US actually provided child care to mothers employed during WWII. [0]
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
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 doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
"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."
"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."
Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.
The assumption here is that only people with means got care and were surveyed. I am not sure that this is the case. Moreover, you can correct for those factors, and, I assume, any statistician worth their salt are.
Given the reproducibility crisis, particularly in the social sciences, I wouldn’t put too much weight into the skill or honesty of the people doing that work (and statisticians they are not - more like people with a humanities background who take some statistics courses and then do numerology)
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
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.
Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.
Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.
Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.
> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight
This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.
Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.
You go first then. It can be a you cut I choose type thing with gender roles.
Because let me tell you dude I and every other woman is picking the men's package in this deal. You go ahead and be a 50's housewife if you think it's so good. We've had the option to choose if we want that terrible life for 40+ years now and "fuck no" won in a landslide.
Do you know how depressing it is to find out that both my mom and my mother-in-law squirreled away money in a secret bank account just so they could have the tiniest bit of financial independence separate from their husbands. And keep in mind these are men who they both love dearly and are still married to to this day.
Hold on - you're conflating "traditional housewife with zero financial independence" with "choosing to be the primary caregiver for your own kids." Those are not the same thing.
The fact that your mom and MIL needed secret bank accounts isn't an argument against raising your own children - it's an argument for financial transparency and shared accounts in modern marriages. And yeah, we should absolutely have that.
But here's what you're missing: plenty of women (and men!) are choosing to be primary caregivers today because we have the choice now. It's not 1950 - it's 2025. Nobody's talking about giving up bank accounts or financial independence. We're talking about prioritizing raising your own kids over outsourcing it, when that's financially possible.
It's hard as hell, it's undervalued, and it's not for everyone. But acting like everyone who makes that choice is deluded? That's just as dismissive as the people who think all women should be doing it.
The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.
I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.
Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.
Protect from what? Themselves and other men? Why do they have to provide while women are being made helpless and dependent?
> Things worked this way for thousands upon thousands of years and led to our species being amazingly resilient
It led to high domestic violence against women. Even normalized one where being the wife was considered just being a man. These are very much correlated with lack of opportunities for women to get earn and live independently. Too many men were using the "protection" as an excuse for being the primary danger in their women's lives.
Bud, "your" people are "getting replaced" because they’re not fucking enough. Pounding your chest about "low-IQ" immigrants and masculinity won't help: they still won't fuck until they feel they can afford the lifestyle they want, regardless of who you feel the "burden of proof" is on. Enjoy seeing -- gasp!! -- a whole lot more brown faces with scary names in the future. (As always, the kids will be alright, regardless of whatever scornful glances they might catch from insecure adult "men".)
Want to raise the next generation of humans in a healthy, humanistic way? Then you go fucking do it, Mr. Big Man. Otherwise, let us do the sensible thing of having universal child care and go back to your racist rat hole.
Someday your woke kids will read your comment and will be mortified.
Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.
It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.
Yes, that's why I thought they'd cheer it. When the state provides day care, more Moms work and contribute to capitalism more than the cost of the day care.
The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial argument for leaving the workforce.
That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
> That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Yip. Oddly enough, this has a lot of economic parallels with cooking at home vs eating out. For a silly example, you can make an Egg McMuffin for a tiny fraction of what you'd pay at McDonalds for one. Yet McDonalds (franchise, not corporate) operate on single digit profit margins. Why?
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
It doesn't. You still need someone to commute to where the daycare is because they don't live there, transaction costs related to payment processing, and that's often illegal if you do it for money because of zoning ordinances etc.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
Sounds like barter to me. There are some benefits, the kid expands their social life, the parent gets to fulfill career needs, etc. There may be issues, but shouldn't be thought of in completely negative terms.
We're talking about different age ranges here. For 0-3 years, especially infants, the attachment research is very consistent primary caregivers matter enormously for development. A 1yo doesn't need to "expand their social life" they need secure attachment. The socialization benefits you're describing kick in later, around 3-4 years old.
Daycare typically won't take a kid until potty trained, so at least 2 and a half or so. At the early ages, it's only a few hours a day as well in my experience.
I don't think daycare is necessarily a net negative. I just don't think many families have thought the calculus through.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
Seriously. There’s a reason all our kids’ preschool teachers never return from maternity leave. The pay isn’t enough to pay someone else to watch your baby while you work. And this school is already an expensive one and is a nonprofit so the money isn’t going to some Mr. Moneybags investor. The economics of childcare are broken.
The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
This analysis is incomplete for a couple of reasons:
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
Varies by state and age? My very red state does not allow a group of 40, full stop. The largest group allowed is for 3-year-olds, with a 1:15 adult:child ratio. For younger children, the ratios and group sizes are smaller.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
Bullshit. Most US states have strict staff ratio limits for properly licensed daycare facilities. The exact ratios vary by state but typically this is something like 1:4 for infants up to 1:14 for school-age children.
> The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
My SO spent a few months collecting the neighbour's daughter along with our own from kindergarten and in exchange the neighbour would make dinner for us. This arrangement started because the neighbours' shifts didn't align with kindergarten hours.
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
> At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
What I meant to say is that not only is this labour completely unrecognised as contributing to the overall economy, it's essential labour, without which other, measurable work could not be performed.
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
It’s not measured in GDP but it is measured. For example right now it’s estimated that household production is around 23% of GDP. So quite sizable.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
I have a suspicion a lot of the “why did wages stop keeping pace with the growth of the economy?” problem is because real productivity hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as our measures of it. But the measures are tied to ways for capitalists to extract more money, so that fake-growth does make line go up for owners. But there’s not nearly as much more actual work getting done as one might think from the numbers.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
It's inflation IMO. Wages started stagnating in the 70s which is exactly when the USD became completely unbacked (due to the end of Bretton Woods), enabling the government to go endlessly deep into debt, which we proceeded to do with gusto, sending inflation skyrocketing.
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
It's not just about the economy, it is about freedom of choice. What does Max and Avery feel about their careers? Would they rather be working or watching kids? If one parent has to stay home, that might mean having to give up a good career.
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
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.
Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
Right, and that's exactly the point. It was extended family and close community, not institutional strangers. Grandma watching the kids while mom works the fields is completely different from dropping an infant at a commercial daycare center with a 1:6 caregiver ratio. The "it takes a village" argument doesn't support modern daycare, it actually undermines it. Those historical models were built on trusted relationships and continuity of care, not economic transactions with rotating staff.
We've strayed pretty far from the original topic here, but the reality is that the US military is literally running out of working aircraft because they're so old. The average age of USAF aircraft is now about 28 years. The fleet was allowed to decay and not substantially recapitalized during the GWOT. Many of the fighters in the combat coded inventory aren't even allowed to hit their original 9G maneuvering limit any more due to accumulated airframe fatigue. Now we're paying an overdue bill.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Sure, that is a problem. Ironically the best solution from an overall expense management standpoint is to drive economies of scale by building more and retiring older units on an accelerated schedule to cut maintenance costs. Keep production lines running continuously instead of periodically starting and stopping. The F-35A, while badly flawed in certain ways, is at least relatively affordable due to high production volumes.
Oh yes it’s about time the US enters another war so we can justify even more military spending and less spending to improve the livelihood of the people.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
You're really missing the point. If we're going to have a military at all then we have to constantly keep building new combat aircraft (and other weapon systems). The old ones wear out and become obsolete. Ironically this is the best way to prevent a major war, through deterrence. (I do think that attacking Venezuela would be stupid and pointless.)
I don’t really dispute that, to loop around to the start of debate, you’re not building an F-35 with unskilled labor. This isn’t automotive workers riveting B-17s together.
Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
It's because it runs like a business that we're able to enjoy a high standard of living.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
The economy will stop growing eventually. Nothing grows forever. If we have built our society around the notion of perpetual economic growth, we have already accepted that "everyone will suffer incredibly", and we're only arguing about which generation will be the one to bear it.
I don’t understand the conjunction of “the state should not subsidize childcare with taxes” and “the church should subsidize childcare with underpaid labor and tithes.”
I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
Yeah, that's why I said it wasn't an easy problem to solve. No need to let the infeasibility of a perfect solution get in the way of a possible, yet however unideal solution.
I mean, a lack of cheap housing is also a policy failure.
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.
Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.
In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
I actually did the math for US once, calculating how much more tax it would take to give everyone minimum wage. The resulting tax rate would certainly be fairly high, but not excessively so; several European countries have higher brackets today, and their economy doesn't collapse.
But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
FWIW I'm far left and in favor of UBI, but one thing to keep in mind is that while it's a simple concept, details (i.e. amounts paid and amounts taxed) matter a lot. There's no reason why UBI can't be redistributive if one desires it to be so - you just use more progressive taxes to fund it.
And, of course, reducing the complexity and cost of welfare ought to be a left wing talking point as well! Again, it depends on what you do with the savings - sure, it can just be taken and used elsewhere, or you could maintain the spending but raise the bar on how much UBI provides.
> Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
Yeah this is sort of the reaction I had. Removing "risk" with UBI and free healthcare and free childcare also removes the filters for a lot of people who would be bad at running a business. If you don't have the stomach to take the risk and do the work to make your idea a success, then maybe you shouldn't try.
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
Why do you need people to make big risks livelihood to do business? People from affluent environment start businesses the most often and they dont really risk all that much. They know they will get help if it fails.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The data on UBI isn't out there, but it is notable that countries with similar tax rates to the US manage to have universal healthcare and more expansive safety nets. Some examples: New Zealand (tax rate ~30% less than the US), Korea, Switzerland, Australia, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Norway.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US, not lower unless you're doing something odd like comparing based on average local wage.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
> New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US
US tax rates are complex due to local variance and other factors. Tax rate on the median NZ income appears to be ~30%. Tax on median US is lower, but state taxes can add significantly. There is not a neat divide between red states & blue states here; Alabama & Georgia have state income taxes, for example.
> The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country.
Switzerland has mandatory healthcare insurance and subsidies for low income earners. The insurance is provided by private companies. It's not really universal healthcare system like in most EU countries.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.
Why is the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services (aka, the economy) the highest priority?
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.
Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
Life is not about checking off boxes on how much free stuff you can hypothetically get from the government either. That has tons of costs and risks just like everything else in life. It’s all relative.
Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
Because YOU are paying for those benefits and they aren’t. If you truly don’t see how offering something for free would attract all the freeloaders, increasing the load on those who work, there’s no saving you.
What I am describing is you literally saving money.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
Can they convert $1K outlay into $1.1K of tax revenue the same month?
Given New Mexico's tax rates, it seems like it would be difficult to do so.
It looks like the program will cost about $600M next year. In order to generate more tax revenue than it costs, it would need to increase personal income somewhere on the order of $12-15B of personal income, taxable sales, business profit or some combination.
Now, a fraction of that will come from the childcare workers. Some may come from stay-at-home parents or parents working part time going to work, but given they say it'll save on the order of $12K/year/family, a family would need to increase their income by about $260K/year in order to pay $12K in extra state income taxes.
It's rare to see spending programs actually pay for themselves. Mostly when politicians talk about a program paying for itself, they preform verbal slight-of-hand, arguing that $x will come back as $x*y in economic activity. That is, of course, a lie, but no one calls them out the fact that economic activity ≠ taxes.
It doesn’t matter if New Mexico’s state government recuperates its revenue it matters if New Mexico’s citizens are better off. As such federal, state, and local levels are worth considering not just state taxes, including changes in other outlays such as healthcare subsidies. Effective tax rates on marginal income often exceed 50% for American families even ignoring the income stream from daycare workers and facilities etc. US Government spending being 40.5% of GDP those kinds of marginal tax rates should be expected.
Now as a low population state implementing this at the state level means most of that federal savings/revenue helps people outside of the state, but that’s the issue with implementing such programs at the state level rather than an issue with the type of program itself.
Simplest way to increase total absolute output is always to stop providing intake.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
> a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Well, that‘s not related to this specific conversation, but industrialization in socialist states did that in a number of cases. Soviet Union between 1950s and 1970s has seen significant growth and by various accounts achieved up to 5x improvement in purchase power compared to Russian Empire at its peak, in 1913 (how much goods could a worker buy for their salary, not including welfare, which was obviously superior in SU). I‘m not saying socialism is good, the price paid for that was terrible. And anyway my argument wasn’t that there were better societies, just that America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans (and let’s not forget that 60% of the time in that century there existed slavery). People went there not because it was great (and not everyone went there, many German settlers chose opposite direction, moving to Wild East, helping colonial expansion of Russian empire). It was just marginally better than certain places in Europe with its wars and famines.
> America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
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.
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
Looks like list of arguments for a beer talk at BBQ party on 4th of July. I mean, are you seriously using „Wehrmacht relied on horses“ as a proof of American exceptionality?
I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you
LOL, thanks for the kind words! I just happened to like working on compilers, as few programmers will touch them. If you're ever in the Seattle area, we have a monthly D Coffee Haus where we drink and talk about languages, compilers, airplanes, cars, and physics. All are welcome!
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.
What do you think patriotism is, if not "community sacrifice"?
GP's point is that you are playing fast and loose with words here, so much so that your point doesn't make sense. "Community sacrifice" is a much broader category than those few policies you dislike.
when you say 'individual rights', you should be honest about which classes of people that was referring to. By the way, don't be so defensive, the working poor are being absolutely crushed by capital right now, your guys won!
were blacks considered men? did it include women? it feels like you're purposely ignoring history
Btw ~40% of the people i've met in homeless outreach have full time jobs, taxes are not what's keeping them homeless. In china 90% of the population own their homes, I'm sorry but the all that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich. Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Yes. The people who wrote the Constitution were well aware of the conundrum, but were faced with the reality that they could not form a union without allowing the slaveholders to continue. In essence, they kicked the can down the road, which resulted in a catastrophic war.
> did it include women?
Yes. Whether the word "men" means exclusively men or men and women depends on the context.
> taxes are not what's keeping them homeless
You're suggesting that taxes don't have effects beyond just paying the money. When a businessman is taxed, for example, that means he has less money to invest in his business, which means fewer jobs, fewer purchases of plant & equipment, slower growth, higher prices, etc., all of which negatively affect the rest of the economy, including poor people.
