US actually provided child care to mothers employed during WWII. [0]
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
For what its worth, the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children, citing a study from Quebec.
> The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.
Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.
> a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
It’s good that it’s a state policy, not a federal one. We need more policies to stay at the state level, regardless of the policy. Federalism is how we can test the effects of competing policies under the same house. If the policy is a problem for you, it’s a lot easier to vote with your feet and move to a different state than to move to a different country
I think it also gives it a better chance as an experiment. The federal government tends to pendulum swing between left and right on a fairly short cycle. Most states seem to be considerably more stable and less prone to trying to revert policies put in place by the "other side" every few years.
For something like this as a first pass, for sure, but if it can be shown to be "realistic" then I have no problem with the Feds enacting it. I especially feel that we need a single-payer option for health insurance. We're the only major "wealthy" nation with a completely regressive health care policy that punishes people for being poor to the point we just let them die if the $ aren't flowing
We need a public healthcare system, but whether it should be single payer is not readily evident, and I rather suspect that clinging to that particular model is what's causing progressives to get stuck trying to push it through. It's probably because most people in US immediately think of Canada when they think of socialized healthcare, and there's very little awareness of what other countries do on either left or right, so we're essentially perpetually debating the Canadian model. We should look at Europe instead and pick something that's both proven to work and more agreeable with American sensibilities. German, perhaps.
Too many people aren't satisfied with the policies they want affecting only them and their communities. They want to impose their will on people thousands of miles away
For some things, yes. I think this sort of thing is compatible with being legislated at the state level. Other policies are not. See states with strict gun laws being undermined by neighboring states with very loose laws.
To me that seems like a necessary trade off for the benefits gained. The stricter laws wouldn’t have necessarily been achieved nor maintained had they not been enacted at the state level.
What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over
If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.
While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it
And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc
When I was a kid (youngest of four) growing up in a suburb of a small town, my mom would often drop me off at a neighbor's house to watch me while she ran errands or did stuff for my siblings. No payment, just neighbors being neighborly.
Now, I can't fathom something like that being feasible in our increasingly individualistic neighborhood. Regretfully, I don't even know the names of most of my neighbors. I wave to them on the street but I wouldn't ask them to take care of my daughter.
I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
Ideally we could go back to being an interdependent society but it has to happen organically. No amount of legislation or budget can fix that.
> I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
You still can. I managed to make friends with a few neighbors just by asking a few innocuous questions every time we meet. Some are friendlier than others. I don't talk to everyone I meet, just those I think could be friendly. I'm usually wrong though and the ones I'd never think would be friendly turns out the most talkative. I met my next door neighbor on afternoon and we talked for 6 hours. Take a chance, odds are good you'll find someone who wants to reach out as much as you.
The main reason I wouldn't enjoy watching my neighbor's kids is that we now have an absolutely paranoid, delusional society that has a mentally ill view of the dangers of children. By signing up to watch kids you incur absolutely massive liability, all it takes is one accusation and your whole life is destroyed and you lose everything, no matter that it was false. You would basically need cameras at every angle at all times before any rational person would want to watch someone else's kids.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
That's a good point, but the model could still work.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.
My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
It's also odd how no one ever asks whether the reason child care is necessary and a single-income household isn't earning enough anymore to make a living because Americans are effectively competing with the entire world for housing and jobs.
Man, the "anti-immigration" square on my HN bingo card has a hole in it from all the pen marks. Anyway, we stopped investing in kids because kids aren't profitable in the next quarter, like everything else that's beneficial to society and not the eight wealthy people currently running it.
Another way to say it might be that we've been shielded from the effects of not investing in our own children by the immigration of smart and educated young adults, where countries with less immigration are more acutely aware of how well its own educational system is performing.
> so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately need the quality education who are going to be left behind.
If it were up to me, I'd send those people to jail (yes yes, I know. I'm just angry and lashing out)
I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?
One state offering something is a start but we're still far behind maternity, pre-k, childhood nutrition, and primary or secondary education in general for most of the population relative to peer nations. Plus this administration's cuts to Medicare or SNAP which will also hit the poorest kids the most. Plus the national debt they are saddled with.
Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.
Definitely one of the few policies that Trump "championed" that I supported him on; severely curtailing H1B visas going forward. Those who are here can be grandfathered in, but going forward the program should be wound down, and we invest in our own civilians and youth.
Can't read the whole article, but am curious about how it will impact unlicensed childcare operations. I imagine that the number of parents using these is much higher than many people realize. Will be interesting to see how many parents end up using the state program.
Until very recently in human history 100% of childcare operations were unlicensed, and this was better in every way than a government bureaucracy run system.
I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
Until recently, you had personally known everyone, for years, who you might hand your child off to for a few hours.
We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.
Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.
Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It baffles me that it's so hard to argue for care for children. The response is always "but it's the parents' responsibility". Which, okay, fair, BUT if the parent is failing their responsibility (which can happen for many reasons, many of which don't need maliciousness nor incompetence), then what? We let the child die? We let the child starve? That's what I don't get. A child doesn't have autonomy, so it shouldn't even be a question of helping them out.
We can argue about what to do with the parents but in the mean time we're going to let children suffer? That's lunacy. I don't even have children and I'll gladly pay taxes to prevent child suffering. How is anyone against that?
Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.
I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.
I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.
I agree with you. But to steelman the argument on the other side, their concern is that subsidizing care for children creates a moral hazard by encouraging irresponsible people to have even more children. It's a feedback loop which creates an escalating burden on the rest of society. I don't think that denying care to children is effective or morally justified; I'm just trying to explain what seems to be the underlying argument.
I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented.
Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you.
This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's another issue, but when they get sick they more than deserve treatment.
