There's two things I think you've overlooked. One thing is that politically it's easier for benefits to remain sticky if everyone benefits from it vs a subpopulation. That's why universal income has stronger support than welfare benefits. Additionally, when you don't have means testing, the bureaucracy is a lot more straightforward and politicians can't mess with it by effectively cutting the program by increasing the administrative burden.

> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.

This is the second piece. What about people who are on the margin who aren't wealthy enough to do this and the subsidy would hep them achieve this? The subsidy could help the mom stay home and maybe do part-time work from home even. The thing that's easiest to miss when you're well on one side of a boundary is only looking at the other side of the boundary instead of also looking at where that boundary is drawn.

I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.

+1 This whole mentality of voucher system is selfish.

Even if we consider it as an "efficiency" problem, it is far cheaper for a person to be paid to take care of N children (where N is not too large), rather than have the have the mom, who is probably qualified in some other field, take care of just their children.

Good government policies generally avoid step functions otherwise you get perverse incentives.

For example, if you lose too many benefits when you get a job, it can easily make getting a job yield negative expected value, this is bad because often it stunts future career potential.

There may be families that cannot quite afford to be a stay-at-home mom even though they want to. Providing the waiver also increases the overall fairness. In rural areas there are generally far fewer childcare options, so this becomes a benefit that accrues to those that live in cities. Not very fair.

Isn’t the idea that many families want to have a stay at home mom, but can’t afford to and are forced to work.

Therefore a waiver would help with this?

In most of those other households, it's highly probable that they wish they could have a stay-at-home-parent but can't afford it. A small payment can help nudge people over the line where it suddenly becomes financially viable. A voucher type solution would also work great for families that would also prefer to e.g. hire a private nanny instead of sending their child to daycare.

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

> We are lucky that we can afford to do this.

> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it?

This is rather noble of you, but the reason is obvious. If the playing field were "levelled" then you wouldn't have to be lucky. It is all well and good that you are lucky, but there is a certain population who want to emulate your choice but are unable to, because they are missing precisely the marginal amount that the childcare provision costs. It is a political choice to say that those people should not be able to pursue home-care of the children in order that we can avoid giving out a rebate.

Right. I agree, but I think you are appealing to generosity when it works just as well if you appeal to greed and selfishness.

If I'm a parent who does not intend to take advantage of the program and therefore not to get any benefit directly, and I assume the program is done well and not rushed, I could reasonably expect:

- More parents able to be in the work force (immediately) - Better metrics for the young children entering. Especially for at risk. - Savings from less crime in the future. - Higher attainment of students when they enter the work force later. - Higher birth rate??? (probably not but this one is interesting regardless)

My understanding so far is that this leads to spending savings in addition to QOL of life improvements. And that's just for me. I want to live with less crime and less tax liability.

Asking for additional waivers imo just increases the cost in areas that will not as directly achieve the benefits of the program as stated. The only reason to ask for it is as a negotiation tactic.

I think the most important thing is to focus on the quality of the program and make sure the resources are there. And to make sure opportunities persist to prevent "fade out". I think that might have been the difference between Oklahoma's success in pre-k vs a program in Tennessee.

Why wouldn't you want your friends to better be able to afford what you have, by getting an equal value stipend to stay at home if you're for universal childcare? There are many families that might be only one or two tuitions away from being able to stay at home with their child like they had wished, and assigning the waiver/voucher to the child instead of to the daycare can make that happen.

And no it's not a free lunch. If stay-at-home in a family isn't reimbursed, they are actually worse off, because now they have an additional tax they are paying that they did not have before. So now even more people like you who wanted a parent to stay at home are driven out of it because their family budget comes upon this tax.

> I just don't understand this mentality.

It is bad faith reasoning. If you imagine a person that does not want women to participate in the workforce but wants to express that in a way that doesn’t sound repugnant, it is pretty easy to see how someone would come up with that.

The way you can tell that it’s bad faith is by looking at the context that “pay women to stay out of the workforce” gets brought up. In this case it is framed as an alternative to providing childcare, but those two ideas have nothing to do with each other. As a society we could do both. The “pay women to stay out of the workforce” or “pay for childcare” dichotomy is completely made up, and folks that engage in that particular type of make-believe are either profoundly intellectually lazy or being intentionally disingenuous.

because your wife (and in turn your household yes) deserves to be compensated for the socially valuable labour first of all?

> It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it

It affects you like if your neighbor got a $5000 tax credit and you didn’t.

