It's not a crab bucket mentality. Subsidizing one group that competes in the same markets (e.g. only dual income families, who compete with single income families for housing in desirable areas to raise kids) actually increases costs for the unsubsidized group. It doesn't just make them relatively worse off, but absolutely worse off. It shifts the margin of who can afford a single family lifestyle, all else equal.

Since it's subsidizing specific behavior and not merely being poor or whatever, people will naturally look at whether they think that behavior ought to be incentivized, or whether the government should stay neutral.

My wife is also a stay at home mom, and I've argued before that an increase in the child tax credit with a phase out for high income (so we might not qualify) makes more sense than a childcare credit/deduction for this reason. Then you're just subsidizing having kids, which seems fine to me (assuming we're subsidizing anything) since that's sort of necessary to sustain society.

If the logic was applied even more generally, it would read: "If any Group X gets Benefit Y, then everyone must also get Benefit Y." Applied universally, it totally defeats the point of subsidies.

Childless people are free to start businesses to provide services that can take advantage of those rebates.

The argument you’re making in general is a valid one about subsidies, it’s a weird argument to make regarding children since having children is the only way society survives. Unless your claim is that we’re overpopulated but generally people in developed countries are not reproducing, and a meaningful part of that does appear to be the cost.

So the answer is that this specific subsidy is net beneficial as we want to make it easier for people to have and raise kids, not least of which because it produces better adults when those kids grow up and makes society healthier.

This is a great point, and the obvious answer is the government should provide zero subsidies or welfare programs. Every single program creates moral hazard and deadweight loss. Iterate your question to conclusion, and you will arrive there.

What the government should encourage is charitable donations, and when I say that, I mean the mere act of it. There should be no tax incentive for doing so.

Where children are concerned, if anything, perhaps make the sales tax on child-related services zero, and increase sales tax on luxury goods associated with sink or dink households. At least that methodology provides the opportunity to forgo the penalties.

In AZ we offer ESA to homeschoolers, vouchers to charter or private school kids, and then normal tuition free public schools.

That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.

I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.

If I as a taxpayer am going to subsidize someone else's activity, then why shouldn't I get a say in how they perform that activity?

If it costs $100/child at a daycare facility, but $200/child for someone to be a stay-at-home parent, and you're asking me, a random taxpayer, to pay for one of those for someone else, from a financial perspective I will likely prefer to pay for the former.

Now, I personally don't get to decide where tax dollars go, but I could easily imagine there are enough people with this preference that it could influence public policy.

Having said that, if it's actually significantly better for a child to have a SAH parent, I might change my tune. (My mother was a SAHM, and I think that was great for us growing up.)

> Why does providing assistance have to mean centralized control of what assistance looks like?

I generally agree with you, but often the reason that these programs work economically is that those who don't choose to use them still contribute. There are (at least) three different categories: (1) caregivers who will care for their child themselves regardless of whether or not free care is available elsewhere, (2) caregivers who will find care elsewhere regardless of the cost, and (3) caregivers who will make use of free care if available, or otherwise, care for their child themselves.

I think the group (1) has a tendency to be higher income. It's certainly not true of everyone in that group, but I would wager that a significant number of people in that group do not need the financial assistance. Those people not using the free resource, but still contributing to funding it is what makes it economically viable.

Vouchers are just a bribe to get people to actually vote for higher taxes that fund social services that they themselves aren't going to use or benefit from.

"Why should I pay for taxes that don't benefit me?" is an aggressively American view toward the social contract.

People who make money pay taxes, those pay for things, and citizens (not taxpayers) get to use those things if and when they need them.

> Parents are plenty qualified to take care of their kids.

Are they really though? I mean, I was raised by mine, and I've done well enough for myself, so that system can't be too bad, and most of the rest of humanity has also been raised by parents, for since... before there were humans. But if we look at this from first principles, it doesn't actually make sense. First, we let just about any random pairing of two humans, one of which has a uterus, can be a parent. Think of the most average person you know, then realize that half of everyone is dumber than them. Then put them with someone else that's just as dumb. Now give them a baby. And then add sleep deprivation on top of that. Seriously, it's a wonder that the human race has managed to survive this long.

