I'm not sure I follow, but I'm open to being wrong. The point of this subsidy is not to encourage people to move from paid-childcare to stay-at-home. That's a totally separate economic decision. The point of it is to ease/eliminate the burden of those who require paid-childcare.

If we think there is a societal advantage to financially incentivize parents to stay-at-home with a subsidy, I'd be open to looking at the cost/benefit, but it's a different issue.

And I am not significantly worse off if my neighbor's childcare burden is lifted. Not every tax dollar I spend needs to come back to me in the form of a benefit.

> 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.