Just as a general aside - The amount of hubris when it comes to Early Childhood Education is always astounding to me. So many people assume they are experts because they were a toddler once or can become an expert just by reading a couple books. How many people on HN are even aware there is an entire specialty in Education devoted to preschoolers for very good reason? ANY program that attempts to put kids in a good daycare with trained professionals is a win for everyone.
New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
481–490 of 695 posts
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, this only occurs with unions and rising wages, where a single income from a secure job can support a family while a parent stays home to perform childrearing. Are we there? When will we get there? These are important questions to ask if this is a dependency to improving household financials to encourage the outcome in this context (a stay at home parent). If jobs are tenuous or insecure, long term financial o…
Regulation, my man. Doesn't require fitting into the existing framework that was invented to as a stopgap for dangerous factory working conditions. The barrier is people's preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like.
Can you expound on this? What regulation? What "preconceived notions on what work day, weeks, and lives have to look like"? Unions and higher wages enable people to afford families, and I am an aggressive proponent of a 4 day work week at 100% pay considering productivity gains over the last half century, but I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't understand this mentality. 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…
+1 This whole mentality of voucher system is selfish. 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.
It’s not any more selfish than wanting subsidy for childcare. A voucher system is about choice. Parents get to have some financial assistance to make it possible for them to stay at home and be with their kids, or to provide their children with experiences that aren’t just sitting in the daycare center’s room. If they want to do things differently, why shouldn’t they be able to? Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?
> 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.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good government policies generally avoid step functions otherwise you get perverse incentives. 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…
My house has never been on fire, should I get a tax rebate for never needing service from the fire department? 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.
Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.
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.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why not let them go to child care on those days, get those reimbursed, but also use the funds for other things (like supplies for raising kids at home, or to pay for other activities you take them to that aren’t just daycare)?
Because the point of subsidising care is to remove cost barriers to parents getting back into work or dealing with other stuff or socialising kids in a day care environment, not to turn parenting into a profit centre
Why would providing vouchers turn parenting into a profit center? That’s a cynical way to portray one side of this when you probably don’t take the same harsh view of the other side. The point of subsidizing care isn’t to get parents “back into work”. It’s to help people raise children. That’s it. You’re gatekeeping what this is for as a way to justify unnecessary centralization and a lack of choice where choice is possible.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to look at variability. The cities are doing ok, but it is out in the rural areas, and the reservations specifically, where there are going to be extreme negative outcomes. There are areas on some of the reservations that are yet to be electrified as an illustration of just what kind of challenges NM is up against.
Los Alamos is doing well. That’s about it.
Los Alamos has a single high school in their district, and it isn’t even close to the top ranked school in the state.
As I said, the variability is the key metric.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
If my neighbor already gets a $5000 tax credit remodeling his bathroom or installing a new/greener boiler. Should I get $5000 for not remodeling?
You have demonstrated the point of the policy. What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.
> What is it that is being incentivized here?
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.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#488It's easy to promise things, but hard to deliver them. How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?" Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree? Regardl…
> How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?" How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different? > everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
It's amazing how much of the opposition isn't a specific conceptual problem with the rightness or wrongness of the ideal behind the policy but re-litigating assumptions that are already accepted and baked into routine investments we already make to service and infrastructure.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#489I support my tax dollars going to pay for universal child care. This is likely the second or third largest expense for young families. To be honest, I do not know how people can afford to have multiple children in daycare in any major metropolitan area.
Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare. Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers. This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
I just don't understand this mentality. 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…
I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.