It’s community money paying for it so it impacts you because it is your tax dollars being spent.

Of course it affects your situation. It’s paid for from taxes so it takes away from other things you as a taxpayer could have, right? But also if the goal is to incentivize raising children, someone who wants to raise their child in a family centric way rather than outsourcing it should have help too right?

But leaving those arguments aside, I also think that only subsidizing daycare is too one size fits all, just like with public schools. If people want to raise their kids differently, they should be able to get assistance. Like if I want to not have a single daycare provider but want to instead take my kids to a few different activities during the day (like to a museum and then a swim class and then baseball or whatever), why shouldn’t tax funds be made available to offset the costs of those things?

> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives.

But this is true in the other direction, too. Means testing costs money, time, and ensures some needy folks fall off the program.

For example, Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/no-savings-found-in-fl...

> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.

And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.

It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.

In Poland, they have a "universal child benefit" that pays a stipend for every child you have.

They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.

From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.

So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.

> The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay ...

By your own argument, this policy dilutes the value New Mexico / Feds were prior giving to the poorer parents who met the means testing New Mexico used before, then, no? Because this isn't the beginning of "free" childcare in NM, they are just expanding it beyond the prior poverty-line times 'X" means testing.

Ergo per your logic "real outcome would be reduced benefits" to the poorer parents who already had subsidized childcare.

Edit: accidently switched "childcare" to "healthcare" a few times, flipped back

"But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care."

And that's the argument against many of these policies - removal of the needs based testing. Odd to see you defend the policy on the very basis others attack it on.

I would very much be considered someone who doesn’t “need” the funding, but when deciding between having a 3rd child or just sticking with 2, I wasn’t comfortable enough to afford 3 in daycare and helping 3 through college. However, I expect my offspring to be significantly greater economic contributors to society than the average. It would have made sense for society to fund my childcare to incentivize me to populate the earth.

>Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.

They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?

"it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care". Looking at data like 77% of US workers would face financial difficulty if a paycheck was delayed by just one week. I would imaging % of people with kids who don’t need it for child care is fairly tiny.

> But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.

This exists. It’s called the Child Tax Credit.

If the children have any parent that is working, whether it is one or two, by definition they need more money.

The real reason this is “bad” is because the policy actually being implemented is, as the GP comment demonstrates, to get women into the workforce. This requires the goal to be getting them out of the home away from their children. Thus, you must relatively penalize mothers who stay home and care for their children, which is what this policy does. Of course, it is worse for children, worse for families, worse for mothers, worse for just about everything except “business.”

Edit to add: It is only better for the business and the economy short term, because ultimately it results in a lower birth rate and below replacement level fertility is the main problem we currently have for the near-future economy

Literally what Canada did under Harper, and then grew substantially larger under Trudeau.

End result is that Canada's child poverty rate was cut in half over the aughts.

https://x.com/trevortombe/status/1100416615202533377

And yes, it hit the same political hurdles you'd expect. A Liberal-party aide helped lose the 2006 selection by saying parents would burn it on "beer and popcorn". He's still around as a consultant and professional trash-talking commentator. This is ironic considering how the party championed it's success after they (rightly) expanded the program.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/liberal-apologizes-for-saying...

I guess Youre not a fan of UBI?

In the book 'Double Entry' the author explains that the guy who created GDP was actually in favor of having family caregiving and household activities accounted for in GDP. If that had happened, different world

More realistically here, there’s a limit to the funding any individual state can come up with to fund benefits. Tradeoffs have to be considered and increased workforce participation increases the tax receipts that fund these programs. It’s not much more complicated than that.

> There are many things that may be better overall, but because they're not financialized, they don't show up on GDP and so are deemed "worthless."

I think you're confusing GDP with a measure of worth or quality. It is not. Just because you can earn money doing double-shifts in a coal mine that doesn't make it better than spending the same time at a beach doing nothing.

and these $12-24k are net dollars so the parents needs more like $20-40k of gross income to pay for it, but now they can have a small job or small business that nets them even as low as $15k and still come out ahead

You don't subsidize the rich, yet you subsidize rich child care corporations (or high-level bureaucrats in the event it is public) at the expense of not subsidizing stay at home moms.

You don't want people paid for taking care of their children, but it's OK if other people are paid for taking care of their chidlren.

None of this makes sense. Especially not this false dichotomy that either you send your kids to daycare or they don't learn to interact with others early.