And finally, the vast majority of illnesses can be treated cheaply if irregularly do your checkups. It can cost society $200 today for a doctor visit , or 30k for an ER stay in 3 years.
That said, I think this should be handled on a state by state basis. If the people of Alabama don't believe in single-payer healthcare, or they want to forbid using single pair healthcare for contraceptive or something, that shouldn't stop a progressive state from implementing it.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.
And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think the national politics would support that at the moment. 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... but they might against 18 or 19 year olds. It's a foot in the door persuasion tactic rather than try to get everything all at once.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
Be aware that Medicare is a long way from free. At least if you've had a well-paying job in the past few years, Medicare premiums are pretty similar to exchange costs (or COBRA).
Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.
Most children don't have enough credits to qualify for Medicare.
OTOH, very few children have enough individual income to be disqualified from Medicaid, but it's based on household income.
My handwavey plan for universal federalized healthcare includes using the child's income as a qualifier for Medicaid, phased in so the system will hopefully adjust over time rather than get overloaded to collapse. Also reduce the Medicare eligibility age over time. A solution that takes decades to roll out leaves a lot of unsolved problems, but adding a large number of people to an existing program in one fell swoop feels like it's going to be a negative too.
I believe children do get healthcare, coverage, insurance or not in the US. The family might take on crushing debt that will never be paid off but the child will be treated. At least, this is my understanding - please correct me if I am wrong.
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.
Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best.
I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.
By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.
Ham-fisted reactionary policy versus attacking the root cause, which is 1) cost of living has now increased to require two working parents 2) The government values housewives at about $2k per year in tax credits. Let women stay at home and raise their children as they know best, and pay them for the cost of the service they provide.
You have a point but I live in New Mexico. It's not like many of these moms are suddenly going to become stellar parents with a $2K tax credit. The state has real issues with poverty, education and work ethic and it's often generational.
Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.
If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
In Canada, you cannot file taxes jointly, so income tax brackets are on an individual basis instead of on a couple basis. It really makes it expensive for a single parent to stay home as one person making 100k pays about 30% more income tax than two people making 50k.
Don’t give me free daycare, just make it so much less punishing to stay at home and take care of my kids.
All of it is kindof dumb, I pay a higher tax because joint filing is not a thing, and my increased tax pays for subsidized daycare…
If governments aren’t willing to value women at what their work at home is worth, they’re not serious about tackling the birthrate problem. Show me a country with universal childcare with a TFR above 2.1. It’s a cheap substitute for the love and attention only a mother can provide young children
Exactly. I was raised by two working parents who were very involved in my life, and I wasn't a "latchkey" kid by any means. While the "traditional" spouse at home does work out pretty well if the single wage earner can do well, to be sure. That doesn't mean other situations can't prosper. It's not a magically set up that is the solution for everyone.
I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too high; one accident can result in a major lawsuit to the company, and (2) the cost of the distractions; parents will never get any work done if their kid close by.
I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
In some places (esp those with low access to birth control and sub-par sexual health education), there are too many unplanned children being born to people who do not have the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty.
Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.
I’ll even begin to entertain this argument only once the burden of having and raising children falls on society as a whole, and not individual women. Until then, absolutely not.
That's true that it would be good for more access to birth control, but this is a confusing statement because you benefit economically and socially from each new kid that is born and raised. If child care is socialized, it means that the kids are going to be better taken care of versus the mother is impoverished and (a) doesn't work and stays poor or (b) does work and they aren't taken care of properly.
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
At most high schools in our district we offer childcare to the teachers for free. I think thats really the model we should be moving to. Just add pre-k and daycare to the public school system. We have the space already.
> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
It's a shame that there's not the option of providing parents with the choice of free child care or some kind of cash subsidy.
A bit tangential, but the overall problem is that cost of having children is privatized while the benefit is socialized. I'd love to see age and number of children progressively factored into the income tax bracket people pay. Something like a 60-80% tax rate for all income >150k for those >40 without children so those that benefit the most from future generations being born are helping to shoulder the cost
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
We would be even better off subsidizing parents staying home with their own children. Unfortunately most subsidies have proven ineffective at nudging up birth rates.
In an emotional development sort of way: maybe. Subsidized childcare however provides two jobs to the economy for the price of one and every single person worried about birth rates is either a white supremacist or the sort of emotionless economist that 2:1 is appealing to.
Those subsidies tend to be €X00 per month. I am not aware of any scheme that even attempted to replace 80% of forfeited wages. A subsidy that ends up with you having to move impoverish yourself is not going to have the desired effect.
No, we wouldn’t. This subsidy directly benefits the survival rate of children while universal basic income is too broad. healthcare is more affordable than UBI.
The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse
There's potentially an argument for a ponzi scheme for one-ish more generation after which robots can do elder care and it's not necessary anymore.
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
> The state has spent years building early childhood funding — In 2020 it created a $10 billion trust fund using revenue from its booming oil and gas industry. Then, in 2022 voters approved drawing more from the Land Grant Permanent Fund.
It will be very interesting to see how this experiment pans out. I just don't see how the economics of it can work out knowing how much some of my friends pay for childcare while they're at work.
Perhaps if you take them to a dump. The wonderful people at my daughter’s day care are absolutely invested in their development and spend 6 uninterrupted hours per day with them focused exclusively on that. It’s stupid expensive though.
That depends on who you are as a parent though. It could be the strangers are lifeline and positive force on the child's development compared to what you are.
A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
Popular opinion but raising the price of everything just because you can so people can't even afford kids anymore and then blaming poor people for that is a terrible idea.
I know this sounds cold, but the people who most utilize "free" things are the absolute least likely to understand it's not free.
