New Mexico Is First State in Us to Offer Universal Child Care
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New Mexico
New Mexico becomes the first US state to offer universal child care, sparking discussion on its potential impact, funding, and implementation, with many commenters expressing support and enthusiasm.
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I haven't see a coherent rationale for reversing course on this doctrine, which was extremely strongly held, and cited a lot.
I don't think government at any level should get to discriminate based on protected classes and I hope most people alive today will agree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/08/supreme-court-ice-r...
By whom?
> since at least 1980 that small, local government was best. I was given the impression
By whom?
> extremely strongly held, and cited a lot
By whom?
I wouldn't be surprised if it encourages companies to have on-site daycare.
Probably richer taxpayers are the ones that won't like it.
I have a friend that had a daughter that lived there, and had serious mental health issues, and I'd hear nightmare stories about how bad the state was for that.
I have family with similar issues, in New York, and they get an amazing amount of state support.
The medical situation is getting worse by the year, though. I don’t think it’s just a matter of shoveling more dollars
People don’t want immigrants getting help that residents pay for, so they turn the spigots off for everyone.
One thing that struck me - towns down there had a template. 90% of towns we drove through were just a blood plasma "donation" center, a dollar store, a gas station, and a cemetery. Very bleak existence out there, oil and gas boom notwithstanding.
I know other states have as well, so nothing new there, but seeing as they basically fund all the state's social projects, felt a bit done wrong.
I took my GF to the emergency room once with chest pains (turned out to be a lung infection). After an hours long wait we got to see the "doctor". The doctor came in in street clothes which were wrinkled jeans and a frumpy polo. He was not smart and from appearance, speech and thinking patterns easily could have been the janitorial mid level manager (no disrespect meant to janitorial staff). They did a chest scan, he said he would review it, then told her to go home and take a Motrin and then she got mysterious bills for the next year from the event.
I would go to Texas which isn't far if the emergency permitted it, and in fact they do airlift most serious cases directly to Lubbock.
Just to be clear for those not familiar with the relative position of cities in Texas, imagine getting hurt in Illinois and the EMT's being like "the hospitals around here are shit, we're going to Gary".
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
And that also needs to be paid for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
2. What if not everything in life is about the economy?
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
The entire incel and tradwife spectrum hates these policies.
Am I mistaken? Thoughts?
As I said, the variability is the key metric.
I will say that (and this is 20+ years out of date) coming from a good for New Mexico public school put me about a year ahead of everyone else in a decent California public school when we moved.
So overall my main point is that you probably want to look at schools on some kind of basis other than the state overall, especially in states like NM and AZ.
They weren’t doing well before, but it’s not been trending well.
Having said that, Albuquerque is nice. Props to the Navajo nation for helping out with early COVID vaccine testing.
I went to a school board meeting, where they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a tire alignment machine for the shop class. I would rather have seen it spent on online math instruction, but I could see their point of view: they want to graduate students who have a chance to get a job, and the academic side of the school is not providing it, and not trending in that direction. So they spent the money where they saw some hope.
If you can afford to do better than public school for your children in New Mexico, it's an imperative.
But you can have a pretty nice, affordable living in places like Taos, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and parts of Las Cruces and Albuquerque.
Breastfeeding doesn't move money around, but formula does; things like that.
Cooking your own meal doesn't raise GDP beyond the cost of supplies, but door-dashing from a restaurant does.
No complexity can make a $1 billion expense able to be paid with $1m of revenue.
I rarely find this to be the case for anything big or important.
That's not the claim I'm making. Someone entering the workforce has tax implications for a local government far beyond their individual tax receipts and will increase their future earning potential.
Again I didn't claim that. The tradeoff is generating some percentage of X benefit in economic activity vs some much lower percentage of X while X is also much larger.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare
There is no way this is affordable to New Mexico. They're estimating the cost at $600 million a year, of about 6% of their total budget next year.
You can actually think through your belief. The announcement provides a concrete number: $12,000 per child. Do you generate $12k in tax revenue? Note that this means direct and indirect tax revenue, not only from your job and what your employer earns from your work but also with your own expenses that you can cover by having a job.
If you have a severely disabled child (who is on SSA), you often can get certified by the state and get paid as the caretaker. Then the action appears on the GDP.
I think you're confusing GDP with a measure of worth or quality. It is not. Just because you can earn money doing double-shifts in a coal mine that doesn't make it better than spending the same time at a beach doing nothing.
GDP of a country is flat for 10 years, but everyone is happier and healthier and feels better? Bad country!
GDP is soaring for ten years, but everyone is depressed, suicidal, deep in debt, overweight, and dying early? Good country!
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=long+term+outcomes+of+dayc...
I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.
> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.
In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.
Also, the daycares typically have structured programs that are fun and helpful for toddler development.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
If you remove the cost of regulating a benefit, then there will be more money available for people to get this benefit.
