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Comment by andrewaylett | Hacker News Reader

Scottish babies too, as of a couple of years ago! The baby box is great: it's given to all parents pretty much automatically.

It's got everything a totally unprepared family would need to look after the baby for the first few days. Even as a not-completely-disorganised family, it was nice to have. And giving it to everyone is probably cheaper than trying to work out for which parents that level of support is necessary ahead of time. Not least because families who need the support are probably the least able to find it.

I'm very happy that my tax money is spent on preventative efforts, rather than relying on fixing things up after they've become critical.

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I love the universality of these programs—there's no stigma attached to using them.

For our firstborn, we (in Michigan, US) used a county-provided program that included a quick home visit and a small welcome kit (nothing as elaborate as described in this article). While it was not presented as being only intended for impoverished/unprepared families, we couldn't help but feeling that we weren't their target audience, given our income level and family support.

All too often, US social programs are paternalistic "help the needy" regimes, often with intentional stigma (to supposedly cut costs through reduced utilization). IMHO, this is harmful for everyone.

This times one-thousand. I'm surprised your infant child was not required to take a drug test first. j/k

We're white, so I'm sure it never crossed the worker's mind (j/k, kinda).

Part of the problem is any universal program gets attacked for helping people who don't 'need' the help and that being a waste of money. And on a certain face it's true, cutting some people out of a program will make the top line number cheaper but will also require administration and get into fights about just who needs what.

It's one reason so many new social safety net programs are being suggested as variants of Universal X now, they're much less likely to get cut because everyone gets it and it's harder to do the whole 'welfare queen' style racial coding if the program goes to everyone.

In Sweden, parents automatically get money from the government for each kid that they have, regardless of their income.

This has been criticized numerous times, but every time it turns out that it's just cheaper to pay out the money to everyone, than to have some sort of needs-based evaluation machinery that you have to staff with people who have to make judgements, pisses people off, and then the whole system can be gamed anyway.

Same thing in Poland. It's just cheaper to give money to everyone.

Here in the USA we'd prefer to spend a thousand dollars, to prevent someone from getting a hundred, because "they don't deserve it".

>Part of the problem is any universal program gets attacked for helping people who don't 'need' the help and that being a waste of money.

It's funny. When you suggest that everyone gets a tax cut, people whinge about the rich, the people needing it the least, getting a tax cut, yet it never seems to stop tax cuts to the wealthy. The rationale most often trotted out for this is that it will 'trickle down' because the people who need it the least will spend more which will fuel the economy. (I'm not commenting on whether trickle down works, just that it's the rationale most commonly deployed.)

So why don't people use this line of reasoning when it comes to universal basic income, money given to parents of children, etc? For the people who need it most, it can help them succeed. For the people who need it least, it can fuel sending their kid to college or pay for a family vacation which also stimulates the economy.

An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. From an economical standpoint (especially through the viewpoint of the situation in America) measures like these would save the taxpayer money in the long run with less emergency issues arising and needing to be covered by public funds. I'm not sure why measures like these aren't used everywhere.

These types of things are called 'entitlement' in US which apparently people are not worthy of (so the constant slashing by republicans).

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