> So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?

I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.

The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent

You may be surprised to learn that Quebec is not in America.

Even if you assume the statistics for hyperactivity are correct, how did the researchers decide which statistics were relevant?

In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.

For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:

"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality

"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).

There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."

The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:

"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."

I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.

Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.

It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.

Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.

Wait a minute… that sounds like…

I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.

If the tax man can't see it, it doesn't exist.

.

Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.

Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.

The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".

Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.

I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.

Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.

I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.

They would need to be building tanks and airplanes.

I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.

Obamacare is threatening to capsize the country with its cost.

America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.

US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...

Reality doesn't match your claim, for example when one looks at European countries who have all of that.

Why is "the economy" our highest priority here?

Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.

And yet every single socialist, European country is behind the US in terms of their economic output.

Totally agree.

However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.

Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.

In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?

Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.

This comment is sort of weird. Like you’re finding technically true rebuttals that don’t really refute the high level point.

I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.

> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent

It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.

The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.

When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.

Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?

> 1% of the recipients are fraudulent

Google sez:

"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."

Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).

Turns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors.

Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.

Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.

It turns out that the promise to hurt other people more is a winning strategy.

We developed vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. If that’s “feeble” then I guess I’ll take it every time.

We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.

Outside the home childcare is not 24/7. It's for a portion of the day. Also, it's really weird to be making this argument for mothers and not fathers.

Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.

It may be suboptimal, but what isn't? The problem here is assuming that the expensive bureaucratic credential based system is optimal or even better at all. "Everybody knows $SOME_NEIGHBOR and she's great with kids" is just a much better indicator of quality in child care than "$SOME_DAYCARE is licensed by $SOME_BUREAUCRACY."

Also, I'm not even against state support for parents needing childcare, but giving $500 a month to each parent who needs it to find childcare in an informal system will actually be much better than a state run system that spends $2000 per kid.

We are only handing them off to complete strangers because the informal system has been driven underground by laws that only allow the state licensed bureaucratic monopoly. If state licensing was optional and people were allowed to run neighborhood businesses I bet you would see something very different.

“Recently” seems to mean something different in your comment than the one you replied to. As in at least an order of magnitude difference, maybe two.

Terrible analogy.

btw analogy is not a good way to win arguments.

I didn't say anything about school. This article is about childcare for children below school age. But basic education is also actually quite cheap and easy to provide. Abraham Lincoln was educated in a one room school house. We have made it expensive by turning it into a bureaucratic nightmare with administrators, school boards, lawyers, and PTAs, when all you really need is a few good teachers who are given the authority to set and enforce high standards.

https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death..., and wikipedia on Math Wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_wars

Personally, I find Boaler's advocacy extreme. Her famous quote: "Every student is capable of understanding every theorem in mathematics – and beyond – the mathematics curriculum. They just need the opportunity to struggle with rich tasks and see mathematics as a conceptual, creative subject.” This sounds inspiring, but in practice she advocated the policy of truly dumbing down math curriculums and text books. To say the least, shouldn't she at least demonstrate that she could understand any theorem? But instead, she advocated that SFUSD eliminate algebra from 8th Grade . Another example was that the curriculum that she advocated, College Preparatory Mathematics, was so boring and trivial. She also said something along the line "Traditional mathematics teaching is repetitive and uninspiring. We give students 30 similar problems to do over and over again, and it bores them and turns them off math for life.” What's funny is that the alternatives that Boaler prescribed were quite uninspiring and low level: https://www.youcubed.org/tasks/. All I can derive from her policies and complaints is that she couldn't do math. Why people would listen to someone who sucked at math about math education is beyond me.

… behind in childhood nutrition? Between the WIC program, snap, and school meals there is plenty of resources.

It’s true that it’s means tested, but I’m not entirely sure we need to be providing free meals for rich people.

How do you feel about open borders then?

If someone has the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty do they still need free childcare then?

The type of doctors who accept Medicare or a possible single payer system are not giving out precautionary excessive mris.

Such a tiny percentage of people actually want to do stuff like that.

Even without factoring in cost, most people shrug it off until it’s bad.

Practically every other country has figured this out, it’s not impossible

> I think we have to start somewhere that isn't controversial like extending coverage to kids. I don't think anyone is going to be against covering 8 and 9 year olds...