Most people think the state is a machine of infinite money, and the only thing preventing $1 million checks in the mail to everyone is corporate lobbyists protecting the elite.
I think there is a lot of confusion about it. You overestimate people. :P I wish it was a case of me underestimating people, but after the things I saw...
You are overestimating people. I've met several people with higher education who don't understand that trade-off. They see the world as a fight between good guys who want to give the society free stuff and the bad guys that want to make money out of it.
Sure, but that hides most of the facts about how it works. There are a lot of parties involved in this, including people paying for it and being paid for it, and those paying probably out number those getting it for free at point of use. Sweeping that under the rug is just a sales ploy, which shows what the outlet wants you to believe about this program.
We have this thing called “federalism” which prevents that hypothetical law from being constitutional. The federal government cannot tell states how to spend their own money.
Ignore the law and tie it up in court until regime change? Something is only real or of concern if there are consequences. Words and opinions without force backing them are just words and opinions.
This is one of my pet peeves. If you believe in the welfare state concept, you should never refer to anything that’s subsidized as “free.” It’s a recipe for disaster. As a European who was uprooted and settled in the US, I’ve become painfully aware of how little we Europeans comprehend the workings of the economy. I believe this is partly due to the propaganda surrounding the welfare state as “free.”
Of course, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.
The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.
Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.
People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
Its free at the endpoint for user. That's what the "free" means here. No one is pretending that resources for things like roads, police, firefighting, primary schooling and others come out of nothingness and don´t have any cost.
Exactly. What else are you going to call it, but free? That's literally the word for it.
Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.
We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.
I agree with the concept of not labeling things which are subsidized as "free", while still considering the price worth it. Similarly, I think the framing of negative rights vs entitlements makes sense, while still believing that certain entitlements are worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I have found that such framings are mostly associated with a set of beliefs which I feel profoundly at odds with (e.g. unlimited wealth inequality is fine). So I find myself aligned with the "health care is a human right" crowd despite my discomfort with the ideological underpinnings.
Right. I believe every socialist should feel offended by the term “free healthcare.”
Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
The narratives on this topic are hard to pierce through. Economic literacy is low among the public. Politicians take advantage of this to pretend that solving everything is as simple as taxing the people you don’t like (billionaires, corporations, or even completely incorrect narratives about how we’ll use tariffs to make other countries pay us, which we all know is false). These groups are all represented as infinite money wells that just need to be tapped by electing the right person.
This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.
Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.
However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
You shouldn’t be downvoted, kind of a lame part of HN lately.
I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.
As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.
It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.
Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)
Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.
However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
I’m not sure. If we compare the US to Europe (and I say this with a heavy heart), I wouldn’t be confident that the EU has a positive balance. There hasn’t been any growth in the EU in the last 25 years.
What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?
Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?
When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.
You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.
You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.
Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
That's true of private enterprise that has a profit motive. The "product" here is healthy well-adjusted citizens that can one day be workers. The public sector is not the same.
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.
Yes, in the case of a business giving out free services or things. But, government is not and has never been a business so this doesn't apply in this case.
US actually provided child care to mothers employed during WWII. [0]
Richard Nixon vetoed the bill that would have expanded it out to all families. [1]
Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole with a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness. AKA The rich keep getting richer.
[0] https://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/blog/the-lanham-act-and-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Child_Developmen...
For what its worth, the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children, citing a study from Quebec.
> The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.
[1] https://archive.is/ScFRX
In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.
Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.
So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
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FTA
> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum
Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.
> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children
I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.
If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".
The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.
You can’t really compare them without a better definition.
This is probably because they are actually measuring hyperactivity when there is universal care versus 40% of it going unmeasured.
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I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.
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It's not an intractable issue. It's just a matter of economics.
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You'd think the Economist would care more about this study: https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...
Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.
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It was done so mothers could work building tanks and airplanes, not out of any concern for the children.
Then do it today so mothers can continue to work and help the economy.
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Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
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This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.
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> a moved to pure individualism built around selfishness
The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice. Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
(Immigrants to the US arrived with nothing more than a suitcase.)
> Funny how we keep forgetting the past and reject what benefited us as a whole
Oh the irony!
> The US was founded on individual rights
Excluding those whose land was stolen and redistributed by government.
> not community sacrifice
Excluding government-funded infrastructure projects like canals that enabled growth. And support that immigrants received from ethnic communities.
> Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty
Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.
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I mildly disagree with your take but it's still mindblowing how I can read some random political flame on HN and it's WALTER FUCKING BRIGHT. Your one of my tech heroes, so cool to spot you on here. If this were real life I'd ask for a selfie to prove that this happened but maybe you could, idk, sign a message with your PGP key so I can prove I interacted with you
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> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
Approximately 25,000 americans gave their lives in the revolutionary war. Every signer of the declaration of independence was signing their own death warrant should they have lost to the strongest military in the world. This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
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> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms ... during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty into the middle class and beyond.
Woah! The US was founded on occupation and slavery. How do you think millions of people were able to move up out of poverty? Because the US was abundant in land and natural resources, which during the 1800s we stole from the native Americans and exploited in large part with slave labor (at first, later pseudo-enslavement as sharecroppers).
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> The US was founded on individual rights and freedoms, not community sacrifice.
You clearly didn’t grow up in an immigrant neighborhood in the city
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Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
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Don't forget: When they help billionaires and trillion dollar business, it's framed as driving prosperity and stimulating the economy.
Only one political party rallies against "government handouts" and blames the individual for their problems.
Why would you generalize your opinion to all when this is extremely clear?
How can things get better if you can't even be bothered to criticize at a granular level? Since we are a Democracy this matters.
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Maybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.
