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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

#611

Post by angmarsbane »

SilverElfin wrote: post #389
notahacker wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, stay at home mums often like to sometimes be able to use child care facilities. I doubt they feel cheated that they don't use it on the majority of days they prefer to spend with their kids...

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 processing reimbursements and extra record keeping is exhausting and adds to the mental load for Moms. Keep it simple, safe, and reliable.

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

#612

Post by WalterBright »

ksenzee wrote: post #582
WalterBright wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom was a full time mom and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.

> Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents

That would be a rarity.

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

#613

Post by ndriscoll »

jjk166 wrote: post #555
SilverElfin wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids. I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they re…

> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention. We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being p…

If you're trying to be efficient, you could also put 100 kids in a room with an adult to do whatever as long as the adult can keep them alive, but most people would recognize that the services are not equivalent. It's not more efficient; it's lower quality.

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

#614

Post by ndriscoll »

jjk166 wrote: post #570
somenameforme wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).

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

#615

Post by ksenzee »

WalterBright wrote: post #612
ksenzee wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.

> Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents That would be a rarity.

Just because women have been shunted into childcare for millennia doesn’t mean we’re naturally better at it. It just means we’ve had to do it. Do you similarly think it’s a rarity for men not to be cut out for subsistence farming?

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

#616

Post by alach11 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #140
Aurornis wrote: post #80

Earlier 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. This is a great way to kill a policy. It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it. But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money…

> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. But this is true in the other direction, too. Means testing costs money, time, and ensures some needy folks fall off the program. For example, Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/no-savings-found-in-fl...

> Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved

It's more complicated than that. Of the 6352 people who applied for TANF, 2306 dropped out during the process. Then of the 4046 TANF applicants remaining, only 2.6% tested positive for drugs. The vast majority of media coverage focused on the 2.6% being less than the ~8% drug-use rate in the general population.

What we don't know is of the people who dropped out, was this due to unintended reasons (privacy concerns, the inconvenience of the drug test, missing deadlines) or due to the intended reason (people self-selecting out because they knew they would test positive and become ineligible for 12 months). We'll never know the real breakdown, but it's misleading to say "it cost more than they saved".

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

#617

Post by Izikiel43 »

hellojesus wrote: post #529
Izikiel43 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless) Why probably not? Childcare before primary school is a huge expense in the US, I think the largest for a healthy kid, around 24k$ per year where I live, so basically every other child is another 24k$ to the budget, or one parent not working. With this approach, having 2 or 3 children is more feasible, and the money saved from universal child…

Let's go with this (I pay a little more than $24k/yr/kid for care now). Does the influx of gov mandated childcare centers reduce the annual expense for parents? If so, it does so at the cost to the current workers by reducing their salaries. If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increas…

> If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.

Sure, you have that short term impact, but it seems NM society has chosen to take on the burden for this.

Long term impact for this measure however is worth it, as the state children will be better educated, and will commit less crimes, at least that's what research says. So long term you will have more taxpayers, and maybe hopefully have to spend less in security.

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

#618

Post by Muromec »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #395
Muromec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact mindset of minmaxing everything is how the society stops having kids.

People are going to respond to incentives whether you think they should or not. I think it's less "mindsets" that have changed so much as the incentives themselves. People no longer need to have kids in order to have sex or to have a comfortable retirement, so many simply don't. Though I'd agree there's certainly a mindset shift that has developed along with that.

There is responding to incentives and there is adopting 10 kids to farm child subsidy/benefits.

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

#619

Post by WalterBright »

ksenzee wrote: post #615
WalterBright wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents That would be a rarity.

Just because women have been shunted into childcare for millennia doesn’t mean we’re naturally better at it. It just means we’ve had to do it. Do you similarly think it’s a rarity for men not to be cut out for subsistence farming?

The bond between a mother and her child is very special and intense. That doesn't happen with a paid caregiver. Heck, I was glued to my mom till I was 4.

I'm sad for you that you don't seem to understand this, with words like "shunted".

My parents are decades gone, but I miss them every day. Not so for any paid caregiver.

My grandmother died when my dad was 9. In his 90s, he forgot that she was dead, and would cry wondering why she didn't visit him.

The notion that this can be replaced with the state is absurd.

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

#620

Post by abustamam »

Muromec wrote: post #164
declan_roberts wrote: post #122

I'm going to take the reverse position. I don't like this policy. I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years. This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.

>I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years. Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off. That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead…

The western idea of individualism and the villification of the lower-class has really fucked American society. "I don't wanna pay taxes for [insert thing that doesn't benefit me]" or "if you're poor it's your fault" in a country where costs of basic necessities like medical care, insurance, food, housing, school, are skyrocketing is insane to me.

I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.

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