> that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich
America's rich people came from poor immigrants. The same for America's middle class.
> Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Have you ever looked at the size of government spending on redistribution? The US abandoned libertarianism in the early 1900s.
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
Yes I know about that theory. But it has problems.
When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!
As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
> Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
Guess where the north got their cotton to make those shoes? The south. The textile industries of the north would've never gotten their start without cheap cotton made possible by slavery.
> As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
Every South American nation that tried to raise itself out of poverty had their government overthrown or their leader assassinated with the help of good ol' USA. Japan/S. Korea/Taiwan industrialized because USA decided they needed strong allies to counter Russia/China. Check out the grand area plans. Africa was colonized, exported millions of their people to slavery, and is continually destabilized by the west (corporations, world bank, IMF, etc) to perpetuate resource extraction.
The poor is kept poor so the rich can get richer. Why is food so plentiful and cheap? Slave labor. Read Tomatoland for a taste. Why are clothes so cheap? People are working for pennies to make those clothes. Why doesn't the iPhone price rise with inflation? There are millions of poor rural Chinese pounding for a chance to work at inhumane conditions for a few dollars a day. You think they make enough to pull their families out of poverty? Nope, it's mostly foreign companies that are reaping the bulk of the profit while continually pressing their costs (labor wages) down.
I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.
Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits).
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news.
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
These can simply be different groups of Somali parents, for what it's worth. Presumably some Somali kids are truly autistic and not participating in the fraud scheme.
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.
It’s good that it’s a state policy, not a federal one. We need more policies to stay at the state level, regardless of the policy. Federalism is how we can test the effects of competing policies under the same house. If the policy is a problem for you, it’s a lot easier to vote with your feet and move to a different state than to move to a different country
I think it also gives it a better chance as an experiment. The federal government tends to pendulum swing between left and right on a fairly short cycle. Most states seem to be considerably more stable and less prone to trying to revert policies put in place by the "other side" every few years.
For something like this as a first pass, for sure, but if it can be shown to be "realistic" then I have no problem with the Feds enacting it. I especially feel that we need a single-payer option for health insurance. We're the only major "wealthy" nation with a completely regressive health care policy that punishes people for being poor to the point we just let them die if the $ aren't flowing
We need a public healthcare system, but whether it should be single payer is not readily evident, and I rather suspect that clinging to that particular model is what's causing progressives to get stuck trying to push it through. It's probably because most people in US immediately think of Canada when they think of socialized healthcare, and there's very little awareness of what other countries do on either left or right, so we're essentially perpetually debating the Canadian model. We should look at Europe instead and pick something that's both proven to work and more agreeable with American sensibilities. German, perhaps.
Too many people aren't satisfied with the policies they want affecting only them and their communities. They want to impose their will on people thousands of miles away
For some things, yes. I think this sort of thing is compatible with being legislated at the state level. Other policies are not. See states with strict gun laws being undermined by neighboring states with very loose laws.
To me that seems like a necessary trade off for the benefits gained. The stricter laws wouldn’t have necessarily been achieved nor maintained had they not been enacted at the state level.
What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over
The churn is largely an artifact of our electoral system IMO. If party seats followed national votes proportionally, the change would be far more gradual without the swings.
Of course, it's also not going to happen because proportional popular vote will strongly favor one party...
At this point I don't think the constitution has much meaning left to it. So many matters have already saw massive changes, sometimes even going back and forth on it. And Wickard v Filburn is still standing precedent. In this kind of climate, SCOTUS could easily chip away at 2A case by case, especially considering that the current expansive interpretation of it only became the new policy less than 20 years ago.
If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.
While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it
And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc
Speaking as an immigrant: yes, absolutely! Legal immigrants generally have to be quite privileged in their place of origin to have the education level necessary to clear the bar in most places to be considered for any kind of visa that allows permanent residency, and to be financially well off enough to afford both the paperwork and the move itself.
When I was a kid (youngest of four) growing up in a suburb of a small town, my mom would often drop me off at a neighbor's house to watch me while she ran errands or did stuff for my siblings. No payment, just neighbors being neighborly.
Now, I can't fathom something like that being feasible in our increasingly individualistic neighborhood. Regretfully, I don't even know the names of most of my neighbors. I wave to them on the street but I wouldn't ask them to take care of my daughter.
I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
Ideally we could go back to being an interdependent society but it has to happen organically. No amount of legislation or budget can fix that.
> I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
You still can. I managed to make friends with a few neighbors just by asking a few innocuous questions every time we meet. Some are friendlier than others. I don't talk to everyone I meet, just those I think could be friendly. I'm usually wrong though and the ones I'd never think would be friendly turns out the most talkative. I met my next door neighbor on afternoon and we talked for 6 hours. Take a chance, odds are good you'll find someone who wants to reach out as much as you.
The main reason I wouldn't enjoy watching my neighbor's kids is that we now have an absolutely paranoid, delusional society that has a mentally ill view of the dangers of children. By signing up to watch kids you incur absolutely massive liability, all it takes is one accusation and your whole life is destroyed and you lose everything, no matter that it was false. You would basically need cameras at every angle at all times before any rational person would want to watch someone else's kids.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
That's a good point, but the model could still work.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.
My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
It's also odd how no one ever asks whether the reason child care is necessary and a single-income household isn't earning enough anymore to make a living because Americans are effectively competing with the entire world for housing and jobs.
Another way to say it might be that we've been shielded from the effects of not investing in our own children by the immigration of smart and educated young adults, where countries with less immigration are more acutely aware of how well its own educational system is performing.
> so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately need the quality education who are going to be left behind.
If it were up to me, I'd send those people to jail (yes yes, I know. I'm just angry and lashing out)
I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?
Personally, I find Boaler's advocacy extreme. Her famous quote: "Every student is capable of understanding every theorem in mathematics – and beyond – the mathematics curriculum. They just need the opportunity to struggle with rich tasks and see mathematics as a conceptual, creative subject.” This sounds inspiring, but in practice she advocated the policy of truly dumbing down math curriculums and text books. To say the least, shouldn't she at least demonstrate that she could understand any theorem? But instead, she advocated that SFUSD eliminate algebra from 8th Grade . Another example was that the curriculum that she advocated, College Preparatory Mathematics, was so boring and trivial. She also said something along the line "Traditional mathematics teaching is repetitive and uninspiring. We give students 30 similar problems to do over and over again, and it bores them and turns them off math for life.” What's funny is that the alternatives that Boaler prescribed were quite uninspiring and low level: https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/. All I can derive from her policies and complaints is that she couldn't do math. Why people would listen to someone who sucked at math about math education is beyond me.
Man, the "anti-immigration" square on my HN bingo card has a hole in it from all the pen marks. Anyway, we stopped investing in kids because kids aren't profitable in the next quarter, like everything else that's beneficial to society and not the eight wealthy people currently running it.
One state offering something is a start but we're still far behind maternity, pre-k, childhood nutrition, and primary or secondary education in general for most of the population relative to peer nations. Plus this administration's cuts to Medicare or SNAP which will also hit the poorest kids the most. Plus the national debt they are saddled with.
Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.
Definitely one of the few policies that Trump "championed" that I supported him on; severely curtailing H1B visas going forward. Those who are here can be grandfathered in, but going forward the program should be wound down, and we invest in our own civilians and youth.
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.
I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
It may be suboptimal, but what isn't? The problem here is assuming that the expensive bureaucratic credential based system is optimal or even better at all. "Everybody knows $SOME_NEIGHBOR and she's great with kids" is just a much better indicator of quality in child care than "$SOME_DAYCARE is licensed by $SOME_BUREAUCRACY."
Also, I'm not even against state support for parents needing childcare, but giving $500 a month to each parent who needs it to find childcare in an informal system will actually be much better than a state run system that spends $2000 per kid.
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.
We are only handing them off to complete strangers because the informal system has been driven underground by laws that only allow the state licensed bureaucratic monopoly. If state licensing was optional and people were allowed to run neighborhood businesses I bet you would see something very different.
I dunno -- it's not like you know people in your neighborhood the way humans used to know members of their tribes. And I've known people in the neighborhood who seemed totally normal and safe, and then got arrested for something shocking. We're not spending all day long with even our next-door neighbors, let alone the ones five blocks away.
Having standards in training, operation, and oversight of childcare seems just as important as safety standards in the food supply. Even though everybody cooks at home, you're not allowed to run a restaurant without certifications and inspections either. And thank goodness.
I'm sorry, America hasn't been Mayberry since the 1950s, and it never will be again. Most of us live in towns with more than just a post office, so this Norman Rockwell-esque fantasy of just dropping your kid off with the nice housewife next door is not just dead, it's starting to smell really bad.
Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.
I didn't say anything about school. This article is about childcare for children below school age. But basic education is also actually quite cheap and easy to provide. Abraham Lincoln was educated in a one room school house. We have made it expensive by turning it into a bureaucratic nightmare with administrators, school boards, lawyers, and PTAs, when all you really need is a few good teachers who are given the authority to set and enforce high standards.
"until very recently" includes pre-industrial times to my understanding when education did not exist in an organized fashion for the poor.
[edit] And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor" for his times? I am sure you can come up with some less fortunate people during the same times which didn't really get the experience of that one room schoolhouse.
The world is quite a lot bigger than Illinois though.
And it seems I need to spell it out for you, right there in the US during the same times, children of black people in the south didn't get access to education[1]. Serfdom was a thing in Europe until the early 1900, serfs children didn't get access to proper education[2]. I'm giving you a link to Russian education, but the whole of Eastern Europe was at a similar level. I don't know what kind of rose tinted cool aid you guys have been drinking.
Ham-fisted reactionary policy versus attacking the root cause, which is 1) cost of living has now increased to require two working parents 2) The government values housewives at about $2k per year in tax credits. Let women stay at home and raise their children as they know best, and pay them for the cost of the service they provide.
In Canada, you cannot file taxes jointly, so income tax brackets are on an individual basis instead of on a couple basis. It really makes it expensive for a single parent to stay home as one person making 100k pays about 30% more income tax than two people making 50k.
Don’t give me free daycare, just make it so much less punishing to stay at home and take care of my kids.
All of it is kindof dumb, I pay a higher tax because joint filing is not a thing, and my increased tax pays for subsidized daycare…
If governments aren’t willing to value women at what their work at home is worth, they’re not serious about tackling the birthrate problem. Show me a country with universal childcare with a TFR above 2.1. It’s a cheap substitute for the love and attention only a mother can provide young children
I suppose in the context of human history, you might argue to enslave a population based on racial characteristics in order to provide childcare.
For many families, both parents have to work. Most time spent not working or sleeping is spent doing a task simultaneously with childcare. Cleaning, preparing meals, repairing things, laundry, etc. Even for families where one individual shoulders the bulk of the burden this is largely the case.
Look, if you want to justify your position by just pointing out that it's the way things have historically been done, expect to have it pointed out how ridiculous you are being. Anyway, Equating child care with the inherent biological sexual dimorphism of childbirth is certainly a take.
You conveniently left off “infant care”. Only one gender lactates, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to talk about “ridiculous”, ignoring reality doesn’t make it any less real, no matter how much you might find it ideologically inconvenient.
You're the one moving the phrase from "child care" to "infant care". And by 6 months the majority of parents are using formula anyway. And there's a percentage of women that for whatever reason can't properly breastfeed. You're really grasping at straws here.
The person most biologically suited to care for an infant is the person who birthed the infant in the first place, and there is a path dependence inherent in ongoing childcare.
Once you have spent six months or a year raising an infant, it is personally psychologically difficult (and developmentally questionable) to cut that tie.
I get that it’s ideologically convenient to pretend that men and women are interchangeable economic cogs, but the sexes are fundamentally different in very pertinent ways.
We all lose under this model, but ultimately the people who lose the most when economic and social policy rejects our inconvenient biological differences are the children themselves.
Family should be able to support themselves on a single earner’s salary. That’s what we should prioritize. They can decide themselves who should stay home, if anyone; gender doesn’t need to factor into our policy if we simply make it our goal for families to not require dual incomes.
You have a point but I live in New Mexico. It's not like many of these moms are suddenly going to become stellar parents with a $2K tax credit. The state has real issues with poverty, education and work ethic and it's often generational.
Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.
If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
Exactly. I was raised by two working parents who were very involved in my life, and I wasn't a "latchkey" kid by any means. While the "traditional" spouse at home does work out pretty well if the single wage earner can do well, to be sure. That doesn't mean other situations can't prosper. It's not a magically set up that is the solution for everyone.
In some places (esp those with low access to birth control and sub-par sexual health education), there are too many unplanned children being born to people who do not have the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty.
Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.
Often programs like this are subsidized based on income such that if they can afford it, it is subsidized less, or you do not qualify past a certain income. That is one method of managing the program's costs, while still benefitting those who are most heavily affected. This program doesn't appear to do that, but many do.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make though.
I’ll even begin to entertain this argument only once the burden of having and raising children falls on society as a whole, and not individual women. Until then, absolutely not.
That's true that it would be good for more access to birth control, but this is a confusing statement because you benefit economically and socially from each new kid that is born and raised. If child care is socialized, it means that the kids are going to be better taken care of versus the mother is impoverished and (a) doesn't work and stays poor or (b) does work and they aren't taken care of properly.
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
At most high schools in our district we offer childcare to the teachers for free. I think thats really the model we should be moving to. Just add pre-k and daycare to the public school system. We have the space already.
> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
Instead of figuring out why and fixing that, you’d apparently prefer that we take a page from the soviets and further embed our social and economic regression into law.
Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It baffles me that it's so hard to argue for care for children. The response is always "but it's the parents' responsibility". Which, okay, fair, BUT if the parent is failing their responsibility (which can happen for many reasons, many of which don't need maliciousness nor incompetence), then what? We let the child die? We let the child starve? That's what I don't get. A child doesn't have autonomy, so it shouldn't even be a question of helping them out.
We can argue about what to do with the parents but in the mean time we're going to let children suffer? That's lunacy. I don't even have children and I'll gladly pay taxes to prevent child suffering. How is anyone against that?
Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.
I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.
I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.
America has universal public education because it started with the “Old Deluder Act”: the state wanted people to be literate so they could read the Bible.
The exact opposite of your allegation above: “Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: ‘don’t teach my children your Satanic ways.’”
Maybe I'm too tired to write clearly. I meant, the reason parents have ownership over their children (at least in America) is primarily for ideological indoctrination.
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 underlying argument.
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.
I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented.
Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you.
This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's another issue, but when they get sick they more than deserve treatment.
And finally, the vast majority of illnesses can be treated cheaply if irregularly do your checkups. It can cost society $200 today for a doctor visit , or 30k for an ER stay in 3 years.
That said, I think this should be handled on a state by state basis. If the people of Alabama don't believe in single-payer healthcare, or they want to forbid using single pair healthcare for contraceptive or something, that shouldn't stop a progressive state from implementing it.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.
And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think the national politics would support that at the moment. I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds... but they might against 18 or 19 year olds. It's a foot in the door persuasion tactic rather than try to get everything all at once.
> I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds...
Not sure what gives you this idea. The major political party in power in the US today campaigned in large part on cruelty and removing subsidies and social benefits from people. There are a huge number of people who would bitterly fight against providing health care to children. It's the same mentality that bitterly fights against free school lunch for children.
I’m not cruel because I think society operates best — in terms of human outcomes — if incentives and disincentives are tied to decisions in ways that maximize the likelihood and benefit of personal responsibility.
Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
>I’m not cruel because I think society operates best — in terms of human outcomes — if incentives and disincentives are tied to decisions in ways that maximize the likelihood and benefit of personal responsibility.
And how did personal responsibility make housing unaffordable?
>Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How neat and tidy.
>How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
What are you talking about? Everyone who's poor and powerless should be helped. More importantly, though, they shouldn't be taken advantage of by wealthy interests. That includes animals, that includes expectant mothers who don't make enough money to survive because the "money to survive" dial was cranked up to 100 in the last five years. But please, lecture us some more about how that's HER fault.
>It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
It's also not kindness to raise their rent for no other reason than you can.
>Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
And we could end it all tomorrow by saying "the US government must fund university education". You know, like they do in Europe, or like we did a few decades ago in the United States. You're pointing to a radically predatory policy decision, designed to benefit rich people, and saying: "See? Government doesn't work!" But that's "conservatism" for you: say government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.
I don't know if you truly believe that education costs would come down if we stopped shunting students into indentured servitude (guess which loans are the only ones that can't be discharged in bankruptcy? What a curious law of the universe that must be!), but if that's the case, then I have a fabulous bridge I'd be willing to part with for a modest price.
I will never stop fighting against people who wield the power of the state to punch down and then point the finger at those same people and blame them. It's disgusting, it's abhorrent, and it must stop.
> I will never stop fighting against people who wield the power of the state to punch down and then point the finger at those same people and blame them. It's disgusting, it's abhorrent, and it must stop.
I can see that. Your ideology creates the problems you think we just need more of your ideology to solve.
You’re not some warrior for freedom or the oppressed, you’re just another person that mistakes enabling for actual care, and thinks serving the interests of the powerful is revolutionary.
So sure, let’s build a system that forces everyone into the workforce, benefits employers who pay too little, and produces worse outcomes for children.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
Be aware that Medicare is a long way from free. At least if you've had a well-paying job in the past few years, Medicare premiums are pretty similar to exchange costs (or COBRA).
Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.
One of our parents pays about $20k/yr all in for ACA - $12k/yr of premiums and $8k/yr on top of that (all unsubsidized)
Her (also unsubsidized) Medicare would be $6.5k/yr partA premium + $1.6k partA deductible+ $2.3k partB + $1k partD + $5k medigap, or about $16.5k total. She has no work credits for Medicare subsidy.
If you have subsidy from free partA premiums, then Medicare is about twice as cheap as unsubsidized ACA, yes. If you don't have subsidy for either, it's a little cheaper, but not by a ton.
So if you just stuck kids on existing Medicare pricing with no work credit for partA, then it would not be substantially cheaper than unsubsized ACA.
No they don't. A lot of the "Medicare for All" crowd assumes that "medicare for all"/universal healthcare is free or at least very low cost rather than something that's in the ballpark of unsubsidized individual/family healthcare plans which is the reality at least within a few years of leaving the professional workforce.
GP is pointing out that Medicare costs for the individual are about the same as ACA or cobra. It's not cheaper, unless you have the work credits to cut down on part A premiums.
So Medicare as-is for kids wouldn't be significantly cheaper than ACA for kids.
To make it cheaper, you'd need to either substantially increase the subsidy on Medicare, or decrease US medical costs (administration costs, drug costs, doctor salaries, etc)
Commercial health insurance is more expensive than Medicare because original Medicare Part A/B doesn't cover prescription drugs, and because commercial plans effectively provide a hidden cross subsidy to Medicare. Under a "Medicare for All" scheme, people would still need to purchase prescription drug coverage (Part D). And because Medicare reimburses providers at very low rates (often below their costs) they have to make up the difference by charging commercial health plans more.
Most children don't have enough credits to qualify for Medicare.
OTOH, very few children have enough individual income to be disqualified from Medicaid, but it's based on household income.
My handwavey plan for universal federalized healthcare includes using the child's income as a qualifier for Medicaid, phased in so the system will hopefully adjust over time rather than get overloaded to collapse. Also reduce the Medicare eligibility age over time. A solution that takes decades to roll out leaves a lot of unsolved problems, but adding a large number of people to an existing program in one fell swoop feels like it's going to be a negative too.
I believe children do get healthcare, coverage, insurance or not in the US. The family might take on crushing debt that will never be paid off but the child will be treated. At least, this is my understanding - please correct me if I am wrong.
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
You don't reduce the regulation, you increase it's flexibility. Such as allowing dynamic zoning where an area that is zoned as medium density residential automatically becomes hybrid high density residential/low commercial once the districts zoned around it as low density residential are filled.
The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.
Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.
Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best.
I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.
By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.
> By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords.
That seems pretty reasonable to me actually? When housing is so supply-constrained, any subsidies/incentives/bonuses/etc. will be captured by the owner of the scarcest asset (real estate). Building more housing at this point seems like it should be a P0 priority before anything else.
It will be very interesting to see how this experiment pans out. I just don't see how the economics of it can work out knowing how much some of my friends pay for childcare while they're at work.
I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too high; one accident can result in a major lawsuit to the company, and (2) the cost of the distractions; parents will never get any work done if their kid close by.
I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
It's a shame that there's not the option of providing parents with the choice of free child care or some kind of cash subsidy.
A bit tangential, but the overall problem is that cost of having children is privatized while the benefit is socialized. I'd love to see age and number of children progressively factored into the income tax bracket people pay. Something like a 60-80% tax rate for all income >150k for those >40 without children so those that benefit the most from future generations being born are helping to shoulder the cost
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
We would be even better off subsidizing parents staying home with their own children. Unfortunately most subsidies have proven ineffective at nudging up birth rates.
In an emotional development sort of way: maybe. Subsidized childcare however provides two jobs to the economy for the price of one and every single person worried about birth rates is either a white supremacist or the sort of emotionless economist that 2:1 is appealing to.
Those subsidies tend to be €X00 per month. I am not aware of any scheme that even attempted to replace 80% of forfeited wages. A subsidy that ends up with you having to move impoverish yourself is not going to have the desired effect.
No, we wouldn’t. This subsidy directly benefits the survival rate of children while universal basic income is too broad. healthcare is more affordable than UBI.
The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse
There's potentially an argument for a ponzi scheme for one-ish more generation after which robots can do elder care and it's not necessary anymore.
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
Not necessarily. For example, if most of society's wealth is concentrated with a few people, and the rest can get crumbs from that table only by serving the wealthy, then a situation where something is delivered with fewer people at lower cost translates to more people starving because they are no longer economically useful.
Perhaps if you take them to a dump. The wonderful people at my daughter’s day care are absolutely invested in their development and spend 6 uninterrupted hours per day with them focused exclusively on that. It’s stupid expensive though.
That depends on who you are as a parent though. It could be the strangers are lifeline and positive force on the child's development compared to what you are.
A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
Popular opinion but raising the price of everything just because you can so people can't even afford kids anymore and then blaming poor people for that is a terrible idea.
> The state has spent years building early childhood funding — In 2020 it created a $10 billion trust fund using revenue from its booming oil and gas industry. Then, in 2022 voters approved drawing more from the Land Grant Permanent Fund.
I know this sounds cold, but the people who most utilize "free" things are the absolute least likely to understand it's not free.
Most people think the state is a machine of infinite money, and the only thing preventing $1 million checks in the mail to everyone is corporate lobbyists protecting the elite.
It's a completely absurd claim that "most" people think the only reason the government isn't sending million dollar checks is hoarding.
The government spending too much and the debt being large is an extremely popular talking point, at least half of everyone would say "the federal government should spend less than they do" much less million dollar checks for every person.
I don't know if I have ever met someone in the ~40% of Americans who don't pay income tax, complaining that their government benefits are going too far.
The people who complain most about government spending are the people who pay a lot in taxes while only directly getting a fraction of it back in useful services. Taxes for roads and police? No Problem. Taxes for rent subsidies? Icy.
I think there is a lot of confusion about it. You overestimate people. :P I wish it was a case of me underestimating people, but after the things I saw...
You are overestimating people. I've met several people with higher education who don't understand that trade-off. They see the world as a fight between good guys who want to give the society free stuff and the bad guys that want to make money out of it.
It's less so the taverns own money and more so that the food, wine, bar (or future visits) subsidize the beer, ie the food is taxed so that the beer is free.
Same with credit card rewards, they're not paid for by the bar, they're paid for by volume at the bar, debit/cash transactions, and the savings on cash controls, and the people that can't payoff their credit card bill.
Sure, but that hides most of the facts about how it works. There are a lot of parties involved in this, including people paying for it and being paid for it, and those paying probably out number those getting it for free at point of use. Sweeping that under the rug is just a sales ploy, which shows what the outlet wants you to believe about this program.
I wouldn't call using the most commonly accepted (and concise) terminology a "sales ploy". If you want every service to be accompanied by a wordy explanation of how it works, then every article would need to mention that the current status quo involves complicated taxpayer subsidy in the form of dependent care FSA accounts and a host of state-level programs.
This is a good example, because a "freeway" is free at point of use, but obviously understood to not be free of construction and maintenance cost. It is called "freeway" because "free-to-drive-on highway" would be too wordy.
Poll a random subset of people with the question "are you in favor of free childcare?". X% will say yes.
Poll another set with the question "are you in favor of taxpayer funded childcare?". Y% will say yes.
I would bet any amount of money that X>Y, and (X-Y)% of people did not think about the fact that a free government service is not actually free.
Exactly how big X and Y are, I couldn't say. But identifying propaganda and deceptive language is never something that should be discouraged, even when it's advocating for a cause you agree with.
Me? I'm not opposed to it. I think tax-payer funded attempts to increase birthrates in our own population are a good idea. We should be doing more to encourage people to have and raise children.
I'm opposed to weasel words and intentionally misleading people about how economies and governments work. I'm also not particularly confident encouraging people to have their children raised by strangers is a good idea.
We have this thing called “federalism” which prevents that hypothetical law from being constitutional. The federal government cannot tell states how to spend their own money.
Ignore the law and tie it up in court until regime change? Something is only real or of concern if there are consequences. Words and opinions without force backing them are just words and opinions.
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, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.
The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.
Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.
People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
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.
I hope you were right, but I strongly suspect you are mistaken.
Most people fail to understand:
- Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income.
- The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported.
- The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.”
- The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)
What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.
What's your source for saying that most people fail to understand that social welfare programs come from taxes? The concept of where government money comes from is such an obvious fact, I don't understand how you can claim most people don't understand it. People go to work for a paycheck, they pay taxes, and they understand money doesn't grow on trees. This is adulting 101.
And no, "subsidized" means a portion of something is covered by someone else, but not necessarily all of it. E.g. a subsidized cafeteria at work may mean all the food is 50% of cost. Subsidized can mean fully subsidized, but that's a special case.
So subsidized is not more precise, it's actually much less precise. "Free" continues to be the accurate and correct term.
You're taking a right-wing political stance against current levels of social spending, which is your prerogative, but there's no need to change perfectly fine language to do so. Even if we called it the mouthful of "fully subsidized childchare", that's not going to make it any less popular.
What could possibly be my source for such a claim? Who is funding studies on this topic?
My source is my upbringing in Europe and my subsequent long-term residence in two other countries, which provided me with a unique perspective on people’s feelings and beliefs.
My source is my diverse life experiences, during which I actively engaged with people from all walks of life as much as I could. I am not making any claims about science or indulging in conspiracies. For such claims, I would require concrete evidence.
What I am saying is that a majority of the Europeans, particularly the youth, has become disconnected from the fundamental principle that to distribute wealth, you must generate it first.
You're seriously saying that the majority of Europeans don't understand that social services come from the taxes they pay?
That honestly sounds as plausible to me as saying the majority of Europeans thinkg 2+2=5.
Forgive me if I have a hard time believing you. Because I can definitely tell you Americans understand where their government spending comes from, and I have a hard time believing that Europeans are somehow less educated on this.
To be clear, I don’t believe it’s an “education” issue. I think it’s a “for too long removed from politics” problem.
For most Europeans, a tax is an unclear bill at the end of the month, leaving them feeling powerless to do anything about it.
One thing I learned from living in America is that people here are much more engaged in civic life and politics. The UK (which I also lived in) is perhaps the exception to this European rule.
You don't need to be involved in politics to understand that government spending comes from.
I'm American but have spent a lot of time in Europe and even got to live in France for a summer. I have seen nothing to indicate that Europeans are ignorant of where government spending comes from. They seem just as smart as anyone else.
And national elections in Europe also seem like large news events, even if the campaign season is (thankfully) a whole lot shorter.