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> Funny how we keep forgetting the past
The remembering/forgetting what "made America great" is very selective. Factory jobs: yes! Labor unions: (silence)
it's because people dont operate with facts and truth. they just want lies instead, sad reality
The US will kick into gear at certain emergency times (WW2, Covid, etc) but not so great outside of then.
I don't see how the US's feeble and lackluster response to COVID counted as "kicking into gear".
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What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
It’s good that it’s a state policy, not a federal one. We need more policies to stay at the state level, regardless of the policy. Federalism is how we can test the effects of competing policies under the same house. If the policy is a problem for you, it’s a lot easier to vote with your feet and move to a different state than to move to a different country
I think it also gives it a better chance as an experiment. The federal government tends to pendulum swing between left and right on a fairly short cycle. Most states seem to be considerably more stable and less prone to trying to revert policies put in place by the "other side" every few years.
For something like this as a first pass, for sure, but if it can be shown to be "realistic" then I have no problem with the Feds enacting it. I especially feel that we need a single-payer option for health insurance. We're the only major "wealthy" nation with a completely regressive health care policy that punishes people for being poor to the point we just let them die if the $ aren't flowing
We need a public healthcare system, but whether it should be single payer is not readily evident, and I rather suspect that clinging to that particular model is what's causing progressives to get stuck trying to push it through. It's probably because most people in US immediately think of Canada when they think of socialized healthcare, and there's very little awareness of what other countries do on either left or right, so we're essentially perpetually debating the Canadian model. We should look at Europe instead and pick something that's both proven to work and more agreeable with American sensibilities. German, perhaps.
Too many people aren't satisfied with the policies they want affecting only them and their communities. They want to impose their will on people thousands of miles away
For some things, yes. I think this sort of thing is compatible with being legislated at the state level. Other policies are not. See states with strict gun laws being undermined by neighboring states with very loose laws.
To me that seems like a necessary trade off for the benefits gained. The stricter laws wouldn’t have necessarily been achieved nor maintained had they not been enacted at the state level.
What does seem like something the federal government should be doing is mediating issues like this between states, without picking a side (of course, that is easier said than done given polarization in politics currently). Rather than giving us watered down one-size-fits-all policies that nobody likes, or worse yet, deadlocked at no policies or the churn of policies being implemented and then repealed over and over
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Sure but you have to pass a Constitutional amendment to fix that, and I don't see that happening on something as divisive as gun ownership.
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"Vote with your feet" is a privileged assertion
The steel man of your argument sounds like:
If we let states have more power, they may enact good or bad policies that others cannot as easily enjoy or escape because of their financial or family standings prevent them from moving. National policies allow everyone to benefit from good policies.
While this is true, the reality frequently seems to be that no bold policy is made or maintained due to polarization or perceived risk. Isolating policies to places willing to try them out is a better outcome. If the policy seems valuable, more states will adopt it
And if you have bad policies nationally, it’s even harder for those less privileged to escape them due to things like immigration laws, costs, language barrier, xenophobia, etc
Are immigrants privileged then?
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It takes a village.
When I was a kid (youngest of four) growing up in a suburb of a small town, my mom would often drop me off at a neighbor's house to watch me while she ran errands or did stuff for my siblings. No payment, just neighbors being neighborly.
Now, I can't fathom something like that being feasible in our increasingly individualistic neighborhood. Regretfully, I don't even know the names of most of my neighbors. I wave to them on the street but I wouldn't ask them to take care of my daughter.
I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
Ideally we could go back to being an interdependent society but it has to happen organically. No amount of legislation or budget can fix that.
> I know that's mostly my fault for not meeting my neighbors. But also, most families aren't even home during the day anymore because they have to work.
You still can. I managed to make friends with a few neighbors just by asking a few innocuous questions every time we meet. Some are friendlier than others. I don't talk to everyone I meet, just those I think could be friendly. I'm usually wrong though and the ones I'd never think would be friendly turns out the most talkative. I met my next door neighbor on afternoon and we talked for 6 hours. Take a chance, odds are good you'll find someone who wants to reach out as much as you.
Thanks for sharing your experience! I should really try it. I'm just shy.
The main reason I wouldn't enjoy watching my neighbor's kids is that we now have an absolutely paranoid, delusional society that has a mentally ill view of the dangers of children. By signing up to watch kids you incur absolutely massive liability, all it takes is one accusation and your whole life is destroyed and you lose everything, no matter that it was false. You would basically need cameras at every angle at all times before any rational person would want to watch someone else's kids.
Thus you end up with daycares nowadays where you pay a gazillion dollars tuition for your child to be taken care of by a minimum wage worker, with most of the money going to overhead and insurance.
The real advantage of government childcare is the state can just say "go fuck yourself" if you sue them or accuse them of misconduct and thus do it for cheap like in the old days. In fact the only other economical model is to just dump your kid at an illegal's house, they don't give a shit if they get sued, they can just dump everything and move to the next city.
That's a good point, but the model could still work.
I think it comes down to trust. If something bad happens to my kid when my neighbor or friend is taking care of her, am I gonna sue them? Furthermore, if they give me their kid, would they sue me if something bad happened? Is it worth burning the bridge of friendship over a mistake? There's a number of different factors at play of course, but if I trust my neighbor / friend / parent / sibling enough to take care of my kid, I hope they trust me enough to know that I would try to resolve any issues privately and not get courts involved. Maybe the worst thing that happens is that a certain neighbor doesn't get to watch my kid anymore.
Of course if there's actual abuse or something criminal, then yeah by all means get the courts involved. But if it was something minor that blows over quickly then no need to escalate.
