New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by WalterBright » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

ksenzee wrote: post #635

WalterBright wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Firstly, I am a mother with two children, so no need to educate me about the bond between mother and child. Secondly, of course children love their parents. You seem to be conflating parenting with daytime childcare. This is a common misconception among people who romanticize stay-at-home parenting: it’s either “mom stays home during the workday with kids” or “the state raises the kids.” You may not be aware, since y…

> forced

Let me look ... I wrote nothing like that.

> they often have a degree in early childhood education

Nobody needs a degree in early childhood education. It comes naturally to parents.

Childcare professionals may develop a bond with the kids, but it's nothing like the bond a mom has.

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

#642

Post by qgin » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

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…

I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of). (The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare) https://illumine.app/blog/h…

I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.

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

#643

Post by qgin » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:53 AM UTC

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…

We're likely 5-10 years out from a world where tappy-tap computer keyboard jobs are in a death spiral and caregiving jobs are one of the only fields untouched by automation.

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

#644

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

qgin wrote: post #642

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of). (The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare) https://illumine.app/blog/h…

I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.

Americans have been brain washed, these are deeply rooted belief systems like religions, that have an immune response when challenged. Steep climb ahead.

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

#645

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #639

notahacker wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You went straight to what people "need" but then ignored the whole schtick we're discussing was NM going from means-tested to universal childcare even for people that don't "need" it. Nope, I'm the one explicitly not ignoring the major rationale behind providing universal free childcare, which is that it removes a massive disincentive to using childcare (it's expensive), with the result that parents are less likely…

> I mean, if there is some stay at home parent that finds looking after their own children during the daytime such a burden they "need" an extra $1k per child per month to do it... they should probably just use the free childcare. The fact that you argue for daycare workers to be paid but not parents is honestly astonishing. “No, we will not give you $100/day for your kid but we will happily give $100/day to BabyCorp…

[deleted]

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

#646

Post by ksenzee » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 3:39 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #641

ksenzee wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, I am a mother with two children, so no need to educate me about the bond between mother and child. Secondly, of course children love their parents. You seem to be conflating parenting with daytime childcare. This is a common misconception among people who romanticize stay-at-home parenting: it’s either “mom stays home during the workday with kids” or “the state raises the kids.” You may not be aware, since y…

> forced Let me look ... I wrote nothing like that. > they often have a degree in early childhood education Nobody needs a degree in early childhood education. It comes naturally to parents. Childcare professionals may develop a bond with the kids, but it's nothing like the bond a mom has.

I'm the one asserting that women have been forced into childcare for millennia. It's the default state in the absence of societal support.

> It comes naturally to parents.

_Love_ comes naturally to parents. Almost nothing else does, in my experience. You are extrapolating from an incomplete dataset. Again, your mom being good at the job of staying home with kids does not make other moms good at it. You are talking to a mom who isn't. I do, in fact, exist. I am asserting that my family, and society, are better off because I had a choice of career. I guarantee my kids would agree. It has nothing to do with how much I love them, and everything to do with my aptitude for homemaking and preschool childcare.

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

#647

Post by somenameforme » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

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,…

You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. An interesting one is that children who spend extensive time in daycare even end up less socially competent which is quite interesting since it runs contrary to one of the typical arguments in favor of daycare. But it's also not surprising if you think about it, because at home a child is getting vastly more attention and interaction than he would in daycare.

And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=long+term+outcomes+of+dayc...

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

#648

Post by mothballed » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

qgin wrote: post #642

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of). (The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare) https://illumine.app/blog/h…

I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.

There are bad public services and fairly good public services. There are also some great private services and some bad ones.

There's no public roads where I live. They're all private easements, but you can pass through them no problem for miles and miles and get most the way to town without ever touching a taxpayer dime. I first built my bit of the road with a shovel , a 4x4 truck, and a hatchet which blows away what it would have cost my neighbors in taxes. If I tried to explain this to someone with no real concept of anything but a public road system their brain would probably explode trying to understand how this works out better than even many public road systems.

There are a lot of people with exploding brains who can never get to the point of realizing our private road system is working as well as public road systems, and other exploding brains not realizing the public roads are working as well as their private roads.

The main pain point I have tends to be that when the option for peaceful voluntary trade is available, I strongly prefer it over the violence of forcing others via taxation. Therefore I much prefer the situation of my community -- i.e. basically no police/fire, no public roads, and no public utilities. It works great but the pride point is the very low level of violence / involuntary funding necessary to make it happen.

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

#649

Post by pempem » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 4:51 AM UTC

hellojesus wrote: post #549

pempem wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home? This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table. The conversation on this table is: Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not o…

> Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not. This is a major statement, and I don't think it's fully qualified. Why have childcare expenses imcreased by 30% in the past few years? There should be an arbitrage opportunity if costs have stayed fixed. If costs have increased, is it due to general economic pressures or increased regulatory burden? If the for…

Hi Jesus

According to a quick google and the census: || Approximately 3 in 4 Americans (or about 86%) live in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA), with the percentage of the U.S. population in these areas reaching an all-time high. As of 2024, nearly 294 million people—or about 86% of the total population—resided in a metro area, a trend that continues to grow.

If we think the wage differential will keep up in less populated areas, that is no longer occurring either. We do not live in a perfect capitalist system and many trades, activities and services are given benefits and protections for a variety of reasons.

There are other places - outside of the US - that have provided this tax credit. Its not shameful to learn from other countries and adopt things that are going well and are beneficial both to the freedom of people and the economy.

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

#650

Post by tempfile » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 6:52 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #556

tempfile wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are lucky that we can afford to do this. > It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? This is rather noble of you, but the reason is obvious. If the playing field were "levelled" then you wouldn't have to be lucky . It is all well and good that you are lucky, but there is a certain population who want to emulate your choice but are unable to, because they are missing precisely the marginal a…

I never said I opposed a subsidy to encourage stay-at-home parenting. By all means, we should propose it and study its pros and cons. But the lack of that subsidy should not cause someone to oppose a paid-childcare subsidy.

>> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.

> I just don't understand this mentality.

I don't understand. Wasn't your original comment opposing an equal value waiver?