Fussing with language to make rightwing political points (i.e. lying) is the bread and butter of rightwing ideology. You don't say "I don't think governments should spend any money on social services or helping their citizens", because that makes you sound like a terrible person. So you look down your nose and say "Well, it's not really FREE, akshually! I am very smart." And then you prance around tooting your dog whistle.
I agree with the concept of not labeling things which are subsidized as "free", while still considering the price worth it. Similarly, I think the framing of negative rights vs entitlements makes sense, while still believing that certain entitlements are worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I have found that such framings are mostly associated with a set of beliefs which I feel profoundly at odds with (e.g. unlimited wealth inequality is fine). So I find myself aligned with the "health care is a human right" crowd despite my discomfort with the ideological underpinnings.
Right. I believe every socialist should feel offended by the term “free healthcare.”
Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
But the doctor isn't working for free, the nurse isn't working for free, the receptionist isn't working for free, the machines in the office weren't free, the rent on the office isn't free. Yes, theres no bill that arrives that you pay for directly out of pocket, but the system very much isn’t actually free.
Who on earth thinks the doctor is working for free, or the nurse, or anyone else...?
This is the most strawman of strawmen I might ever have heard.
By your logic, the word "free" should be banished from the English language, because literally nothing could ever be free.
Except, for people who have common sense, "free" means you don't have to pay for the thing directly.
In this case, your taxes get aggregated with everyone else's and then some gets split up into health services. But since there's no direct connection between the two -- you don't get more healthcare if you pay more taxes individually, and you don't get to pay less taxes if you don't go to the doctor -- it's conceptualized as paying taxes on one end, and getting free health care on the other. This is just common sense. Everyone understands how this works. It's the same way we have free schools. Or you think schools aren't actually free either...?
This is where you’re being naive. I meant this in other parts of the thread: Americans are more connected to the outcome of taxes because the government doesn’t control every aspect of life.
For Europeans, while they understand the concept of taxes, the government’s vastness and involvement in everything make it a black box that they fund without having a say. They can just hope it’s being used effectively (although many believe it isn’t).
Most European elections revolve around sentimental signaling and rarely present concrete plans that explain practical solutions to problems.
Americans assume the rest of the world is on the same page, but that’s not the case IMO
I'm sorry, but you're the one who seems naive here. European governments "control every aspect of life"? What are you on about? Europe isn't Soviet communism, or a dictatorship under Mussolini.
You're taking a bizarrely extreme ideological position that does not match reality. Elections in countries like France and Germany are vibrant and heavily contested and citizens are greatly interested and involved.
Whether there's more sentimental signaling than you'd like, or too few concrete plans -- that's true across the world, and in the US.
But that has nothing to do with whether it makes sense to call government services provided at no direct cost "free".
You've made it clear you want to redefine language to suit your kind of right-wing ideology, where you seem shockingly judgmental and dismissive of your fellow citizens. No thanks.
They're not? If you're the type of person to pay taxes, that money gets used to pay the teachers. The pizza restaurant that offers free delivery - that's also not free. They use the money from the customer buying pizza to pay the delivery driver. If you're in a country that allows businesses to get away with that, that might explain your confusion, but not all countries, eg Germany, allow businesses to get away with false advertising like that.
Again, by your logic, nothing provided by someone else could ever be free. Right?
So then what exactly is the point of having the word?
So let's get rid of the word. Now, we need a word to mean things you don't pay for directly, since that's a very useful and practical concept when it comes to your personal budget. What do you think of the word... I'm just brainstorming here... "free"?
The narratives on this topic are hard to pierce through. Economic literacy is low among the public. Politicians take advantage of this to pretend that solving everything is as simple as taxing the people you don’t like (billionaires, corporations, or even completely incorrect narratives about how we’ll use tariffs to make other countries pay us, which we all know is false). These groups are all represented as infinite money wells that just need to be tapped by electing the right person.
This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.
Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.
However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
I’m not sure. If we compare the US to Europe (and I say this with a heavy heart), I wouldn’t be confident that the EU has a positive balance. There hasn’t been any growth in the EU in the last 25 years.
What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?
Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?
When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.
You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.
You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.
Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
You shouldn’t be downvoted, kind of a lame part of HN lately.
I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.
As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.
It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.
Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)
Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.
However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
Yes, in the case of a business giving out free services or things. But, government is not and has never been a business so this doesn't apply in this case.
That's true of private enterprise that has a profit motive. The "product" here is healthy well-adjusted citizens that can one day be workers. The public sector is not the same.
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.
US actually provided child care to mothers employed during WWII. [0]
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
[0] https://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/blog/the-lanham-act-and-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Child_Developmen...
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 doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
[1] https://archive.is/ScFRX
In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
> So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.
The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent
Norway accepts they are a homogeneous country. Americans lose their minds at the thought
What do you mean?
[flagged]
The US isn’t homogenous country. It can’t become that without amending the constitution and then deporting or killing 40% of the population.
Honestly, opinions like this are the best anti-white propaganda around.
I know higher order functions are cool and all, but using (apply ...) makes nested applications easier to notice.
The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
FTA
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
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."
I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.
Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.
The assumption here is that only people with means got care and were surveyed. I am not sure that this is the case. Moreover, you can correct for those factors, and, I assume, any statistician worth their salt are.
Given the reproducibility crisis, particularly in the social sciences, I wouldn’t put too much weight into the skill or honesty of the people doing that work (and statisticians they are not - more like people with a humanities background who take some statistics courses and then do numerology)
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
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.
I am reading the article and it looks like it is being compared to the elder cohorts of Qubec children and also rest of Canada.
Looks like Quebec's past and rest of Canada is the control.
I'm referring to the comment you responded to comparing america to various countries that offer free childcare.
It's not an intractable issue. It's just a matter of economics.
Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.
Wait a minute… that sounds like…
That sounds like the ideal situation we have decided to make unrealistic.
> Wait a minute… that sounds like…
The child tax credit.
Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.
Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.
> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight
This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.
Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.
You go first then. It can be a you cut I choose type thing with gender roles.
Because let me tell you dude I and every other woman is picking the men's package in this deal. You go ahead and be a 50's housewife if you think it's so good. We've had the option to choose if we want that terrible life for 40+ years now and "fuck no" won in a landslide.
Do you know how depressing it is to find out that both my mom and my mother-in-law squirreled away money in a secret bank account just so they could have the tiniest bit of financial independence separate from their husbands. And keep in mind these are men who they both love dearly and are still married to to this day.
Hold on - you're conflating "traditional housewife with zero financial independence" with "choosing to be the primary caregiver for your own kids." Those are not the same thing.
The fact that your mom and MIL needed secret bank accounts isn't an argument against raising your own children - it's an argument for financial transparency and shared accounts in modern marriages. And yeah, we should absolutely have that.
But here's what you're missing: plenty of women (and men!) are choosing to be primary caregivers today because we have the choice now. It's not 1950 - it's 2025. Nobody's talking about giving up bank accounts or financial independence. We're talking about prioritizing raising your own kids over outsourcing it, when that's financially possible.
It's hard as hell, it's undervalued, and it's not for everyone. But acting like everyone who makes that choice is deluded? That's just as dismissive as the people who think all women should be doing it.
Since women’s lib, men’s wages have been flat while women’s has climbed. See the first chart here: https://www.businessinsider.com/gender-wage-pay-gap-charts-2...
The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.
I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.
Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.
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> The burden of proof is on feminists to prove why things they believe and optimize for are necessary and good, not the other way around.
Simple question, but what evidence would change your mind?
> We need fathers to protect and provide.
Protect from what? Themselves and other men? Why do they have to provide while women are being made helpless and dependent?
> Things worked this way for thousands upon thousands of years and led to our species being amazingly resilient
It led to high domestic violence against women. Even normalized one where being the wife was considered just being a man. These are very much correlated with lack of opportunities for women to get earn and live independently. Too many men were using the "protection" as an excuse for being the primary danger in their women's lives.
What the fuck, dude?
Bud, "your" people are "getting replaced" because they’re not fucking enough. Pounding your chest about "low-IQ" immigrants and masculinity won't help: they still won't fuck until they feel they can afford the lifestyle they want, regardless of who you feel the "burden of proof" is on. Enjoy seeing -- gasp!! -- a whole lot more brown faces with scary names in the future. (As always, the kids will be alright, regardless of whatever scornful glances they might catch from insecure adult "men".)
Want to raise the next generation of humans in a healthy, humanistic way? Then you go fucking do it, Mr. Big Man. Otherwise, let us do the sensible thing of having universal child care and go back to your racist rat hole.
Someday your woke kids will read your comment and will be mortified.
Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.
It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.
You'd think the Economist would care more about this study: https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...
Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.
I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.
The Economist is a capitalism cheerleader, so no, they would not care for that study.
Yes, that's why I thought they'd cheer it. When the state provides day care, more Moms work and contribute to capitalism more than the cost of the day care.
It was done so mothers could work building tanks and airplanes, not out of any concern for the children.
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".
The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial argument for leaving the workforce.
That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
> That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Yip. Oddly enough, this has a lot of economic parallels with cooking at home vs eating out. For a silly example, you can make an Egg McMuffin for a tiny fraction of what you'd pay at McDonalds for one. Yet McDonalds (franchise, not corporate) operate on single digit profit margins. Why?
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
Poorer people use home-based daycares, which has the same cost advantages.
It doesn't. You still need someone to commute to where the daycare is because they don't live there, transaction costs related to payment processing, and that's often illegal if you do it for money because of zoning ordinances etc.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
Sounds like barter to me. There are some benefits, the kid expands their social life, the parent gets to fulfill career needs, etc. There may be issues, but shouldn't be thought of in completely negative terms.
We're talking about different age ranges here. For 0-3 years, especially infants, the attachment research is very consistent primary caregivers matter enormously for development. A 1yo doesn't need to "expand their social life" they need secure attachment. The socialization benefits you're describing kick in later, around 3-4 years old.
Daycare typically won't take a kid until potty trained, so at least 2 and a half or so. At the early ages, it's only a few hours a day as well in my experience.
I don't think daycare is necessarily a net negative. I just don't think many families have thought the calculus through.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
Behold the glory of private equity.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
Seriously. There’s a reason all our kids’ preschool teachers never return from maternity leave. The pay isn’t enough to pay someone else to watch your baby while you work. And this school is already an expensive one and is a nonprofit so the money isn’t going to some Mr. Moneybags investor. The economics of childcare are broken.
All of them? A bunch of my son's daycare teachers had their own kids, even infants, attending the same daycare.
My kids were young 25 years ago but the same was true for us then.
The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
This analysis is incomplete for a couple of reasons:
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
4.5? At a US daycare those kids will be in a group of 20-40, with one or two adults supervising.
Varies by state and age? My very red state does not allow a group of 40, full stop. The largest group allowed is for 3-year-olds, with a 1:15 adult:child ratio. For younger children, the ratios and group sizes are smaller.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
Given the cost of out of home childcare, three kids more than pays for a nanny. Even two can.
Not exactly a “rich” thing, just a matter of “scale” (in YC terms).
In California, at least, those numbers wouldn't be acceptable.
My daughter's at an in-home daycare with IIRC five or six other kids. There are two adults there full-time, sometimes three.
Two adults supervising 20-40 daycare-aged kids is simply not feasible.
Depends on the state and child age. California is on the stricter end of legally mandated ratios:
0-18 months: 1:3
18 months to 3 years: 1:4
3-5 years: 1:5
Bullshit. Most US states have strict staff ratio limits for properly licensed daycare facilities. The exact ratios vary by state but typically this is something like 1:4 for infants up to 1:14 for school-age children.
> The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
My SO spent a few months collecting the neighbour's daughter along with our own from kindergarten and in exchange the neighbour would make dinner for us. This arrangement started because the neighbours' shifts didn't align with kindergarten hours.
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
> At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
What I meant to say is that not only is this labour completely unrecognised as contributing to the overall economy, it's essential labour, without which other, measurable work could not be performed.
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
> Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
Yes, 100% agreed.
It’s not measured in GDP but it is measured. For example right now it’s estimated that household production is around 23% of GDP. So quite sizable.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
I have a suspicion a lot of the “why did wages stop keeping pace with the growth of the economy?” problem is because real productivity hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as our measures of it. But the measures are tied to ways for capitalists to extract more money, so that fake-growth does make line go up for owners. But there’s not nearly as much more actual work getting done as one might think from the numbers.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
It's inflation IMO. Wages started stagnating in the 70s which is exactly when the USD became completely unbacked (due to the end of Bretton Woods), enabling the government to go endlessly deep into debt, which we proceeded to do with gusto, sending inflation skyrocketing.
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
But what if Avery has the skills and training to watch 5 kids at once in a group?
What age?
0-18 months, there is no skill other than being the parent(s).
How do you "skill" yourself more attention to give?
They are very different.
In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.
In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.
Interesting game engine:
1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars
2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars
It's not just about the economy, it is about freedom of choice. What does Max and Avery feel about their careers? Would they rather be working or watching kids? If one parent has to stay home, that might mean having to give up a good career.
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
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.
Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.
It reminds me of Bujold.
“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants — although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food, of course — housing — education, clothing, medical care — it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, nonproductive army.”
Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”
Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”
Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”
Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”
“I believe” — her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness — “they call it women’s work. And the supply usually exceeds the demand — non-union scabs, as it were, undercutting the market.”
> Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do
This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.
Right, and that's exactly the point. It was extended family and close community, not institutional strangers. Grandma watching the kids while mom works the fields is completely different from dropping an infant at a commercial daycare center with a 1:6 caregiver ratio. The "it takes a village" argument doesn't support modern daycare, it actually undermines it. Those historical models were built on trusted relationships and continuity of care, not economic transactions with rotating staff.
They would need to be building tanks and airplanes.
Why?
We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
We've strayed pretty far from the original topic here, but the reality is that the US military is literally running out of working aircraft because they're so old. The average age of USAF aircraft is now about 28 years. The fleet was allowed to decay and not substantially recapitalized during the GWOT. Many of the fighters in the combat coded inventory aren't even allowed to hit their original 9G maneuvering limit any more due to accumulated airframe fatigue. Now we're paying an overdue bill.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
The problem is that fighter aircraft have gotten too expensive to afford to build, even for a nation.