Not sure what gives you this idea. The major political party in power in the US today campaigned in large part on cruelty and removing subsidies and social benefits from people. There are a huge number of people who would bitterly fight against providing health care to children. It's the same mentality that bitterly fights against free school lunch for children.

Their health would improve?

Imagine it doesn’t go away on its own, it’s something serious and you caught it early.

For working class people , the skin in the game is having to miss a day of work, etc. Theirs still an opportunity cost

I think a solution to fix this moral hazard is to take children away from their parents when the subsidies become too much. But for lots of reasons, society really doesn't want that to happen.

I do understand that argument but 1) doesn't seem to be stopping it now 2) that falls under the "we can argue what to do with the parents".

Let's argue about what to do with the parents but not let kids suffer

So if we're doing anecdotes...

One of our parents pays about $20k/yr all in for ACA - $12k/yr of premiums and $8k/yr on top of that (all unsubsidized)

Her (also unsubsidized) Medicare would be $6.5k/yr partA premium + $1.6k partA deductible+ $2.3k partB + $1k partD + $5k medigap, or about $16.5k total. She has no work credits for Medicare subsidy.

If you have subsidy from free partA premiums, then Medicare is about twice as cheap as unsubsidized ACA, yes. If you don't have subsidy for either, it's a little cheaper, but not by a ton.

So if you just stuck kids on existing Medicare pricing with no work credit for partA, then it would not be substantially cheaper than unsubsized ACA.

GP is pointing out that Medicare costs for the individual are about the same as ACA or cobra. It's not cheaper, unless you have the work credits to cut down on part A premiums.

So Medicare as-is for kids wouldn't be significantly cheaper than ACA for kids.

To make it cheaper, you'd need to either substantially increase the subsidy on Medicare, or decrease US medical costs (administration costs, drug costs, doctor salaries, etc)

Commercial health insurance is more expensive than Medicare because original Medicare Part A/B doesn't cover prescription drugs, and because commercial plans effectively provide a hidden cross subsidy to Medicare. Under a "Medicare for All" scheme, people would still need to purchase prescription drug coverage (Part D). And because Medicare reimburses providers at very low rates (often below their costs) they have to make up the difference by charging commercial health plans more.

You don't reduce the regulation, you increase it's flexibility. Such as allowing dynamic zoning where an area that is zoned as medium density residential automatically becomes hybrid high density residential/low commercial once the districts zoned around it as low density residential are filled.

The issue is we zone something and it stays that way until it's manually reviewed and rezoned. The district has no ability to change itself according to the circumstances. It has to rely on a third party that acts without due haste and with great reluctance.

Georgism is the way to prosperity.

I'm not sure why people don't immediately get serfdom vibes whenever they mention a land tax.

It does not, because productivity can increase. You have a very common misunderstanding

It's a completely absurd claim that "most" people think the only reason the government isn't sending million dollar checks is hoarding.

The government spending too much and the debt being large is an extremely popular talking point, at least half of everyone would say "the federal government should spend less than they do" much less million dollar checks for every person.

It's less so the taverns own money and more so that the food, wine, bar (or future visits) subsidize the beer, ie the food is taxed so that the beer is free.

Same with credit card rewards, they're not paid for by the bar, they're paid for by volume at the bar, debit/cash transactions, and the savings on cash controls, and the people that can't payoff their credit card bill.

An economy is not a zero sum game.

I wouldn't call using the most commonly accepted (and concise) terminology a "sales ploy". If you want every service to be accompanied by a wordy explanation of how it works, then every article would need to mention that the current status quo involves complicated taxpayer subsidy in the form of dependent care FSA accounts and a host of state-level programs.

What else could it mean for a state-provided service to be "free"?

Might as well complain about how we get free roads and fire services.

That taxpayers pay for government programs isn't the big revelation you seem to believe it is.

I hope you were right, but I strongly suspect you are mistaken.

Most people fail to understand: - Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income. - The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported. - The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.” - The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)

What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.

Because of the incessant focus on billionaires/1%/.1% people are totally unaware that most wealth is tied up in the 70-95% group.

Any kind of "funded by the rich" program will mostly come from that group. That's why it's hard to pass these thing.