I fail to understand what value your initial comment holds. The grandparents of that comment was talking about financial feasibility of the program in the context of a proposed waiver. This necessarily implies that on-topic responses to that should be weighing financial feasibility of the program with and without the waiver. Your most recent comment seems to just be clarifying that your initial comment is just the same generalized explanation for the current expansion - expanding the benefit to the currently working higher earning parents where the return is unclear and logically dubious, thus providing some much lower percentage of X while X is much larger. The only way to claim what your comment is trying to is to also display some evidence that this current expansion will provide economic activity benefit beyond the previous program that had 4x poverty level means testing. Otherwise, it's simply "some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger" vs the same thing with X being even larger.

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ch4s3 2 days ago | parent [-]

The idea of extending the program to pay people who aren't using the benefit directly sounds nice in theory but would cost way more and incentivizes people to not work. This necessarily makes the broader version of the program even more expensive than it appears at first. A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care. This offsets the cost a little. Giving essentially cash payments to people who stay at home has no such offset. So it is much more expensive and disincentivizes people working which might slightly offset the cost.

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

There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.

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giantg2 2 days ago | parent [-]

"A working parent using a daycare voucher necessarily pays taxes back into the system and so does the day care."

This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending.

"and incentivizes people to not work"

This would only incentivize low income individuals to not work, which could actually be beneficial as it could drive a living wage increase in that labor segment if employers had to compete against the benefit.

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>This assumes the value of the parent working is greater than the value generated by the alternative consumer spending. I don't think the benefit is even contingent on the parent working, and it definitely isn't contingent on the value of their current and discounted future earnings appreciation being greater than the cost of sending the kids to daycare. From what I can tell you can put the kid in daycare then lay on a beach if there is anything of that sort in the New Mexican desert. I'm open to the argument that by certain measures "free" childcare leads to increased economic output, but they've certainly not crafted the program in a way I would expect someone with that aim to do it.