As an example, my mother in law was helping out for the first two weeks after my daughter was born. One day, my daughter had hiccups. My MIL said "I'm gonna fill a bottle of water to give to her" and I'm like "you will do no such thing, babies cannot have water. It's formula or breast milk." Later, on a cold night, she put a blanket (not swaddle) on my daughter, and a stuffed animal in her crib, and I'm like "babies cannot have loose stuff in their cribs, it's a choking/suffocation hazard."
My point is that I'm not gonna sue my MIL for being a bad caretaker, I'm just not gonna trust her to be a caretaker unless she took some infant safety courses. But I would trust a neighbor who I know has taken infant safety courses because they recently had a newborn or something, and trust that they'd do their best with my kid as I would theirs.
My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
It's also odd how no one ever asks whether the reason child care is necessary and a single-income household isn't earning enough anymore to make a living because Americans are effectively competing with the entire world for housing and jobs.
Probably because that’s not true.
Man, the "anti-immigration" square on my HN bingo card has a hole in it from all the pen marks. Anyway, we stopped investing in kids because kids aren't profitable in the next quarter, like everything else that's beneficial to society and not the eight wealthy people currently running it.
Hope this helps.
Since when did public (government) schools become run for profit?
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Another way to say it might be that we've been shielded from the effects of not investing in our own children by the immigration of smart and educated young adults, where countries with less immigration are more acutely aware of how well its own educational system is performing.
> so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
The school districts like SFUSD are actually sabotaging the growth of our kids in the name of equity. They're committed to ideas from people like Jo Boaler, and they tried very hard to dumb down the curriculum. The real tragedy is that kids from wealthy families will just get other means of education to make up the difference. It's the kids who desperately need the quality education who are going to be left behind.
If it were up to me, I'd send those people to jail (yes yes, I know. I'm just angry and lashing out)
I looked up this lady on Wikipedia, but I couldn't find any obvious problems. It says she's a math educator with degrees from known universities and lots of published research?
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What makes you say that when New Mexico is now offering free childcare?
One state offering something is a start but we're still far behind maternity, pre-k, childhood nutrition, and primary or secondary education in general for most of the population relative to peer nations. Plus this administration's cuts to Medicare or SNAP which will also hit the poorest kids the most. Plus the national debt they are saddled with.
Our children's well being (physical health, mental health, education, etc) is routinely ranked toward the absolute bottom compared peer nations.
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Free childcare is an investment in working parents, not the children.
I would not say that free childcare is an investment in children.
Definitely one of the few policies that Trump "championed" that I supported him on; severely curtailing H1B visas going forward. Those who are here can be grandfathered in, but going forward the program should be wound down, and we invest in our own civilians and youth.
Can't read the whole article, but am curious about how it will impact unlicensed childcare operations. I imagine that the number of parents using these is much higher than many people realize. Will be interesting to see how many parents end up using the state program.
Until very recently in human history 100% of childcare operations were unlicensed, and this was better in every way than a government bureaucracy run system.
I'm not knocking it. My parents didn't use licensed daycare for preschool for me or my sister. Just dropped us off at some old lady's house and paid her cash for watching us. 99% of arrangements like that work out fine. It may be suboptimal, but usually it's at least fine.
I'm actually wondering if the program will make a big dent though. One issue with formal childcare arrangements is that the hours tend to not be flexible. Parents who have to work til 6 some nights, or who have nontraditional work schedules in general may not be better served by the state's option.
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Until recently, you had personally known everyone, for years, who you might hand your child off to for a few hours.
We have things like licensing because we're handing off our children to perfect strangers, and want some level of assurance that it's not going to be a disaster.
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Until recently in human history 100% of humans were illiterate.
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Yes, let's go back to the 1300s, when we didn't need no stinkin' government licensure! Or flush toilets.
Even with the terrible state of education in most nations, that is a patently untrue sentence at least in the fact that poor people can have access to education at all.
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Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It baffles me that it's so hard to argue for care for children. The response is always "but it's the parents' responsibility". Which, okay, fair, BUT if the parent is failing their responsibility (which can happen for many reasons, many of which don't need maliciousness nor incompetence), then what? We let the child die? We let the child starve? That's what I don't get. A child doesn't have autonomy, so it shouldn't even be a question of helping them out.
We can argue about what to do with the parents but in the mean time we're going to let children suffer? That's lunacy. I don't even have children and I'll gladly pay taxes to prevent child suffering. How is anyone against that?
Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.
I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.
I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.
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I agree with you. But to steelman the argument on the other side, their concern is that subsidizing care for children creates a moral hazard by encouraging irresponsible people to have even more children. It's a feedback loop which creates an escalating burden on the rest of society. I don't think that denying care to children is effective or morally justified; I'm just trying to explain what seems to be the underlying argument.
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It should cover everyone.
No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented.
Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you.
This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's another issue, but when they get sick they more than deserve treatment.
And finally, the vast majority of illnesses can be treated cheaply if irregularly do your checkups. It can cost society $200 today for a doctor visit , or 30k for an ER stay in 3 years.
That said, I think this should be handled on a state by state basis. If the people of Alabama don't believe in single-payer healthcare, or they want to forbid using single pair healthcare for contraceptive or something, that shouldn't stop a progressive state from implementing it.
> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
This isn't entirely true, there are entire industries catering to the worried well, eg expensive precautionary full-body MRIs with unclear scientific backing, whatever it is Bryan Johnson is doing and selling these days, etc.
And exactly what counts as need flexes and changes depending on circumstance and who is asking. "Do I need a doctor for this" is not a question that everyone answers the same way.
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This is a common misconception. For asymptomatic adults there is no proven benefit to regular "checkups".
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.36756
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
Expanding to undocumented providers is probably ripe for abuse. Although perhaps abusable either way.
What stops someone from saying “I’m an undocumented provider with 500 kids. Pay me 500 x AMOUNT”.
