax break if you do Y). Also, the government can make your labor worth less by printing money and increasing inflation.

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

#292
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that gets difficult when we talk about incidental causes of needing support.

Like let's say there's two parents, the primary income earner dies, there's not enough in savings, so single parent now needs support. I don't think that's anyone's "fault".

On the other hand, we could look at a case where there's a family who's never made enough money to support their kids and keeps having more. You can take away the kids and fine the parents for fraud. (Obviously should issue a warning before this)

But I think that for some parts of this, tying the benefits to the child just reduces the opportunities for abuse. Medical care for children is a pretty straight forward one. You make it universal and the taxes are progressive such that you make it a wash for middle or upper middle income families and a loss for upper income families. So everyone gets the benefits but that creates an efficient system where we don't really need to do means testing on the child at time of their medical checkup. Same thing for something like food programs. Both of these can even utilize the existing schools so we don't need to build new facilities. For food, you just make it so access to the cafeteria is free. Provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Will people abuse the program? Absolutely. Nothing is 100% bulletproof. Will the cost of abuse outweigh the costs needed to avoid the abuse? Probably not. Will the costs of avoiding the abuse outweigh the costs of a child going hungry? Absolutely not.

I think this last part is important to note because frequently the complaints about these systems leverage the fact that the system is imperfect. We then spend years arguing about how to make it perfect (which is literally an impossible task) and meanwhile we leave the most important part of the problem unsolved, causing damage. If we are unable to recognize that perfection is impossible then our conversations just become silly as we love to "play devil's advocate" or "steelman" arguments. That adversarial nature is a very helpful tool for refinement, but it also can't serve as a complete blocker either.

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US was founded on individual rights Excluding those whose land was stolen and redistributed by government. > not community sacrifice Excluding government-funded infrastructure projects like canals that enabled growth. And support that immigrants received from ethnic communities. > Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.

This comment is sort of weird. Like you’re finding technically true rebuttals that don’t really refute the high level point.

The high level point is idealism not grounded in historical facts and probably not worthy spending time and going deeper with criticism, because full rebuttal isn’t some expert knowledge - ChatGPT can do that for you. America of 1800s is everything but libertarian paradise and is not truly exceptional. Industrialization in Europe increased prosperity while building welfare states at the same time.

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

#295

Can't read the whole article, but am curious about how it will impact unlicensed childcare operations. I imagine that the number of parents using these is much higher than many people realize. Will be interesting to see how many parents end up using the state program.

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, you had personally known everyone, for years, who you might hand your child off to for a few hours.

We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.

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

#297
post #63
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…

Its free at the endpoint for user. That's what the "free" means here. No one is pretending that resources for things like roads, police, firefighting, primary schooling and others come out of nothingness and don´t have any cost.

Exactly. What else are you going to call it, but free? That's literally the word for it.

Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.

We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.

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

#298
post #279
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…

I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.

You may be surprised to learn that Quebec is not in America.

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

#299
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…

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

Even if you assume the statistics for hyperactivity are correct, how did the researchers decide which statistics were relevant?

In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.

For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:

"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality

"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).

There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."

The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:

"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."

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

#300
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.

You may be surprised to learn that Quebec is not in America.

America is the place without universal childcare being used as a control here.
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