Sure, that is a problem. Ironically the best solution from an overall expense management standpoint is to drive economies of scale by building more and retiring older units on an accelerated schedule to cut maintenance costs. Keep production lines running continuously instead of periodically starting and stopping. The F-35A, while badly flawed in certain ways, is at least relatively affordable due to high production volumes.
Not to build, but to build and maintain. We never budget for maintenance (we as in companies and governments).
If Sweden can do it...
Oh yes it’s about time the US enters another war so we can justify even more military spending and less spending to improve the livelihood of the people.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
You're really missing the point. If we're going to have a military at all then we have to constantly keep building new combat aircraft (and other weapon systems). The old ones wear out and become obsolete. Ironically this is the best way to prevent a major war, through deterrence. (I do think that attacking Venezuela would be stupid and pointless.)
I don’t really dispute that, to loop around to the start of debate, you’re not building an F-35 with unskilled labor. This isn’t automotive workers riveting B-17s together.
Everyone should learn how to build drones.
Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
I think we should act with empathy and care for each other.
The government does not need to be run like a fucking business.
It's because it runs like a business that we're able to enjoy a high standard of living.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
The economy will stop growing eventually. Nothing grows forever. If we have built our society around the notion of perpetual economic growth, we have already accepted that "everyone will suffer incredibly", and we're only arguing about which generation will be the one to bear it.
> The economy will stop growing eventually.
That isn't necessarily true. If we find continual efficiency gains, it may never stop growing for thousands of years.
Most growth curves in life are S-curves. Population growth, etc. But technological advancement could continue until we become a type II civilization.
That's absolutely sci-fi speculation, but there are no signs of technological advancement ending.
If each round of advancement increases efficiency, growth continues. I don't see an end in sight.
I don’t understand the conjunction of “the state should not subsidize childcare with taxes” and “the church should subsidize childcare with underpaid labor and tithes.”
Church membership is voluntary.
Being atheist, GP is presumably not a member (or at worst, is a member in bad faith, pun intended).
I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
Raising children is basically a full time job. Why not compensate it as such?
I'd be on board with that. That was Andrew Yangs whole proposition with UBI. https://2020.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/
Sure it goes to everyone, but I think that's okay. Some parents would still choose to both work, and use their monthly check to pay for daycare. I think the important thing is freedom to choose.
The government can set up free child care as it has already set up other similar programs.
How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?
Yeah, that's why I said it wasn't an easy problem to solve. No need to let the infeasibility of a perfect solution get in the way of a possible, yet however unideal solution.
I mean, a lack of cheap housing is also a policy failure.
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.
Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.
Russia and some other ex-Soviet states have it, as a leftover of the Soviet system. But it persists because people find it essential.
Slovenia doesn’t have free healthcare, only subsidized.
Source: https://www.gov.si/teme/znizano-placilo-vrtca/
Childcare, not healthcare. Like babysitting
Sorry typo. I meant childcare, link mentions childcare.
Berlin, Germany. Admission from 1.5 y.o.
In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
My kids very rarely got sick in pre-school (1-5 years old) or in school. Make sure they sleep enough and you are usually good.
> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
See https://www.statsforvalteren.no/innlandet/barnehage-og-oppla...
> In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
France AFAICT
https://www.newsweek.com/us-mom-unpacks-costs-child-care-par...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/explainer-how-childcare...
Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.
I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
I think it’s more likely that UBI discourages business creation than encourages it.
Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.
Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
I actually did the math for US once, calculating how much more tax it would take to give everyone minimum wage. The resulting tax rate would certainly be fairly high, but not excessively so; several European countries have higher brackets today, and their economy doesn't collapse.
But also, are you accounting for all the means-tested welfare that such a program would replace?
The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
FWIW I'm far left and in favor of UBI, but one thing to keep in mind is that while it's a simple concept, details (i.e. amounts paid and amounts taxed) matter a lot. There's no reason why UBI can't be redistributive if one desires it to be so - you just use more progressive taxes to fund it.
And, of course, reducing the complexity and cost of welfare ought to be a left wing talking point as well! Again, it depends on what you do with the savings - sure, it can just be taken and used elsewhere, or you could maintain the spending but raise the bar on how much UBI provides.
> Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
This is hypothetical, isn't it?
Depends what you mean.
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
UBI is both a pipe dream and unnecessary.
It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
Yeah this is sort of the reaction I had. Removing "risk" with UBI and free healthcare and free childcare also removes the filters for a lot of people who would be bad at running a business. If you don't have the stomach to take the risk and do the work to make your idea a success, then maybe you shouldn't try.
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
Why do you need people to make big risks livelihood to do business? People from affluent environment start businesses the most often and they dont really risk all that much. They know they will get help if it fails.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The data on UBI isn't out there, but it is notable that countries with similar tax rates to the US manage to have universal healthcare and more expansive safety nets. Some examples: New Zealand (tax rate ~30% less than the US), Korea, Switzerland, Australia, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Norway.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US, not lower unless you're doing something odd like comparing based on average local wage.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
> New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US
US tax rates are complex due to local variance and other factors. Tax rate on the median NZ income appears to be ~30%. Tax on median US is lower, but state taxes can add significantly. There is not a neat divide between red states & blue states here; Alabama & Georgia have state income taxes, for example.
> The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country.
And that's before the health insurance premiums!
Switzerland has mandatory healthcare insurance and subsidies for low income earners. The insurance is provided by private companies. It's not really universal healthcare system like in most EU countries.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
I included the Swiss example exactly for this reason, to show that it's not 100% about the delivery model.
n = 1, but if we get UBI, I will immediately start a precious metals brokerage business.
Obamacare is threatening to capsize the country with its cost.
America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.
US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...
Reality doesn't match your claim, for example when one looks at European countries who have all of that.
Why is "the economy" our highest priority here?
Why is the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services (aka, the economy) the highest priority?
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.
Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.
The Canadian economy is not doing very well.
And yet every single socialist, European country is behind the US in terms of their economic output.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
So tired of the argument.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
Yeah, it’s like forgetting that the point of money in life is living, rather than the money itself.
Life is not about checking off boxes on how much free stuff you can hypothetically get from the government either. That has tons of costs and risks just like everything else in life. It’s all relative.
Totally agree.
However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.
Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
How can trust be irrelevant? Why would anyone want pretenders and deceivers to have better families?
If you yourself alongside everyone else in your country benefits why should you care if you happen to dislike some of those people?
Because YOU are paying for those benefits and they aren’t. If you truly don’t see how offering something for free would attract all the freeloaders, increasing the load on those who work, there’s no saving you.
What I am describing is you literally saving money.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
Can they convert $1K outlay into $1.1K of tax revenue the same month?
Given New Mexico's tax rates, it seems like it would be difficult to do so.
It looks like the program will cost about $600M next year. In order to generate more tax revenue than it costs, it would need to increase personal income somewhere on the order of $12-15B of personal income, taxable sales, business profit or some combination.
Now, a fraction of that will come from the childcare workers. Some may come from stay-at-home parents or parents working part time going to work, but given they say it'll save on the order of $12K/year/family, a family would need to increase their income by about $260K/year in order to pay $12K in extra state income taxes.
It's rare to see spending programs actually pay for themselves. Mostly when politicians talk about a program paying for itself, they preform verbal slight-of-hand, arguing that $x will come back as $x*y in economic activity. That is, of course, a lie, but no one calls them out the fact that economic activity ≠ taxes.
It doesn’t matter if New Mexico’s state government recuperates its revenue it matters if New Mexico’s citizens are better off. As such federal, state, and local levels are worth considering not just state taxes, including changes in other outlays such as healthcare subsidies. Effective tax rates on marginal income often exceed 50% for American families even ignoring the income stream from daycare workers and facilities etc. US Government spending being 40.5% of GDP those kinds of marginal tax rates should be expected.
Now as a low population state implementing this at the state level means most of that federal savings/revenue helps people outside of the state, but that’s the issue with implementing such programs at the state level rather than an issue with the type of program itself.
So that we don't get even more of them!
While in a low trust society, which you obviously already have, people are most productive when they're at perpetual risk of starvation.
No, you simply are unable to reap the benefits that are available to high trust societies.
Reap 'em? I'm unable to even conceive of them!
"productive"
Simplest way to increase total absolute output is always to stop providing intake.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
> a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
Oh the irony!
> 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.
> Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Well, that‘s not related to this specific conversation, but industrialization in socialist states did that in a number of cases. Soviet Union between 1950s and 1970s has seen significant growth and by various accounts achieved up to 5x improvement in purchase power compared to Russian Empire at its peak, in 1913 (how much goods could a worker buy for their salary, not including welfare, which was obviously superior in SU). I‘m not saying socialism is good, the price paid for that was terrible. And anyway my argument wasn’t that there were better societies, just that America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans (and let’s not forget that 60% of the time in that century there existed slavery). People went there not because it was great (and not everyone went there, many German settlers chose opposite direction, moving to Wild East, helping colonial expansion of Russian empire). It was just marginally better than certain places in Europe with its wars and famines.
> America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
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.
Not truly exceptional? Some fun facts:
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
America truly is exceptional.
Looks like list of arguments for a beer talk at BBQ party on 4th of July. I mean, are you seriously using „Wehrmacht relied on horses“ as a proof of American exceptionality?
It's proof that Germany had not industrialized like the US did.
(You won't see many horses in wartime films, because the Germans tried to show off their industrial machines, not their reliance on horsepower.)
Every nation that exists or ever existed took land by force. And yes, there were public works projects.
The government did not engage in welfare until FDR.
I agree on that. It doesn’t make your previous comment right.
It makes your comment a diversion from the point. America was not founded on communal sacrifice.
I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you
LOL, thanks for the kind words! I just happened to like working on compilers, as few programmers will touch them. If you're ever in the Seattle area, we have a monthly D Coffee Haus where we drink and talk about languages, compilers, airplanes, cars, and physics. All are welcome!
(Even C++ people show up! All in good fun.)
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
The price of freedom is always paid in blood.
> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.
What do you think patriotism is, if not "community sacrifice"?
GP's point is that you are playing fast and loose with words here, so much so that your point doesn't make sense. "Community sacrifice" is a much broader category than those few policies you dislike.
Take a look at the post I originally responded to. It wasn't about patriotism, it was about wealth redistribution.
when you say 'individual rights', you should be honest about which classes of people that was referring to. By the way, don't be so defensive, the working poor are being absolutely crushed by capital right now, your guys won!
> you should be honest about which classes of people that was referring to
I'll go with "all men" from the Declaration of Independence.
> the working poor are being absolutely crushed by capital right now
They're being crushed by the government. You cannot make a country wealthy by raising taxes and redistributing the money.
> your guys won!
I go with the "all men" thang.
You mean all land owning men or men of sufficient wealth (those who can vote). Certainly not women. In other words, the male elites.
were blacks considered men? did it include women? it feels like you're purposely ignoring history
Btw ~40% of the people i've met in homeless outreach have full time jobs, taxes are not what's keeping them homeless. In china 90% of the population own their homes, I'm sorry but the all that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich. Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
> were blacks considered men?
Yes. The people who wrote the Constitution were well aware of the conundrum, but were faced with the reality that they could not form a union without allowing the slaveholders to continue. In essence, they kicked the can down the road, which resulted in a catastrophic war.
> did it include women?
Yes. Whether the word "men" means exclusively men or men and women depends on the context.
> taxes are not what's keeping them homeless
You're suggesting that taxes don't have effects beyond just paying the money. When a businessman is taxed, for example, that means he has less money to invest in his business, which means fewer jobs, fewer purchases of plant & equipment, slower growth, higher prices, etc., all of which negatively affect the rest of the economy, including poor people.
> that libertarian shit is such an obvious myth to protect the rich
America's rich people came from poor immigrants. The same for America's middle class.
> Every country I've ever visited with more redistributive policies has a substantially better quality of life
Have you ever looked at the size of government spending on redistribution? The US abandoned libertarianism in the early 1900s.
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
Yes I know about that theory. But it has problems.
When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!
As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
> Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
Guess where the north got their cotton to make those shoes? The south. The textile industries of the north would've never gotten their start without cheap cotton made possible by slavery.
> As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
Every South American nation that tried to raise itself out of poverty had their government overthrown or their leader assassinated with the help of good ol' USA. Japan/S. Korea/Taiwan industrialized because USA decided they needed strong allies to counter Russia/China. Check out the grand area plans. Africa was colonized, exported millions of their people to slavery, and is continually destabilized by the west (corporations, world bank, IMF, etc) to perpetuate resource extraction.
The poor is kept poor so the rich can get richer. Why is food so plentiful and cheap? Slave labor. Read Tomatoland for a taste. Why are clothes so cheap? People are working for pennies to make those clothes. Why doesn't the iPhone price rise with inflation? There are millions of poor rural Chinese pounding for a chance to work at inhumane conditions for a few dollars a day. You think they make enough to pull their families out of poverty? Nope, it's mostly foreign companies that are reaping the bulk of the profit while continually pressing their costs (labor wages) down.
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
You clearly didn’t grow up in an immigrant neighborhood in the city
I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.
Even so, do you think the Mennonites or Mormons in Mexico would agree with no community sacrifice as as part of their narrative?
I grew up next to the Hispanic neighborhood in Arizona, and the schools I attended were about 30% Hispanic.
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past
The remembering/forgetting what "made America great" is very selective. Factory jobs: yes! Labor unions: (silence)
Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits).
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
Where does mass trustworthy behavior (ie, "a high trust society") come from?
From the perspective of 2025, it's pretty incredible how much of a higher trust society we had as recently as 2019.
How are you measuring this?
Vibes.
It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.
Do you have more references about this?
It's a very recent story, but for example:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a...
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news.
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
These can simply be different groups of Somali parents, for what it's worth. Presumably some Somali kids are truly autistic and not participating in the fraud scheme.
> 1% of the recipients are fraudulent
Google sez:
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
Em. "Improper payments" includes mistaken payments, overpayments and underpayments.
It is a measure of payment (or non-payment) errors, not fraud.