Public schools have residence and identity requirements. What’s an undocumented childcare provider going to have?
I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think the national politics would support that at the moment. 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... but they might against 18 or 19 year olds. It's a foot in the door persuasion tactic rather than try to get everything all at once.
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> No body goes to the doctor because they want to.
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
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Be aware that Medicare is a long way from free. At least if you've had a well-paying job in the past few years, Medicare premiums are pretty similar to exchange costs (or COBRA).
Everyone knows Medicare isn't "free".
Medicare and COBRA are not similar costs. My parents pay half what I would pay if I took COBRA and they have a better plan. Neither of them were struggling before they retired and I'll put it this way, they bought a second home in retirement.
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Health insurance isn't free either and it's way more expensive than Medicare. We're all also already paying for Medicare...
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Most children don't have enough credits to qualify for Medicare.
OTOH, very few children have enough individual income to be disqualified from Medicaid, but it's based on household income.
My handwavey plan for universal federalized healthcare includes using the child's income as a qualifier for Medicaid, phased in so the system will hopefully adjust over time rather than get overloaded to collapse. Also reduce the Medicare eligibility age over time. A solution that takes decades to roll out leaves a lot of unsolved problems, but adding a large number of people to an existing program in one fell swoop feels like it's going to be a negative too.
I believe children do get healthcare, coverage, insurance or not in the US. The family might take on crushing debt that will never be paid off but the child will be treated. At least, this is my understanding - please correct me if I am wrong.
It’s wrong.
Medicaid does cover children
And in many states there are also CHIP plans for children who don't qualify for Medicaid.
https://www.healthcare.gov/medicaid-chip/childrens-health-in...
Call it a childcare bailout instead of "free". Society will accept it then.
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
Land price will adjust accordingly in response to any positive economic news. If you want an unalloy good to come out of these programs, tax lands.
Otherwise, any welfare program will just get some of its value captured by landlords.
Land value tax won't help unless you greatly reduce the zoning and regulation over what can be built on the land.
Putting the land to its most efficient use isn't possible if all you're allowed to build is a two-story detached single family house.
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Our property taxes are already crazy high and continue to go up every year. How does this help?
Land value tax is interesting because it encourages/forces more efficient use but you can do a lot more by cutting demand through limiting immigration and financialization opportunities.
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Across the US, the majority (2/3-ish) of children already live in families where both parents are employed. I don't see free childcare moving that statistic more than a few percentage points at best. I'm skeptical that this policy would encourage more parents to work and further raise housing costs, especially since this would mostly affect families with children who are pre-K. It is a big policy change but the number of families it will affect is quite small I think. If it does have any effect on housing cost I would expect to see it at the very low-end since it would help low-earners the most.
In Quebec it was a 20% jump in mother employment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-31/affordabl...
And had all sorts of negative outcomes for the kids: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/long-term-study-of-...
Exactly. Now landlords will charge more. The owner of assets get all the money.
By your and OP's logic, nothing should be done to subsidize anything or make people's lives more affordable because the excess will be sucked up by landlords. On the flip side, if we did things to make people's lives less affordable, would that translate into landlords giving back by lowering rents? I don't think so.
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Ham-fisted reactionary policy versus attacking the root cause, which is 1) cost of living has now increased to require two working parents 2) The government values housewives at about $2k per year in tax credits. Let women stay at home and raise their children as they know best, and pay them for the cost of the service they provide.
You have a point but I live in New Mexico. It's not like many of these moms are suddenly going to become stellar parents with a $2K tax credit. The state has real issues with poverty, education and work ethic and it's often generational.
Giving children some stability, role models and nutrition early in life seems like a pretty good investment from my perspective.
If the state pulls it off without the usual mismanagement and graft remains to be seen but I applaud the effort.
In Canada, you cannot file taxes jointly, so income tax brackets are on an individual basis instead of on a couple basis. It really makes it expensive for a single parent to stay home as one person making 100k pays about 30% more income tax than two people making 50k.
Don’t give me free daycare, just make it so much less punishing to stay at home and take care of my kids.
All of it is kindof dumb, I pay a higher tax because joint filing is not a thing, and my increased tax pays for subsidized daycare…
So, what, pay someone a full time salary for caring for 1 or two children? Pretty sure that doesn't scale
If governments aren’t willing to value women at what their work at home is worth, they’re not serious about tackling the birthrate problem. Show me a country with universal childcare with a TFR above 2.1. It’s a cheap substitute for the love and attention only a mother can provide young children
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What if the husband wants to stay home and raise the kids?
Also no, women (or men) who stay home don’t “know best” by default. That knowledge is earned and requires intent.
Exactly. I was raised by two working parents who were very involved in my life, and I wasn't a "latchkey" kid by any means. While the "traditional" spouse at home does work out pretty well if the single wage earner can do well, to be sure. That doesn't mean other situations can't prosper. It's not a magically set up that is the solution for everyone.
I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too high; one accident can result in a major lawsuit to the company, and (2) the cost of the distractions; parents will never get any work done if their kid close by.
I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
Offering free childcare would be far more expensive than offering subsidized cafeterias, meditation rooms, and a gym.
Because it’s too expensive. Most people want wages.
People who have no children in particular would prefer to be paid wages versus other people getting childcare and them getting less wages.
Companies don’t want employees whose time is split between childcare and work. This is why egg freezing is a common perk but childcare is not.
Pretty dystopian to have your employer raise your children for you IMO.
All for it, but free birth control should also be provided.
Free condoms are widely available.
https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/sexual-health/free-condo...
Why? Do we have too many children?
In some places (esp those with low access to birth control and sub-par sexual health education), there are too many unplanned children being born to people who do not have the means to comfortably raise a child without being in poverty.
