Apparently until now they've been providing this only to families below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. FPL is $32,150 for a 4-person family, so $128,600 combined family income (2 people working for $64,300 each -- and that's before fed and state taxes are deducted). Since that is far from being wealthy enough to "just" spring for expensive care, I'm glad to see this.

My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.

Not sure where in California you are, but the SF Bay Area’s economy is heavily distorted by intentionally bad roads and artificial housing shortages.

Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.

That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.

For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.

Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.

On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)

Providing such benefits to those below poverty level doesn’t make sense to me. People are that level of economic value need to improve their situation before taking on the burden of children. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the poorest to have large families they can’t take care of. The opposite should be happening - we should subsidize households with demonstrated capability to be successful (which in our society does mean economically) to have more children.