That doesn't mean 11% of recipients are fraudulent.
Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?
I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits.
With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
That $200billion means about 17% fraud in a program with minimal checks
Don't forget: When they help billionaires and trillion dollar business, it's framed as driving prosperity and stimulating the economy.
Only one political party rallies against "government handouts" and blames the individual for their problems.
Why would you generalize your opinion to all when this is extremely clear?
How can things get better if you can't even be bothered to criticize at a granular level? Since we are a Democracy this matters.
A mentor once told me that telling people something is much less effective than leading them to realize it themselves.
Of course you're right, but spelling it out explicitly leads to a partisan flame ware.
Maybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.
Turns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors.
Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.
Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
It turns out that the promise to hurt other people more is a winning strategy.
it's because people dont operate with facts and truth. they just want lies instead, sad reality
The US will kick into gear at certain emergency times (WW2, Covid, etc) but not so great outside of then.
I don't see how the US's feeble and lackluster response to COVID counted as "kicking into gear".
We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.
We developed vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. If that’s “feeble” then I guess I’ll take it every time.
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
It’s good that it’s a state policy, not a federal one. We need more policies to stay at the state level, regardless of the policy. Federalism is how we can test the effects of competing policies under the same house. If the policy is a problem for you, it’s a lot easier to vote with your feet and move to a different state than to move to a different country
I think it also gives it a better chance as an experiment. The federal government tends to pendulum swing between left and right on a fairly short cycle. Most states seem to be considerably more stable and less prone to trying to revert policies put in place by the "other side" every few years.
For something like this as a first pass, for sure, but if it can be shown to be "realistic" then I have no problem with the Feds enacting it. I especially feel that we need a single-payer option for health insurance. We're the only major "wealthy" nation with a completely regressive health care policy that punishes people for being poor to the point we just let them die if the $ aren't flowing
We need a public healthcare system, but whether it should be single payer is not readily evident, and I rather suspect that clinging to that particular model is what's causing progressives to get stuck trying to push it through. It's probably because most people in US immediately think of Canada when they think of socialized healthcare, and there's very little awareness of what other countries do on either left or right, so we're essentially perpetually debating the Canadian model. We should look at Europe instead and pick something that's both proven to work and more agreeable with American sensibilities. German, perhaps.
Too many people aren't satisfied with the policies they want affecting only them and their communities. They want to impose their will on people thousands of miles away
For some things, yes. I think this sort of thing is compatible with being legislated at the state level. Other policies are not. See states with strict gun laws being undermined by neighboring states with very loose laws.
To me that seems like a necessary trade off for the benefits gained. The stricter laws wouldn’t have necessarily been achieved nor maintained had they not been enacted at the state level.
What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over
The churn is largely an artifact of our electoral system IMO. If party seats followed national votes proportionally, the change would be far more gradual without the swings.
Of course, it's also not going to happen because proportional popular vote will strongly favor one party...
Sure but you have to pass a Constitutional amendment to fix that, and I don't see that happening on something as divisive as gun ownership.
At this point I don't think the constitution has much meaning left to it. So many matters have already saw massive changes, sometimes even going back and forth on it. And Wickard v Filburn is still standing precedent. In this kind of climate, SCOTUS could easily chip away at 2A case by case, especially considering that the current expansive interpretation of it only became the new policy less than 20 years ago.
"Vote with your feet" is a privileged assertion
The steel man of your argument sounds like:
If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.
While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it
And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc
Are immigrants privileged then?
Speaking as an immigrant: yes, absolutely! Legal immigrants generally have to be quite privileged in their place of origin to have the education level necessary to clear the bar in most places to be considered for any kind of visa that allows permanent residency, and to be financially well off enough to afford both the paperwork and the move itself.
You added the qualifier “legal”.
What about illegal?
It takes a village.
When I was a kid (youngest of four) growing up in a suburb of a small town, my mom would often drop me off at a neighbor's house to watch me while she ran errands or did stuff for my siblings. No payment, just neighbors being neighborly.
Now, I can't fathom something like that being feasible in our increasingly individualistic neighborhood. Regretfully, I don't even know the names of most of my neighbors. I wave to them on the street but I wouldn't ask them to take care of my daughter.
I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
Ideally we could go back to being an interdependent society but it has to happen organically. No amount of legislation or budget can fix that.
> I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
You still can. I managed to make friends with a few neighbors just by asking a few innocuous questions every time we meet. Some are friendlier than others. I don't talk to everyone I meet, just those I think could be friendly. I'm usually wrong though and the ones I'd never think would be friendly turns out the most talkative. I met my next door neighbor on afternoon and we talked for 6 hours. Take a chance, odds are good you'll find someone who wants to reach out as much as you.
Thanks for sharing your experience! I should really try it. I'm just shy.
The main reason I wouldn't enjoy watching my neighbor's kids is that we now have an absolutely paranoid, delusional society that has a mentally ill view of the dangers of children. By signing up to watch kids you incur absolutely massive liability, all it takes is one accusation and your whole life is destroyed and you lose everything, no matter that it was false. You would basically need cameras at every angle at all times before any rational person would want to watch someone else's kids.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
That's a good point, but the model could still work.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.
My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
It's also odd how no one ever asks whether the reason child care is necessary and a single-income household isn't earning enough anymore to make a living because Americans are effectively competing with the entire world for housing and jobs.
Probably because that’s not true.
Another way to say it might be that we've been shielded from the effects of not investing in our own children by the immigration of smart and educated young adults, where countries with less immigration are more acutely aware of how well its own educational system is performing.
> so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately need the quality education who are going to be left behind.
If it were up to me, I'd send those people to jail (yes yes, I know. I'm just angry and lashing out)
I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?
https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death..., and wikipedia on Math Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_wars
Personally, I find Boaler's advocacy extreme. Her famous quote: "Every student is capable of understanding every theorem in mathematics – and beyond – the mathematics curriculum. They just need the opportunity to struggle with rich tasks and see mathematics as a conceptual, creative subject.” This sounds inspiring, but in practice she advocated the policy of truly dumbing down math curriculums and text books. To say the least, shouldn't she at least demonstrate that she could understand any theorem? But instead, she advocated that SFUSD eliminate algebra from 8th Grade . Another example was that the curriculum that she advocated, College Preparatory Mathematics, was so boring and trivial. She also said something along the line "Traditional mathematics teaching is repetitive and uninspiring. We give students 30 similar problems to do over and over again, and it bores them and turns them off math for life.” What's funny is that the alternatives that Boaler prescribed were quite uninspiring and low level: https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/. All I can derive from her policies and complaints is that she couldn't do math. Why people would listen to someone who sucked at math about math education is beyond me.
Man, the "anti-immigration" square on my HN bingo card has a hole in it from all the pen marks. Anyway, we stopped investing in kids because kids aren't profitable in the next quarter, like everything else that's beneficial to society and not the eight wealthy people currently running it.
Hope this helps.
What makes you say that when New Mexico is now offering free childcare?
One state offering something is a start but we're still far behind maternity, pre-k, childhood nutrition, and primary or secondary education in general for most of the population relative to peer nations. Plus this administration's cuts to Medicare or SNAP which will also hit the poorest kids the most. Plus the national debt they are saddled with.
Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.
… behind in childhood nutrition? Between the WIC program, snap, and school meals there is plenty of resources.
It’s true that it’s means tested, but I’m not entirely sure we need to be providing free meals for rich people.
Free childcare is an investment in working parents, not the children.
I would not say that free childcare is an investment in children.
Definitely one of the few policies that Trump "championed" that I supported him on; severely curtailing H1B visas going forward. Those who are here can be grandfathered in, but going forward the program should be wound down, and we invest in our own civilians and youth.
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.
I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
It may be suboptimal, but what isn't? The problem here is assuming that the expensive bureaucratic credential based system is optimal or even better at all. "Everybody knows $SOME_NEIGHBOR and she's great with kids" is just a much better indicator of quality in child care than "$SOME_DAYCARE is licensed by $SOME_BUREAUCRACY."
Also, I'm not even against state support for parents needing childcare, but giving $500 a month to each parent who needs it to find childcare in an informal system will actually be much better than a state run system that spends $2000 per kid.
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.
We are only handing them off to complete strangers because the informal system has been driven underground by laws that only allow the state licensed bureaucratic monopoly. If state licensing was optional and people were allowed to run neighborhood businesses I bet you would see something very different.
I dunno -- it's not like you know people in your neighborhood the way humans used to know members of their tribes. And I've known people in the neighborhood who seemed totally normal and safe, and then got arrested for something shocking. We're not spending all day long with even our next-door neighbors, let alone the ones five blocks away.
Having standards in training, operation, and oversight of childcare seems just as important as safety standards in the food supply. Even though everybody cooks at home, you're not allowed to run a restaurant without certifications and inspections either. And thank goodness.
I'm sorry, America hasn't been Mayberry since the 1950s, and it never will be again. Most of us live in towns with more than just a post office, so this Norman Rockwell-esque fantasy of just dropping your kid off with the nice housewife next door is not just dead, it's starting to smell really bad.
Until recently in human history 100% of humans were illiterate.
“Recently” seems to mean something different in your comment than the one you replied to. As in at least an order of magnitude difference, maybe two.
Terrible analogy.
btw analogy is not a good way to win arguments.
Winning arguments with analogies is like painting still life with a broad brush
Lmao welcome to HN, baby! Every reply chain here:
1. Some point.
2. Counterpoint.
3. Countercounterpoint.
4-10. Belabored analogies that people argue about.
11-15. Weird blood-and-soil stuff.
Yes, let's go back to the 1300s, when we didn't need no stinkin' government licensure! Or flush toilets.
Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.
I didn't say anything about school. This article is about childcare for children below school age. But basic education is also actually quite cheap and easy to provide. Abraham Lincoln was educated in a one room school house. We have made it expensive by turning it into a bureaucratic nightmare with administrators, school boards, lawyers, and PTAs, when all you really need is a few good teachers who are given the authority to set and enforce high standards.
"until very recently" includes pre-industrial times to my understanding when education did not exist in an organized fashion for the poor.
[edit] And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor" for his times? I am sure you can come up with some less fortunate people during the same times which didn't really get the experience of that one room schoolhouse.
Illinois had universal free public school since 1825, so no, you couldn’t find anyone who didn’t have access to that experience (or better).
The world is quite a lot bigger than Illinois though.
And it seems I need to spell it out for you, right there in the US during the same times, children of black people in the south didn't get access to education[1]. Serfdom was a thing in Europe until the early 1900, serfs children didn't get access to proper education[2]. I'm giving you a link to Russian education, but the whole of Eastern Europe was at a similar level. I don't know what kind of rose tinted cool aid you guys have been drinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_during_the_slave_per...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire#Education
> And in what world is Abraham Lincoln considered "the poor"
In the world where he was born on the frontier in a log cabin, which is this one.
Yet that is heaps more privilege than black slaves and native tribes had at the same time. Is that really not obvious to you?
Call it a childcare bailout instead of "free". Society will accept it then.
Ham-fisted reactionary policy versus attacking the root cause, which is 1) cost of living has now increased to require two working parents 2) The government values housewives at about $2k per year in tax credits. Let women stay at home and raise their children as they know best, and pay them for the cost of the service they provide.
In Canada, you cannot file taxes jointly, so income tax brackets are on an individual basis instead of on a couple basis. It really makes it expensive for a single parent to stay home as one person making 100k pays about 30% more income tax than two people making 50k.
Don’t give me free daycare, just make it so much less punishing to stay at home and take care of my kids.
All of it is kindof dumb, I pay a higher tax because joint filing is not a thing, and my increased tax pays for subsidized daycare…
So, what, pay someone a full time salary for caring for 1 or two children? Pretty sure that doesn't scale
If governments aren’t willing to value women at what their work at home is worth, they’re not serious about tackling the birthrate problem. Show me a country with universal childcare with a TFR above 2.1. It’s a cheap substitute for the love and attention only a mother can provide young children
Outside the home childcare is not 24/7. It's for a portion of the day. Also, it's really weird to be making this argument for mothers and not fathers.
Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.
The fact he only supports women staying at home should tell you everything you need to know about the caliber person you’re dealing with.
> Outside the home childcare is not 24/7.
No, but it is during our most productive, aware, and valuable daylight hours.
> Also, it's really weird to be making this argument for mothers and not fathers.
In the context of human history, it’s not weird at all.
> Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.
How?
It reduces the time children spend with a parent, and it creates a world in which both parents have to work just to afford having children.
I suppose in the context of human history, you might argue to enslave a population based on racial characteristics in order to provide childcare.
For many families, both parents have to work. Most time spent not working or sleeping is spent doing a task simultaneously with childcare. Cleaning, preparing meals, repairing things, laundry, etc. Even for families where one individual shoulders the bulk of the burden this is largely the case.
Equating racism with the inherent biological sexual dimorphism of childbirth and infant care is certainly a take.
Look, if you want to justify your position by just pointing out that it's the way things have historically been done, expect to have it pointed out how ridiculous you are being. Anyway, Equating child care with the inherent biological sexual dimorphism of childbirth is certainly a take.
You conveniently left off “infant care”. Only one gender lactates, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to talk about “ridiculous”, ignoring reality doesn’t make it any less real, no matter how much you might find it ideologically inconvenient.
You're the one moving the phrase from "child care" to "infant care". And by 6 months the majority of parents are using formula anyway. And there's a percentage of women that for whatever reason can't properly breastfeed. You're really grasping at straws here.
The person most biologically suited to care for an infant is the person who birthed the infant in the first place, and there is a path dependence inherent in ongoing childcare.
Once you have spent six months or a year raising an infant, it is personally psychologically difficult (and developmentally questionable) to cut that tie.
I get that it’s ideologically convenient to pretend that men and women are interchangeable economic cogs, but the sexes are fundamentally different in very pertinent ways.
We all lose under this model, but ultimately the people who lose the most when economic and social policy rejects our inconvenient biological differences are the children themselves.
Family should be able to support themselves on a single earner’s salary. That’s what we should prioritize. They can decide themselves who should stay home, if anyone; gender doesn’t need to factor into our policy if we simply make it our goal for families to not require dual incomes.