Any policy (UBI or others) must take into account the state and potential of the country. Based on the Gulf state UBI example (if correct, I did not check) it would mean that with their initial conditions UBI will not result in developing skills (although, thinking of it, maybe their purpose of giving UBI was close to the one observed, their ruler don't strike me as very progressive).
But this is true in the other direction, too. Means testing costs money, time, and ensures some needy folks fall off the program.
For example, Florida did drug testing as a condition for welfare benefits... and it cost more than they saved. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/no-savings-found-in-fl...
They’re doing this on the federal level now. Most popular government programs have been cut or sabotaged, and as a result the debt is increasing by $4T.
> With Monday’s announcement universal child care will be extended to every family in the state, regardless of income.
It's more complicated than that. Of the 6352 people who applied for TANF, 2306 dropped out during the process. Then of the 4046 TANF applicants remaining, only 2.6% tested positive for drugs. The vast majority of media coverage focused on the 2.6% being less than the ~8% drug-use rate in the general population.
What we don't know is of the people who dropped out, was this due to unintended reasons (privacy concerns, the inconvenience of the drug test, missing deadlines) or due to the intended reason (people self-selecting out because they knew they would test positive and become ineligible for 12 months). We'll never know the real breakdown, but it's misleading to say "it cost more than they saved".
> An internal document about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, caseloads stated that the drug testing policy, at least from July through September, did not lead to fewer cases. “We saw no dampening effect on the caseload,” the document said.
And while no-strings-attached payouts appeal to rational geeks, they usually lead to public perception problems. If you give a voucher for childcare to a parent struggling with addiction or a gambling habit, they will probably send the kid to childcare. If you give them cash, they probably won't.
It's a minority that might not be worth fixating on from a rational policy-making point of view, you bet it's the minority that will be in the headlines. Selfishly, I'd like cash in lieu of all the convoluted, conditional benefits that are available to me. But I know why policymakers won't let me have it.
Geeks are as emotional and irrational as everybody else. They are even worse in fact because they can rationalize their behavior even harder.
If you give a no-strings attached cash payment for childcare to a parent struggling with a paying their rent problem, they will also probably not send the kid to childcare, and instead take the cash. And then everybody's rents will go up because families with children have more capability to pay.
Nothing is ever a perfect system, but there are many more things wrong with the current system than concerns about the equity BETWEEN different working class families in different situations. Some of those dysfunctions will happily consume most of an incrementalist policy solution to an arbitrary problem. Direct provision or vouchered provision of necessary goods and services has a lot of minor problems, but it happily mitigates our ability to let one problem eat an unrelated solution.
They do pay for it and it is expensive, but apparently it made a large reduction in child poverty, so that's a win.
From my understanding, it also reduced women in the workforce and reduced investment in childcare infrastructure since more mothers were then taking care of children at home.
So this is possible, it just depends on what you want to incentivize.
Edit to add: It is only better for the business and the economy short term, because ultimately it results in a lower birth rate and below replacement level fertility is the main problem we currently have for the near-future economy
Hell, think about how childless people must feel about this. Or the child tax credit. Nothing is "perfectly fair", but sometimes public policy is good enough.
Childless people basically get their cake and eat it too under the social welfare scheme of most western countries, getting the benefits of children without having to deal with much of the drawbacks.
This exists. It’s called the Child Tax Credit.
If the children have any parent that is working, whether it is one or two, by definition they need more money.
End result is that Canada's child poverty rate was cut in half over the aughts.
https://x.com/trevortombe/status/1100416615202533377
And yes, it hit the same political hurdles you'd expect. A Liberal-party aide helped lose the 2006 selection by saying parents would burn it on "beer and popcorn". He's still around as a consultant and professional trash-talking commentator. This is ironic considering how the party championed it's success after they (rightly) expanded the program.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/liberal-apologizes-for-saying...
By your own argument, this policy dilutes the value New Mexico / Feds were prior giving to the poorer parents who met the means testing New Mexico used before, then, no? Because this isn't the beginning of "free" childcare in NM, they are just expanding it beyond the prior poverty-line times 'X" means testing.
Ergo per your logic "real outcome would be reduced benefits" to the poorer parents who already had subsidized childcare.
Edit: accidently switched "childcare" to "healthcare" a few times, flipped back
And that's the argument against many of these policies - removal of the needs based testing. Odd to see you defend the policy on the very basis others attack it on.
They're the ones who are basically paying the vast majority of the cost of this program, what's the problem with a small fraction of it coming back to them? Especially if it reduces the bureaucratic overhead of running it?
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
And the rich parents who can afford childcare are also given a subsidy. A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work. Is this really what you want? If it is the poor your care about why not subsidies just them?
I’m confused; how does your preferred policy solve this problem?
Policy is a constant battle of unintended consequences. I clearly understand that nothing isn't immune from those consequences, and so I'm constantly adjusting my preferred policy trying to find the least bad compromise.
That's fine.
> A married parent who wants to stay home but can't quite afford it is forced to work.
I don't get what point you think you're making. Do you believe that not offering universal child care changed that?
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
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