I just want to +1 this post before it gets flagged for being "political" or whatever.

I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.

We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.

If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).

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arduanika 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think that's an accurate recounting of the reasons for the American Revolution. That '/' is doing a lot of work, and "wealth inequality" was not a topical notion at the time.

That said, this is a fine thing for a state to experiment with. From other comments, it sounds like NM's ability to try this out is related to a recent oil and gas boom. We'll see how it goes.

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scarface_74 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.

Universal healthcare is similar. You want to support small businesses? Lack of affordable healthcare stops a lot of people from leaving corporate America to start their own business.

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Muromec 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.

That's what happens when party doesn't have an actual policy stance and min-maxes their pooling numbers based on target audience instead.

Another more cynical take is "childbirths" is just a code for racism and "pro-life" a code for religious types.

	▲	scarface_74 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not just pro-life - even though it might encourage more women to not have abortions - it’s also they want to stave off the country from becoming “majority minority” to “preserve their culture”. The minute they even think that minorities are help by pro child policies they will be back to the “welfare queen” dog whistles that Reagan did. But to be fair, a few of the religious non MAGA conservatives did understand that the best way to reduce abortions were to support new mothers and children. But now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, they don’t seem to care about it anymore.

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jimt1234 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What’s frustrating about this is that conservatives are always warning about the decreasing child birth rate. But fight against policies that would help support families who have children.

Didn't the Big Beautiful Bill include $5K for newborn babies? I thought I saw a headline that said that. But anyway, yeah, 5-grand is gonna solve everything. /s