It doesn't have to be mother at home. Roles can be reverse. I think it's very important to point that out.
You have a point but I live in New Mexico. It's not like many of these moms are suddenly going to become stellar parents with a $2K tax credit. The state has real issues with poverty, education and work ethic and it's often generational.
Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.
If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
What if the husband wants to stay home and raise the kids?
Also no, women (or men) who stay home don’t “know best” by default. That knowledge is earned and requires intent.
Exactly. I was raised by two working parents who were very involved in my life, and I wasn't a "latchkey" kid by any means. While the "traditional" spouse at home does work out pretty well if the single wage earner can do well, to be sure. That doesn't mean other situations can't prosper. It's not a magically set up that is the solution for everyone.
All for it, but free birth control should also be provided.
Free condoms are widely available.
https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/sexual-health/free-condo...
Why? Do we have too many children?
In some places (esp those with low access to birth control and sub-par sexual health education), there are too many unplanned children being born to people who do not have the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty.
Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.
If someone has the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty do they still need free childcare then?
Often programs like this are subsidized based on income such that if they can afford it, it is subsidized less, or you do not qualify past a certain income. That is one method of managing the program's costs, while still benefitting those who are most heavily affected. This program doesn't appear to do that, but many do.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make though.
Having an extra $2k/mo per child laying around puts you in a pretty high income bracket.
Yes. And stop bringing your kids to breweries.
We do also have reproductive care written into law.
Children are a positive externality so we should actually tax birth control rather than make it free.
;)
Sounds like you're volunteering your time and resources to help raise them! Thanks, you can stop by the adoption agency any time today. :)
I’ll even begin to entertain this argument only once the burden of having and raising children falls on society as a whole, and not individual women. Until then, absolutely not.
[flagged]
That's true that it would be good for more access to birth control, but this is a confusing statement because you benefit economically and socially from each new kid that is born and raised. If child care is socialized, it means that the kids are going to be better taken care of versus the mother is impoverished and (a) doesn't work and stays poor or (b) does work and they aren't taken care of properly.
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
At most high schools in our district we offer childcare to the teachers for free. I think thats really the model we should be moving to. Just add pre-k and daycare to the public school system. We have the space already.
Give the state your kids and get to work, comrade?
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
Man, even the Soviet Union was able to provide free childcare. Really makes you think, doesn't it.
We had it better. We threw that away.
Instead of figuring out why and fixing that, you’d apparently prefer that we take a page from the soviets and further embed our social and economic regression into law.
Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It baffles me that it's so hard to argue for care for children. The response is always "but it's the parents' responsibility". Which, okay, fair, BUT if the parent is failing their responsibility (which can happen for many reasons, many of which don't need maliciousness nor incompetence), then what? We let the child die? We let the child starve? That's what I don't get. A child doesn't have autonomy, so it shouldn't even be a question of helping them out.
We can argue about what to do with the parents but in the mean time we're going to let children suffer? That's lunacy. I don't even have children and I'll gladly pay taxes to prevent child suffering. How is anyone against that?
Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.
I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.
I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.
Er…
America has universal public education because it started with the “Old Deluder Act”: the state wanted people to be literate so they could read the Bible.
The exact opposite of your allegation above: “Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: ‘don’t teach my children your Satanic ways.’”
Maybe I'm too tired to write clearly. I meant, the reason parents have ownership over their children (at least in America) is primarily for ideological indoctrination.
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 underlying argument.
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.
I do understand that argument but 1) doesn't seem to be stopping it now 2) that falls under the "we can argue what to do with the parents".
Let's argue about what to do with the parents but not let kids suffer
It should cover everyone.
No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented.
Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you.
This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's another issue, but when they get sick they more than deserve treatment.
And finally, the vast majority of illnesses can be treated cheaply if irregularly do your checkups. It can cost society $200 today for a doctor visit , or 30k for an ER stay in 3 years.
That said, I think this should be handled on a state by state basis. If the people of Alabama don't believe in single-payer healthcare, or they want to forbid using single pair healthcare for contraceptive or something, that shouldn't stop a progressive state from implementing it.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.
And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.
The type of doctors who accept Medicare or a possible single payer system are not giving out precautionary excessive mris.
Such a tiny percentage of people actually want to do stuff like that.
Even without factoring in cost, most people shrug it off until it’s bad.
Practically every other country has figured this out, it’s not impossible
This is a common misconception. For asymptomatic adults there is no proven benefit to regular "checkups".
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.36756
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
Expanding to undocumented providers is probably ripe for abuse. Although perhaps abusable either way.
What stops someone from saying “I’m an undocumented provider with 500 kids. Pay me 500 x AMOUNT”.
Public schools have residence and identity requirements. What’s an undocumented childcare provider going to have?
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think the national politics would support that at the moment. I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds... but they might against 18 or 19 year olds. It's a foot in the door persuasion tactic rather than try to get everything all at once.
> I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds...
Not sure what gives you this idea. The major political party in power in the US today campaigned in large part on cruelty and removing subsidies and social benefits from people. There are a huge number of people who would bitterly fight against providing health care to children. It's the same mentality that bitterly fights against free school lunch for children.
I’m not cruel because I think society operates best — in terms of human outcomes — if incentives and disincentives are tied to decisions in ways that maximize the likelihood and benefit of personal responsibility.
Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
>I’m not cruel because I think society operates best — in terms of human outcomes — if incentives and disincentives are tied to decisions in ways that maximize the likelihood and benefit of personal responsibility.
And how did personal responsibility make housing unaffordable?
>Parents need to be responsible for their children. The state should only step in if they fail in their responsibility.
How neat and tidy.
>How is it folks like yourself can understand these concepts across a myriad of domains, including things like wildlife and their rehabilitation, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency, but not this?
What are you talking about? Everyone who's poor and powerless should be helped. More importantly, though, they shouldn't be taken advantage of by wealthy interests. That includes animals, that includes expectant mothers who don't make enough money to survive because the "money to survive" dial was cranked up to 100 in the last five years. But please, lecture us some more about how that's HER fault.
>It’s not kindness to create people dependent on the state, or to advantage businesses that do not pay a living wage by subsidizing their employees.
It's also not kindness to raise their rent for no other reason than you can.
>Hell, look at what we’ve done to the cost of education by creating government-backed loan programs that simply allow universities to charge as much as students can afford to mortgage from their future.
And we could end it all tomorrow by saying "the US government must fund university education". You know, like they do in Europe, or like we did a few decades ago in the United States. You're pointing to a radically predatory policy decision, designed to benefit rich people, and saying: "See? Government doesn't work!" But that's "conservatism" for you: say government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.
I don't know if you truly believe that education costs would come down if we stopped shunting students into indentured servitude (guess which loans are the only ones that can't be discharged in bankruptcy? What a curious law of the universe that must be!), but if that's the case, then I have a fabulous bridge I'd be willing to part with for a modest price.
I will never stop fighting against people who wield the power of the state to punch down and then point the finger at those same people and blame them. It's disgusting, it's abhorrent, and it must stop.
> I will never stop fighting against people who wield the power of the state to punch down and then point the finger at those same people and blame them. It's disgusting, it's abhorrent, and it must stop.
I can see that. Your ideology creates the problems you think we just need more of your ideology to solve.
You’re not some warrior for freedom or the oppressed, you’re just another person that mistakes enabling for actual care, and thinks serving the interests of the powerful is revolutionary.
So sure, let’s build a system that forces everyone into the workforce, benefits employers who pay too little, and produces worse outcomes for children.
How revolutionary.
The party of “think of the children” couldn’t actually give two flying ducks about children, if it inconveniences them even slightly.
No, we just have a very different idea of how best to help people.
"Taking away every social safety net" is a curious way of doing it.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
Imagine it doesn’t go away on its own, it’s something serious and you caught it early.
For working class people , the skin in the game is having to miss a day of work, etc. Theirs still an opportunity cost
Their health would improve?
Be aware that Medicare is a long way from free. At least if you've had a well-paying job in the past few years, Medicare premiums are pretty similar to exchange costs (or COBRA).
Everyone knows Medicare isn't "free".
Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.
So if we're doing anecdotes...
One of our parents pays about $20k/yr all in for ACA - $12k/yr of premiums and $8k/yr on top of that (all unsubsidized)
Her (also unsubsidized) Medicare would be $6.5k/yr partA premium + $1.6k partA deductible+ $2.3k partB + $1k partD + $5k medigap, or about $16.5k total. She has no work credits for Medicare subsidy.
If you have subsidy from free partA premiums, then Medicare is about twice as cheap as unsubsidized ACA, yes. If you don't have subsidy for either, it's a little cheaper, but not by a ton.
So if you just stuck kids on existing Medicare pricing with no work credit for partA, then it would not be substantially cheaper than unsubsized ACA.
>Everyone knows Medicare isn't "free".
No they don't. A lot of the "Medicare for All" crowd assumes that "medicare for all"/universal healthcare is free or at least very low cost rather than something that's in the ballpark of unsubsidized individual/family healthcare plans which is the reality at least within a few years of leaving the professional workforce.
Health insurance isn't free either and it's way more expensive than Medicare. We're all also already paying for Medicare...
GP is pointing out that Medicare costs for the individual are about the same as ACA or cobra. It's not cheaper, unless you have the work credits to cut down on part A premiums.
So Medicare as-is for kids wouldn't be significantly cheaper than ACA for kids.
To make it cheaper, you'd need to either substantially increase the subsidy on Medicare, or decrease US medical costs (administration costs, drug costs, doctor salaries, etc)
Commercial health insurance is more expensive than Medicare because original Medicare Part A/B doesn't cover prescription drugs, and because commercial plans effectively provide a hidden cross subsidy to Medicare. Under a "Medicare for All" scheme, people would still need to purchase prescription drug coverage (Part D). And because Medicare reimburses providers at very low rates (often below their costs) they have to make up the difference by charging commercial health plans more.
Most children don't have enough credits to qualify for Medicare.
OTOH, very few children have enough individual income to be disqualified from Medicaid, but it's based on household income.
My handwavey plan for universal federalized healthcare includes using the child's income as a qualifier for Medicaid, phased in so the system will hopefully adjust over time rather than get overloaded to collapse. Also reduce the Medicare eligibility age over time. A solution that takes decades to roll out leaves a lot of unsolved problems, but adding a large number of people to an existing program in one fell swoop feels like it's going to be a negative too.
I believe children do get healthcare, coverage, insurance or not in the US. The family might take on crushing debt that will never be paid off but the child will be treated. At least, this is my understanding - please correct me if I am wrong.
It’s wrong.
Medicaid does cover children
And in many states there are also CHIP plans for children who don't qualify for Medicaid.
https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/childrens-health-in...
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
Land price will adjust accordingly in response to any positive economic news. If you want an unalloy good to come out of these programs, tax lands.
Otherwise, any welfare program will just get some of its value captured by landlords.
Land value tax won't help unless you greatly reduce the zoning and regulation over what can be built on the land.
Putting the land to its most efficient use isn't possible if all you're allowed to build is a two-story detached single family house.
You don't reduce the regulation, you increase it's flexibility. Such as allowing dynamic zoning where an area that is zoned as medium density residential automatically becomes hybrid high density residential/low commercial once the districts zoned around it as low density residential are filled.
The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.
Georgism is the way to prosperity.
Our property taxes are already crazy high and continue to go up every year. How does this help?
Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.
I'm not sure why people don't immediately get serfdom vibes whenever they mention a land tax.
It’s the same reason people don’t get serfdom vibes when a government proposes to take over childcare.
Governments buying goods for people with tax money turns them into dependents, sometimes permanently. It’s easy to overlook that.
Probably because most of us are already unlanded serfs, except we also get vibes now. Yay, 1000 years of progress!
Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best. I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.
In Quebec it was a 20% jump in mother employment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...
And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...
Exactly. Now landlords will charge more. The owner of assets get all the money.
By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.
> By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords.
That seems pretty reasonable to me actually? When housing is so supply-constrained, any subsidies/incentives/bonuses/etc. will be captured by the owner of the scarcest asset (real estate). Building more housing at this point seems like it should be a P0 priority before anything else.
It will be very interesting to see how this experiment pans out. I just don't see how the economics of it can work out knowing how much some of my friends pay for childcare while they're at work.
I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too high; one accident can result in a major lawsuit to the company, and (2) the cost of the distractions; parents will never get any work done if their kid close by.
I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
Offering free childcare would be far more expensive than offering subsidized cafeterias, meditation rooms, and a gym.
Because it’s too expensive. Most people want wages.
People who have no children in particular would prefer to be paid wages versus other people getting childcare and them getting less wages.
Companies don’t want employees whose time is split between childcare and work. This is why egg freezing is a common perk but childcare is not.
Pretty dystopian to have your employer raise your children for you IMO.
It's a shame that there's not the option of providing parents with the choice of free child care or some kind of cash subsidy.
A bit tangential, but the overall problem is that cost of having children is privatized while the benefit is socialized. I'd love to see age and number of children progressively factored into the income tax bracket people pay. Something like a 60-80% tax rate for all income >150k for those >40 without children so those that benefit the most from future generations being born are helping to shoulder the cost
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
We would be even better off subsidizing parents staying home with their own children. Unfortunately most subsidies have proven ineffective at nudging up birth rates.
In an emotional development sort of way: maybe. Subsidized childcare however provides two jobs to the economy for the price of one and every single person worried about birth rates is either a white supremacist or the sort of emotionless economist that 2:1 is appealing to.
Why would that be better? I think you'd miss out on economies of scale and end up paying more.
Those subsidies tend to be €X00 per month. I am not aware of any scheme that even attempted to replace 80% of forfeited wages. A subsidy that ends up with you having to move impoverish yourself is not going to have the desired effect.
No, we wouldn’t. This subsidy directly benefits the survival rate of children while universal basic income is too broad. healthcare is more affordable than UBI.
If eight billion people is not enough, do you have a higher number in mind? And if so, what is it?
The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse
There's potentially an argument for a ponzi scheme for one-ish more generation after which robots can do elder care and it's not necessary anymore.