Experience is another thing. Even the most talented brilliant person needs to practice to reach their full potential. Raising a child as a skill is no exception. So we're gonna have absolute amateurs each raise a child, and then, most likely, throw all that learning and experience they did away and not have 10 more. Practice makes perfect, so let's not do that.

What sort of training do we give parents before and during their parenthood? Before we send people off to do a job, non-stop for 18 years, how much training do we give them? Four dedicated years of college with plenty of lab and field work? Not in the slightest. Parents are expected to fund their own education for this job.

Finally, the incentive structure is misaligned. Children don't make any financial sense, since the passage of child labor laws. Don't get me wrong, those laws are a good thing! But from an economic intellectual standpoint, it doesn't make sense to fuck up your life like that. Birth rates in the developed world reflect this. It's obviously a problem though, because children are our future and without them, humanity dies out in a generation. So omg holy shit, have kids. Societally, we need them. Society's only allegiance is to it continuing, and it doesn't without kids. Unfortunately they can't show an ROI in a single quarter, so we'll have to figure out a better mechanism for it, but for something so important, our future, shouldn't we want our best and brightest people on the problem? Yet we don't spend rationally. In the US, the school shooting industry (what schools spend on security in response to school shootings) is a multi-billion dollar industry. That money would be better spent on counselors and on the teachers. But back to my point, we'd rather have unpaid amateurs raise children on their off hours, instead of hiring professionals to do it? And make them pay for it as well? Make that make sense!

The failure modes are known. Children get molested, abused, killed. Raised wrong. Those are corner cases, for sure, but I wouldn't argue that those parents are qualified to raise kids.

Still, that's how we've always done it, and holy shit kids are cute, and you love yours, so of course we think parents are qualified to take care of kids, but we don't actually do any qualification except in the worst cases that we know about. Everyone knows somebody that knows somebody that had a bad childhood and didn't get the government called on them though.

Children being raised by parents we assume are qualified is how we always done it, so the system works well enough, because humanity hasn't ended. But if you were designing a system, you wouldn't do it that way.

Fire protection is generally widely supported because almost everyone shares in the benefit, the protection is a benefit whether or not you need service.

The reason we have worse government services is because there's no attempt to make them fair, the benefits are almost always highly skewed along partisan lines and thus usually not passed.

This is more like saying you'll get a tax rebate if you move from your family home you built with your bare hands into a megacorp built condo complex of equal value and fire risk.

> My house has never been on fire, should I get a tax rebate for never needing service from the fire department?

If you live in a city, there's a good chance your house hasn't been on fire because of the work of the fire department.

Because the point of subsidising care is to remove cost barriers to parents getting back into work or dealing with other stuff or socialising kids in a day care environment, not to turn parenting into a profit centre

Because processing reimbursements and extra record keeping is exhausting and adds to the mental load for Moms. Keep it simple, safe, and reliable.

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

> I just don't understand this mentality.

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

Let's go with this (I pay a little more than $24k/yr/kid for care now).

Does the influx of gov mandated childcare centers reduce the annual expense for parents? If so, it does so at the cost to the current workers by reducing their salaries.

If not, now you've put every taxpayer on the hook for 24k+admin_expenses per child per year. That is an immediate blow to everyone except those benefiting more than their increased tax burden.

The benefit is lower wages for those competing against the new laborers and likely higher government tax inflows?

We shouldn't provide any welfare services. Then we will all be equal. For as much as you Elsa folks quible about people being against giveaways, what is so harmful about not giving thigs away involuntarily?

> And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted.

This seems like an unrelated consideration though. You may be significantly worse off. Maybe the government that provides this raises taxes considerably to make this work. Or maybe they take on crippling debt. Maybe their credit rating goes down.

It's very convenient that it is greed when the stay at home mom wants an equal voucher, but not greed when a mom joins a capitalist for-profit enterprise for whatever wage she can avail herself of with the childcare bill footed by everyone else. Which is precisely what we are discussing.

You have demonstrated the point of the policy.

What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.