One of the reasons to care for your own kids is you can give them individual attention. Unless you have so many kids that you are only caring for your own anyway your plan diverts their attention away to other kids (or those other kids get less attention)

I don't know if that's what they had in mind, but "stay at home mom" is probably not just men/women who solely watch their kid all day long. A full remote worker keeping their kid nearby would probably fit the same criteria, especially if the couple is both remote and they can split dealing with the chores.

> With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed.

And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy. A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work. Is this really what you want? If it is the poor your care about why not subsidies just them?

I agree with you except the part about the policy making a dent. Scandinavian countries have all sorts of "universal childcare" and benefits, and their TFR is still going straight into the shitter. All this talk about expanding the GDP and going towards total workforce participation IMO is why family formation is slowing to a crawl (I mean look at South Korea, where it's all about being a workaholic and they basically will cease to exist in maybe 50-100 years, literally). If we want to continue as a nation or entity of people, I believe the people and the government are going to need to put their thumb on the scale in a way more aggressive way, including both childcare credits for all, paying stay at home parents a salary, major cultural changes (including our own version of the Soviet Mother Heroine/Order of Parental Glory that carry real status with them, perhaps), and economic and cultural pushback on being a DINK or similar. We have no future the way we're going, and these sort of policy interventions have been tried elsewhere and they don't do shit. We really have got to rethink a lot of things, in a way that's probably painful or irritating to the readership here, otherwise we're basically done.

Weird to assume people who support an increased child credit aren't also against devoting resources to pointless wars.

Lots of two-parent working families do the maths, and realize they would pay more in childcare than the income from a second job. This incentivizes one of them to stay at home. Here, the incentive is gone. This is worse for the economy and probably the family.

> You can receive cash-for-care benefit for children between 13 and 19 months, starting the month the child turns 13 months, up until and including the month the child turns 19 months. You can receive cash-for-care benefits for a maximum of 7 months.

so, no, extremely limited compared to what's being discussed.

I wonder why they don’t have the same allergy to a voucher program that is prevalent in the US on the political left. For some reason, letting people exercise their agency and do things their own way is seen as a threat here.

Less efficient? No they aren’t strictly less efficient because they provide MUCH better quality of care.

However, they provide superior level of childcare.

The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).

From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?

Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.

I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?

If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.

What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.

In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.

I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...

Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.

Sigh. Nobody reasonable would think I was suggesting that a dictionary definition change would be helpful.

In the US the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and an amendment in 1940 established the minimum wage and the 40 hour work week by requiring overtime pay beyond 40 hours for non-exempt employees. [1] Many other countries have many similar things.

What I'm talking about is amending the FLSA down from 40 to 30 hours per week for mandatory overtime and reducing the scope of exemptions so that many more people in professional positions are covered by this or a similar set of requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19...

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

No I think there should be extreme limits on anybody owning a single family home that they don't live in. With enormous tax penalties for those who do.

Don't let people get 30 year mortgages. Don't let people own houses they don't live in.

Not if the tax rate is base_rate*phi^n where n is the ordinal number of property the person owns.

It sounds like she was a poor fit, or the child care center sucked.

Try to find one that has long average tenure (10+ years, if possible).

I feel like unionizing really hasn't done much for teachers. They're paid poorly, the conditions are still poor, they don't seem to get much help.

Yay teacher's union?

- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting - Taxes - Insurance - Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance - Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own. - Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)

Most likely profits of the daycare owners + pay for the magagement (the director or whatever) + rent for the location.

Babies, just like adults, are extremely social animals. And they absolutely need to interact with a bunch of other people their age, even more than us. Daily, and for a long period of time. An hour at the park doesn't cut it, and being all day with a sibling doesn't either.

So beyond everyone going back to a Neolithic way of life and living in a bunch of straw teepees all bundled close together, daycare is the best solution I've found to this need.

Just as an example, my oldest has been besties with another kid since they were both 7 months old.

I would expect larger groups of young children to require more even ratios of care takers. I don't know if 3 care takers per 12 children is enough for instance, but I've got a feeling 9 care takers for 36 children is not enough.

It turns out that kids raised by their parents still get a lot of time with other kids though. Their parents don’t just keep them at home. They meet with friends. Go out and play. Their parents take them to classes and activities. Your view is “our kids are fine”, but most parents may say that about their own kids without knowing what the alternative could be. I’ve experienced both situations myself and also observed it as an adult. I think most childcare is a lot more of a free for all than parents think, rather than some sort of well designed experience. If you reduce the ratios significantly by having two kids per worker, maybe the quality improves to approach what a parent can provide. But that’s a lot more expensive.