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
Every modern economy, socialism included, requires a growing population.
You’re right about the main benefit of population decline though. It gives Nature a needed break
It does not, because productivity can increase. You have a very common misunderstanding
Doesn’t work if all of the productivity gains are captured by the wealthy owners of most of the capital though.
If more of society’s desires can be delivered with fewer people at lower cost, all of society benefits
Not necessarily. For example, if most of society's wealth is concentrated with a few people, and the rest can get crumbs from that table only by serving the wealthy, then a situation where something is delivered with fewer people at lower cost translates to more people starving because they are no longer economically useful.
Free, paid by whom?
Tariffs.
Unpopular opinion but leaving your kids with strangers not invested in their development during their most critical years is a terrible idea.
Perhaps if you take them to a dump. The wonderful people at my daughter’s day care are absolutely invested in their development and spend 6 uninterrupted hours per day with them focused exclusively on that. It’s stupid expensive though.
That depends on who you are as a parent though. It could be the strangers are lifeline and positive force on the child's development compared to what you are.
A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
Popular opinion but raising the price of everything just because you can so people can't even afford kids anymore and then blaming poor people for that is a terrible idea.
A few alternate, less paywalled, local articles on the same thing:
https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2025-10-13/childcare-univers...
> The state has spent years building early childhood funding — In 2020 it created a $10 billion trust fund using revenue from its booming oil and gas industry. Then, in 2022 voters approved drawing more from the Land Grant Permanent Fund.
https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/is-universal-childcare-sustai...
Socialism!
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If a tavern puts out a sign saying "free beer," nobody needs to point out that someone is paying for the beer. There's no confusion about this.
I know this sounds cold, but the people who most utilize "free" things are the absolute least likely to understand it's not free.
Most people think the state is a machine of infinite money, and the only thing preventing $1 million checks in the mail to everyone is corporate lobbyists protecting the elite.
It's a completely absurd claim that "most" people think the only reason the government isn't sending million dollar checks is hoarding.
The government spending too much and the debt being large is an extremely popular talking point, at least half of everyone would say "the federal government should spend less than they do" much less million dollar checks for every person.
I don't know if I have ever met someone in the ~40% of Americans who don't pay income tax, complaining that their government benefits are going too far.
The people who complain most about government spending are the people who pay a lot in taxes while only directly getting a fraction of it back in useful services. Taxes for roads and police? No Problem. Taxes for rent subsidies? Icy.
I think there is a lot of confusion about it. You overestimate people. :P I wish it was a case of me underestimating people, but after the things I saw...
You are overestimating people. I've met several people with higher education who don't understand that trade-off. They see the world as a fight between good guys who want to give the society free stuff and the bad guys that want to make money out of it.
A tavern isn't funded by taxes. They're giving away their own money. A government doesn't have its own money, it is giving away tax payer money.
It's less so the taverns own money and more so that the food, wine, bar (or future visits) subsidize the beer, ie the food is taxed so that the beer is free.
Same with credit card rewards, they're not paid for by the bar, they're paid for by volume at the bar, debit/cash transactions, and the savings on cash controls, and the people that can't payoff their credit card bill.
An economy is not a zero sum game.
Yes, people should be reminded that they've already been paying the government without receiving this service for years.
Free at the point of use is how it's usually expressed.
Sure, but that hides most of the facts about how it works. There are a lot of parties involved in this, including people paying for it and being paid for it, and those paying probably out number those getting it for free at point of use. Sweeping that under the rug is just a sales ploy, which shows what the outlet wants you to believe about this program.
I wouldn't call using the most commonly accepted (and concise) terminology a "sales ploy". If you want every service to be accompanied by a wordy explanation of how it works, then every article would need to mention that the current status quo involves complicated taxpayer subsidy in the form of dependent care FSA accounts and a host of state-level programs.
What else could it mean for a state-provided service to be "free"?
Might as well complain about how we get free roads and fire services.
No one has accused roads and fire services of being free.
This is a good example, because a "freeway" is free at point of use, but obviously understood to not be free of construction and maintenance cost. It is called "freeway" because "free-to-drive-on highway" would be too wordy.
> It is called "freeway" because "free-to-drive-on highway" would be too wordy.
This is wrong. "Freeway" comes from free flow of traffic:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/freeway.cfm
That taxpayers pay for government programs isn't the big revelation you seem to believe it is.
Yes, it actually is, to many people.
Poll a random subset of people with the question "are you in favor of free childcare?". X% will say yes.
Poll another set with the question "are you in favor of taxpayer funded childcare?". Y% will say yes.
I would bet any amount of money that X>Y, and (X-Y)% of people did not think about the fact that a free government service is not actually free.
Exactly how big X and Y are, I couldn't say. But identifying propaganda and deceptive language is never something that should be discouraged, even when it's advocating for a cause you agree with.
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We shouldn’t subsidize employers who fail to pay a living wage.
We also shouldn’t put our finger on the economic scale such that it’s impossible to afford having a family unless both parents work.
There’s no such thing as “free”, and every intervention like this has sweeping and widely unanticipated consequences.
Nevermind the question of whether it’s best for child development, for which we have plenty of evidence showing the answer is “no”.
Me? I'm not opposed to it. I think tax-payer funded attempts to increase birthrates in our own population are a good idea. We should be doing more to encourage people to have and raise children.
I'm opposed to weasel words and intentionally misleading people about how economies and governments work. I'm also not particularly confident encouraging people to have their children raised by strangers is a good idea.
If the tax payer was Apple, I wouldn't mind.
Well, crossing new mexico off my list of possible retirement states lol
There's objectively a lot of reasons to do that (New Mexico citizen here) but I'm surprised this is the one you chose.
Nothing is for free!
What if a federal law is passed to make this illegal?
We have this thing called “federalism” which prevents that hypothetical law from being constitutional. The federal government cannot tell states how to spend their own money.
Ignore the law and tie it up in court until regime change? Something is only real or of concern if there are consequences. Words and opinions without force backing them are just words and opinions.
The federal government is illegitimate. Its laws can be ignored without consequence.
What are you talking about?
You get what you pay for might be one argument against such a policy.
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, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.
The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.
Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.
People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
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.
I hope you were right, but I strongly suspect you are mistaken.
Most people fail to understand:
- Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income.
- The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported.
- The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.”
- The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)
What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.
What's your source for saying that most people fail to understand that social welfare programs come from taxes? The concept of where government money comes from is such an obvious fact, I don't understand how you can claim most people don't understand it. People go to work for a paycheck, they pay taxes, and they understand money doesn't grow on trees. This is adulting 101.
And no, "subsidized" means a portion of something is covered by someone else, but not necessarily all of it. E.g. a subsidized cafeteria at work may mean all the food is 50% of cost. Subsidized can mean fully subsidized, but that's a special case.
So subsidized is not more precise, it's actually much less precise. "Free" continues to be the accurate and correct term.
You're taking a right-wing political stance against current levels of social spending, which is your prerogative, but there's no need to change perfectly fine language to do so. Even if we called it the mouthful of "fully subsidized childchare", that's not going to make it any less popular.
What could possibly be my source for such a claim? Who is funding studies on this topic?
My source is my upbringing in Europe and my subsequent long-term residence in two other countries, which provided me with a unique perspective on people’s feelings and beliefs.
My source is my diverse life experiences, during which I actively engaged with people from all walks of life as much as I could. I am not making any claims about science or indulging in conspiracies. For such claims, I would require concrete evidence.
What I am saying is that a majority of the Europeans, particularly the youth, has become disconnected from the fundamental principle that to distribute wealth, you must generate it first.
I hope that helps.
You're seriously saying that the majority of Europeans don't understand that social services come from the taxes they pay?
That honestly sounds as plausible to me as saying the majority of Europeans thinkg 2+2=5.
Forgive me if I have a hard time believing you. Because I can definitely tell you Americans understand where their government spending comes from, and I have a hard time believing that Europeans are somehow less educated on this.
To be clear, I don’t believe it’s an “education” issue. I think it’s a “for too long removed from politics” problem.
For most Europeans, a tax is an unclear bill at the end of the month, leaving them feeling powerless to do anything about it.
One thing I learned from living in America is that people here are much more engaged in civic life and politics. The UK (which I also lived in) is perhaps the exception to this European rule.
You don't need to be involved in politics to understand that government spending comes from.
I'm American but have spent a lot of time in Europe and even got to live in France for a summer. I have seen nothing to indicate that Europeans are ignorant of where government spending comes from. They seem just as smart as anyone else.
And national elections in Europe also seem like large news events, even if the campaign season is (thankfully) a whole lot shorter.
Fussing with language to make rightwing political points (i.e. lying) is the bread and butter of rightwing ideology. You don't say "I don't think governments should spend any money on social services or helping their citizens", because that makes you sound like a terrible person. So you look down your nose and say "Well, it's not really FREE, akshually! I am very smart." And then you prance around tooting your dog whistle.
Ah, yes, thank you. I was trying to hide my right-wing tendencies. That’s what right-wing people do... they’re very shy!
I agree with the concept of not labeling things which are subsidized as "free", while still considering the price worth it. Similarly, I think the framing of negative rights vs entitlements makes sense, while still believing that certain entitlements are worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I have found that such framings are mostly associated with a set of beliefs which I feel profoundly at odds with (e.g. unlimited wealth inequality is fine). So I find myself aligned with the "health care is a human right" crowd despite my discomfort with the ideological underpinnings.
Right. I believe every socialist should feel offended by the term “free healthcare.”
Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
> Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
No... it's a statemet of fact that means when I leave the doctor's, I don't have to pull out my checkbook or credit card or wait for a bill to arrive.
But the doctor isn't working for free, the nurse isn't working for free, the receptionist isn't working for free, the machines in the office weren't free, the rent on the office isn't free. Yes, theres no bill that arrives that you pay for directly out of pocket, but the system very much isn’t actually free.
Who on earth thinks the doctor is working for free, or the nurse, or anyone else...?
This is the most strawman of strawmen I might ever have heard.
By your logic, the word "free" should be banished from the English language, because literally nothing could ever be free.
Except, for people who have common sense, "free" means you don't have to pay for the thing directly.
In this case, your taxes get aggregated with everyone else's and then some gets split up into health services. But since there's no direct connection between the two -- you don't get more healthcare if you pay more taxes individually, and you don't get to pay less taxes if you don't go to the doctor -- it's conceptualized as paying taxes on one end, and getting free health care on the other. This is just common sense. Everyone understands how this works. It's the same way we have free schools. Or you think schools aren't actually free either...?
This is where you’re being naive. I meant this in other parts of the thread: Americans are more connected to the outcome of taxes because the government doesn’t control every aspect of life.
For Europeans, while they understand the concept of taxes, the government’s vastness and involvement in everything make it a black box that they fund without having a say. They can just hope it’s being used effectively (although many believe it isn’t).
Most European elections revolve around sentimental signaling and rarely present concrete plans that explain practical solutions to problems.
Americans assume the rest of the world is on the same page, but that’s not the case IMO
I'm sorry, but you're the one who seems naive here. European governments "control every aspect of life"? What are you on about? Europe isn't Soviet communism, or a dictatorship under Mussolini.
You're taking a bizarrely extreme ideological position that does not match reality. Elections in countries like France and Germany are vibrant and heavily contested and citizens are greatly interested and involved.
Whether there's more sentimental signaling than you'd like, or too few concrete plans -- that's true across the world, and in the US.
But that has nothing to do with whether it makes sense to call government services provided at no direct cost "free".
You've made it clear you want to redefine language to suit your kind of right-wing ideology, where you seem shockingly judgmental and dismissive of your fellow citizens. No thanks.
They're not? If you're the type of person to pay taxes, that money gets used to pay the teachers. The pizza restaurant that offers free delivery - that's also not free. They use the money from the customer buying pizza to pay the delivery driver. If you're in a country that allows businesses to get away with that, that might explain your confusion, but not all countries, eg Germany, allow businesses to get away with false advertising like that.
I'm having a hard time taking this seriously.
Again, by your logic, nothing provided by someone else could ever be free. Right?
So then what exactly is the point of having the word?
So let's get rid of the word. Now, we need a word to mean things you don't pay for directly, since that's a very useful and practical concept when it comes to your personal budget. What do you think of the word... I'm just brainstorming here... "free"?
Am I missing something here?
The narratives on this topic are hard to pierce through. Economic literacy is low among the public. Politicians take advantage of this to pretend that solving everything is as simple as taxing the people you don’t like (billionaires, corporations, or even completely incorrect narratives about how we’ll use tariffs to make other countries pay us, which we all know is false). These groups are all represented as infinite money wells that just need to be tapped by electing the right person.
This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.
Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.
However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
Looking at USA right now, I just do not see how is that superior.
I’m not sure. If we compare the US to Europe (and I say this with a heavy heart), I wouldn’t be confident that the EU has a positive balance. There hasn’t been any growth in the EU in the last 25 years.
What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?
Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?
When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.
You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.
You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.
Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
It works handsomely for the 1%. The rest, well, ...
You shouldn’t be downvoted, kind of a lame part of HN lately.
I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.
As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.
It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.
Because of the incessant focus on billionaires/1%/.1% people are totally unaware that most wealth is tied up in the 70-95% group.
Any kind of "funded by the rich" program will mostly come from that group. That's why it's hard to pass these thing.
by all means, it is a positive redistribution from the "70-95%"...
Which means even more wealth concentration in the 1% and 0.1%.
Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)
Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.
However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
If it’s free then you’re the product …
That's a interesting way to say creating a healthy contributing member of society that leads to future gdp.
How would this apply to, say, public libraries?
Yes, in the case of a business giving out free services or things. But, government is not and has never been a business so this doesn't apply in this case.
That's true of private enterprise that has a profit motive. The "product" here is healthy well-adjusted citizens that can one day be workers. The public sector is not the same.
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.
This but unironically
Really? You're the product of, say, your local fire department?
Your house not spreading fire to the neighboring houses or forest is most of the actual dollar value in a fire department, from a fire perspective.
Saving people and a local healthcare force are fringe benefits, accounting wise.
Local fire department isn't free