Free/low-cost birth control and better sex ed are proven to reduce these instances substantially.
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Yes. And stop bringing your kids to breweries.
We do also have reproductive care written into law.
Children are a positive externality so we should actually tax birth control rather than make it free.
;)
I’ll even begin to entertain this argument only once the burden of having and raising children falls on society as a whole, and not individual women. Until then, absolutely not.
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Sounds like you're volunteering your time and resources to help raise them! Thanks, you can stop by the adoption agency any time today. :)
That's true that it would be good for more access to birth control, but this is a confusing statement because you benefit economically and socially from each new kid that is born and raised. If child care is socialized, it means that the kids are going to be better taken care of versus the mother is impoverished and (a) doesn't work and stays poor or (b) does work and they aren't taken care of properly.
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
At most high schools in our district we offer childcare to the teachers for free. I think thats really the model we should be moving to. Just add pre-k and daycare to the public school system. We have the space already.
Give the state your kids and get to work, comrade?
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/17/archives/in-soviet-union-...
> The vast majority of Soviet families require the salary of a working wife to make ends meet. Repeatedly, Soviet citizens express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife's working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.
Man, even the Soviet Union was able to provide free childcare. Really makes you think, doesn't it.
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It's a shame that there's not the option of providing parents with the choice of free child care or some kind of cash subsidy.
A bit tangential, but the overall problem is that cost of having children is privatized while the benefit is socialized. I'd love to see age and number of children progressively factored into the income tax bracket people pay. Something like a 60-80% tax rate for all income >150k for those >40 without children so those that benefit the most from future generations being born are helping to shoulder the cost
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
We would be even better off subsidizing parents staying home with their own children. Unfortunately most subsidies have proven ineffective at nudging up birth rates.
In an emotional development sort of way: maybe. Subsidized childcare however provides two jobs to the economy for the price of one and every single person worried about birth rates is either a white supremacist or the sort of emotionless economist that 2:1 is appealing to.
Why would that be better? I think you'd miss out on economies of scale and end up paying more.
Those subsidies tend to be €X00 per month. I am not aware of any scheme that even attempted to replace 80% of forfeited wages. A subsidy that ends up with you having to move impoverish yourself is not going to have the desired effect.
No, we wouldn’t. This subsidy directly benefits the survival rate of children while universal basic income is too broad. healthcare is more affordable than UBI.
If eight billion people is not enough, do you have a higher number in mind? And if so, what is it?
The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse
There's potentially an argument for a ponzi scheme for one-ish more generation after which robots can do elder care and it's not necessary anymore.
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
Every modern economy, socialism included, requires a growing population.
You’re right about the main benefit of population decline though. It gives Nature a needed break
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A few alternate, less paywalled, local articles on the same thing:
https://www.kunm.org/local-news/2025-10-13/childcare-univers...
> The state has spent years building early childhood funding — In 2020 it created a $10 billion trust fund using revenue from its booming oil and gas industry. Then, in 2022 voters approved drawing more from the Land Grant Permanent Fund.
https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/is-universal-childcare-sustai...
It will be very interesting to see how this experiment pans out. I just don't see how the economics of it can work out knowing how much some of my friends pay for childcare while they're at work.
Free, paid by whom?
Tariffs.
Unpopular opinion but leaving your kids with strangers not invested in their development during their most critical years is a terrible idea.
Perhaps if you take them to a dump. The wonderful people at my daughter’s day care are absolutely invested in their development and spend 6 uninterrupted hours per day with them focused exclusively on that. It’s stupid expensive though.
That depends on who you are as a parent though. It could be the strangers are lifeline and positive force on the child's development compared to what you are.
A lot of times people assume in these conversation the parents are put together individuals who think about their child's future or even care. And from what I've observed I don't think that is universally the case.
Popular opinion but raising the price of everything just because you can so people can't even afford kids anymore and then blaming poor people for that is a terrible idea.
Socialism!
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If a tavern puts out a sign saying "free beer," nobody needs to point out that someone is paying for the beer. There's no confusion about this.
I know this sounds cold, but the people who most utilize "free" things are the absolute least likely to understand it's not free.
Most people think the state is a machine of infinite money, and the only thing preventing $1 million checks in the mail to everyone is corporate lobbyists protecting the elite.
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I think there is a lot of confusion about it. You overestimate people. :P I wish it was a case of me underestimating people, but after the things I saw...
You are overestimating people. I've met several people with higher education who don't understand that trade-off. They see the world as a fight between good guys who want to give the society free stuff and the bad guys that want to make money out of it.
A tavern isn't funded by taxes. They're giving away their own money. A government doesn't have its own money, it is giving away tax payer money.
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Yes, people should be reminded that they've already been paying the government without receiving this service for years.
Free at the point of use is how it's usually expressed.
Sure, but that hides most of the facts about how it works. There are a lot of parties involved in this, including people paying for it and being paid for it, and those paying probably out number those getting it for free at point of use. Sweeping that under the rug is just a sales ploy, which shows what the outlet wants you to believe about this program.
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If the tax payer was Apple, I wouldn't mind.
Nothing is for free!
Well, crossing new mexico off my list of possible retirement states lol
There's objectively a lot of reasons to do that (New Mexico citizen here) but I'm surprised this is the one you chose.
What if a federal law is passed to make this illegal?
We have this thing called “federalism” which prevents that hypothetical law from being constitutional. The federal government cannot tell states how to spend their own money.
Ignore the law and tie it up in court until regime change? Something is only real or of concern if there are consequences. Words and opinions without force backing them are just words and opinions.
The federal government is illegitimate. Its laws can be ignored without consequence.
What are you talking about?