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

That would be a rarity.

This was surprising to me too. I think there was some guilt around having a child and not spending 100% of our time caring for them. The reality was that quality daycare teachers have a lot of experience and a support network that enables them to create a great environment for learning. Socializing with peers from a young age was a huge benefit. While I'm sure they'll catch up, when observing kids the same age who hadn't been to "school" yet, it was clear that these kids hadn't developed at the same rate. Even if I had all the resources in the world, I'd still send my kids to a good daycare vs trying to replicate these learning opportunities at home.

> The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.

People who stay at home and take care of their own kids aren’t skipping socialization. They still participate in various activities where there are other kids. But, the kids do get a lot higher quality care from stay at home parents than a daycare can afford. If you stay at the daycare and observe things, you’ll see how difficult it is for the workers to split attention.

Oh and you get a lot less illness if avoiding daycare. And that regained time, is development time and time to go do fun things.

Exactly this.

There are so many benefits to day care for the children. It’s hardly the prison camp people make it out to be.

I don’t know if these negative comments are because HN in general dislikes the wider educational system, or if it’s because they dislike governments handing out “charity” to help less affluent families. Maybe a touch of both? But daycare can actually be a really rewarding experience for children.

So much so, that I have parent friends who one of them is a stay-at-home parent and they still send their child to day care at least one day a week to help the child’s independence, social skills and comfort when away from home. And they’ve found their child has been better for the experience

Edit: and the fact that I’ve been downvoted within seconds of posting this shows how ridiculous people are on here when it comes this topic.

There is something sad about not spending as much time as you possibly can with your children in their younger years, though.

You can also take them to events at the public libraries and other places, at least in my area. They're often called "Library Story Times" and they're free where we live. That's what my spouse does. There's a very wide spectrum of social activities available even for kids of stay-at-home parents. She will often get together with other parents and let our son socialize with their children too.

With this option, they are now financially penalized for making that choice in order to subsidize those who don't. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Yea and I think that’s great. OP makes it sound like every parent is pining to contribute to the churning of capitalism if only they didn’t have to worry about raising a child. It’s not so.

They should give money that can be used on anything instead of specifically for healthcare. That way you can choose to take care of your kids yourself and put that money towards food than having to work and then outsource childcare.

I work part time nights/weekends so I can raise my child during the day. Which 50% does that put me in?

>50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.

That's not that revolutionary; it's kind of traditional.

I don't see any mention of free markets in your post. The healthcare industry is not a free market, they are handicapped by regulatiom and by law are required to provide health insurance to anyone that wants it and cannot reject anyone. Of course prices are going to be stiffling when they have to give you insurance no matter your pre-existing conditions and no matter the choices you make

> I just use my bike: why should I pay taxes for roads maintenance.

Most US states pay for a significant fraction of road maintenance from motor fuel taxes ("road tax"). You probably aren't paying those taxes if you're in the US and you don't buy motor fuel.

Increased EV adoption is likely going to change that regime.

You wouldn't have to if the government didn't own the roads. Plenty of examples of this, private companies creating their own roads and charging people a small fee to use them so they can maintain them.

Wouldn't be that hard give people a little device that tracks the roads they use and charges them $0.05 per mile that they drive and then have the company be a co-op that's owned by the people living in that town.

It has not at all. 20% of high school graduates are reading at a 5th grade level, which when you consider the billions of dollars poured into public schools every year is just asinine https://www.abtaba.com/blog/us-literacy-statistics

That's the thing. Nobody ever does the math on what these kind of programs cost society. The long term economic impacts that this will put on other families due to increased taxes, the businesses that might go under because they had to raise prices to cope with increased taxes, the business that never get created due to increased taxes, the other families that are now going to be struggling because they're a 1 income family and they now have to pay for everyone else's kids in addition to the care of their own children that they provide for and don't want to offloat to be taken care of by strangers, etc. etc.

It doesn't work that way. The US Welfare programs have created multi generational families that have never worked and do not have any parents or grandparents that have ever worked a real job because if anyone did they would risk losing $100k's worth of free benefits to work a minimum wage job that would only pay them $30k. It has created a permanant underclass of people with no job skills that are wholly dependant on the system for their survival.

This is just an extension of that.