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New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

governor.state.nm.us

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Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#561

Post by foxyv »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #269

Sounds great. >average annual family savings of $12,000 per child. How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care [1] https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...

They already have an income limited program. This is just going to cover the remaining kids. Honestly, programs like this are usually a net benefit for the entire state. Just like public schooling, housing, and transportation programs.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#562

Post by 9rx »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #333
9rx wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming by education you actually mean schooling, this is the very same thing. The question is really only about at which age subsidized schooling should first start. This moves that age of first subsidized engagement to approximately birth, as opposed to waiting until age ~3-5 (varies by jurisdiction). Historically it was considered a beneficial necessity to gather the children to write down knowledge so that it co…

I think the biggest difference isn't age, it's that childcare also happens during the summer, not just during the school year. (And of course the lack of any particular educational curriculum.)

Is that a meaningful difference, though? Schools were originally open all year round, but the hot summer classroom eventually was deemed an unsuitable place to occupy, thus schools decided to compromise by closing during the hottest months.

Since the advent of air-conditioning, there really isn't any good reason to close schools during the summer. But, like the internet bit before, we've just never bothered to stop and actually think about what we're doing. We carry on with the status quo simply because that's what we did in the past. Not because it makes sense, just because that's what we do.

But in establishing subsidized daycare now, we don't have to think about the time before air-conditioning was invented. We only have to worry about the constraints we have today. Hot summers are not a practical problem as of right now.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#563

Post by efitz »

ryandrake wrote: post #506
slg wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits. It is funny to say this in this specific conversation. The exact logic you are using to support rebates for stay at home parents applies to childless people. So why are you drawing the line exactly where you are drawing it an…

If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.

Yes.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#564

Post by chlodwig »

hellojesus wrote: post #518
ryandrake wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.

Yes, but that should be the point. Public goods are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable. Subsidies fail these conditions. On what grounds should we delegate nonpublic goods/services be provided by the government and not the private sector?

The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.

Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...

Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#565

Post by libraryatnight »

chlodwig wrote: post #490
ryandrake wrote: post #336

Earlier 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…

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 larg…

This strikes me as part of the disease of thinking like a tax payer and not a citizen. It's about the service/resource availability, not the money. And your system seems to create more perversion than what you're reacting to - a bunch of people keeping score to make sure they get theirs.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#566

Post by trinix912 »

deadbabe wrote: post #82
bertili wrote: post #22

It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.

You don’t understand the United States. The point of the US has always been to make it easy for people to accumulate a lot of money, so that they can independently purchase things like child care if they need it, but if not, they can freely invest their money into other things. Prioritizing cashflow over social safety nets results in a very liquid lifestyle, that can change quickly according to your own individual de…

> If you live in a European society where you don’t earn a lot of money but you have most essential things provided by the government, you typically have to live a specific kind of lifestyle. Moving out of that country becomes infeasible, you can’t take government services with you.

You don't have to live any specific kind of lifestyle, but it is true that a sizable portion of your income still goes to the public institutions. You can send your kids to private schools or (in some countries) homeschool them, but you're still paying for everyone else's public education.

Same with savings and pensions funds, a portion of your income goes to the state pension fund, no opting out of that, but you can also invest in private funds or whatever else.

Nobody's, for example, forcing you to work a 9-5 like everyone else, you're free to start a business, be unemployed, work and also run a business on the side etc.

As for moving countries, you can freely move around EU member states while keeping the benefits. You are also still entitled to the benefits of your country of origin even if you move across the globe as long as you keep your citizenship and tax residency there (which might be more impractical than just forgoing the benefits though).

> Your life will look very similar to people around you, everyone depends on the same government services and few have accumulated enough money to live an order of magnitude more comfortable than others. In a random sample of Americans, you will likely find a range of people from low-key millionaires to people up to their eyeballs in crushing debt.

The wealth inequality varies quite vastly depending on which European country you're looking at. Also note that European does not automatically imply them being an EU member state. Overly general statements like these are totally pointless.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#567

Post by notahacker »

hellojesus wrote: post #524
notahacker wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The act of subsidizing childcare doesn't only help stay-at-home parents work, it forces everyone in the market to work more to maintain their same standard of living. Flooding the market with new labor increases the supply Against a fixed demand, this lowers wages. So everyone not getting the subsidy feels pressure from stagnating wages plus the increased tax burden. Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid…

> Let's assume that all those new laborers get paid and therefore demand also increases, moving the equilibrium so some of the wage stagnation pressure is dampened. It's still not going to offset the effect of new labor and taxes

Let's not make the absurd assumption that parents continuing their careers and more daycare centres in operation must be net negative for economic growth.

Even if that was the case, the alternative proposal to subsidise parents equally large amounts whether they use it to pay for childcare or not would result in a larger tax burden paid for from a smaller economic pie.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#568

Post by declan_roberts »

kenjackson wrote: post #363
wetoastfood wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Childcare doesn't end at 1 year though. If you look at public schools as child care, most don't start until kindergarten (about 5 years old). What do you do for the remaining 4 years? And during summer break? And after-school care? This program covers all of those. Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and s…

6 years paid stipend would fix this problem.

Before having our first child, I made a commitment to my wife that I would provide an 84+ year stipend.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#569

Post by timeon »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #15

It'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…

Outside of US there is whole world and maybe they are already doing something like that.

Re: New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care

#570

Post by jjk166 »

somenameforme wrote: post #548
jjk166 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.

In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care. It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.

Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker.

You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.

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