You get what you pay for might be one argument against such a policy.
This is one of my pet peeves. If you believe in the welfare state concept, you should never refer to anything that’s subsidized as “free.” It’s a recipe for disaster. As a European who was uprooted and settled in the US, I’ve become painfully aware of how little we Europeans comprehend the workings of the economy. I believe this is partly due to the propaganda surrounding the welfare state as “free.”
Of course, nothing is truly “free.” It comes at a significant cost that must be carefully understood and balanced for the future. It hinders market dynamism and credit flow, which can easily stifle innovation over time. Calling it “free” is a mere emotional appeal, not a rational justification for its long-term sustainability. It’s no wonder that business in Europe, despite being more regulated and restrained than any other part of the world, is so vilified by the youth. We must stop conflating prosperity with corporate misgivings if we are to progress at all.
As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.
The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.
Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.
People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
Its free at the endpoint for user. That's what the "free" means here. No one is pretending that resources for things like roads, police, firefighting, primary schooling and others come out of nothingness and don´t have any cost.
Exactly. What else are you going to call it, but free? That's literally the word for it.
Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.
We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.
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I agree with the concept of not labeling things which are subsidized as "free", while still considering the price worth it. Similarly, I think the framing of negative rights vs entitlements makes sense, while still believing that certain entitlements are worthwhile.
Unfortunately, I have found that such framings are mostly associated with a set of beliefs which I feel profoundly at odds with (e.g. unlimited wealth inequality is fine). So I find myself aligned with the "health care is a human right" crowd despite my discomfort with the ideological underpinnings.
Right. I believe every socialist should feel offended by the term “free healthcare.”
Building an economy capable of sustaining such a system requires immense effort and collective support. Describing it as “free” is a marketing tactic that assumes people are stupid.
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The narratives on this topic are hard to pierce through. Economic literacy is low among the public. Politicians take advantage of this to pretend that solving everything is as simple as taxing the people you don’t like (billionaires, corporations, or even completely incorrect narratives about how we’ll use tariffs to make other countries pay us, which we all know is false). These groups are all represented as infinite money wells that just need to be tapped by electing the right person.
This problem is most obvious in UBI discussions. Anyone could use Google to look up the US population and multiply it by their imagined UBI payment amount to see how much it would cost. Yet 9 times out of 10 when I hear someone talking about UBI they have some fanciful ideas about everyone getting $30-40K per year without realizing that the total cost of such a program would be far higher than even our total tax revenues currently. Even if you cut all other social programs and only offered UBI it wouldn’t make a difference. A UBI program that writes large checks to everyone would require tax increases that reached into the middle class.
Yes. Plus, taxing those with higher incomes is hardly “taxing the rich.” After all, the wealthy don’t have incomes; they borrow against their assets.
However, they do fund political campaigns, which is why politicians focus on the “work mules” of social welfare: the top 1% earners who contribute 90% of all welfare benefits. This distraction diverts attention from the “real rich” and the top earners can hardly do anything to address the issue... perfect scapegoat.
You shouldn’t be downvoted, kind of a lame part of HN lately.
I disagree that it’s a recipe for disaster - there are many valid kinds of holistic experiences of how a product is priced / sold, that don’t change the positivist economics of what is happening.
As long as childcare is economically positive, I think it is, it doesn’t really matter whatever you call it. And perhaps, it’s free in a way that matters most: redistribution from the very rich, that makes more customers with bigger budgets to spend on shit made by the firms they own.
It’s not just redistribution from the very rich. It’s redistribution from every tax payer, and you can bet your tax dollars aren’t used very efficiently.
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Thanks for your comments. I agree--HN has been quite disappointing lately. For a place that's supposed to be full of tech contrarians, it does sound like an answering machine around here sometimes :)
Regarding your retort, I believe it should possible to measure the economic return of every social benefit. I strongly suspect that there are social benefits that more than pay for their own cost.
However, the most effective way to prove this is by measuring it.
Looking at USA right now, I just do not see how is that superior.
I’m not sure. If we compare the US to Europe (and I say this with a heavy heart), I wouldn’t be confident that the EU has a positive balance. There hasn’t been any growth in the EU in the last 25 years.
What’s Europe’s future? What's its current relevance?
Sure, the US could eliminate all other expenditures and provide every American with the best subsidized healthcare in the world. But what would that achieve? A few decades of chess-thumping to the world? Then bankruptcy? Who will fund the next innovation in healthcare? Is this what Europe did only now those decades of runway are coming to an end?
When you look at the US, you should note that the poorest state here has about the same per-capita GDP as Germany. And the disposable income for people is 50% higher than even Germany. If you don't consider Germany, the poorest state is richer than every EU country and has a disposable income 80% higher.
You want to feel free? You need disposable income. You want to start a company and have clients? You better hope those clients have disposable income.
You want a welfare state? You better have a strong economy. EU isn't trending too hot in that department.
Many of the usual suspects that defend social welfare "just because" also say things like "face the data!" I suggest you do. Just my thoughts.
It works handsomely for the 1%. The rest, well, ...
If it’s free then you’re the product …
That's a interesting way to say creating a healthy contributing member of society that leads to future gdp.
How would this apply to, say, public libraries?
That's true of private enterprise that has a profit motive. The "product" here is healthy well-adjusted citizens that can one day be workers. The public sector is not the same.
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.
Yes, in the case of a business giving out free services or things. But, government is not and has never been a business so this doesn't apply in this case.
Really? You're the product of, say, your local fire department?
Your house not spreading fire to the neighboring houses or forest is most of the actual dollar value in a fire department, from a fire perspective.
Saving people and a local healthcare force are fringe benefits, accounting wise.
Local fire department isn't free
This but unironically