New Mexico voted a child care guarantee into its constitution | Hacker News Reader

New Mexico voted a child care guarantee into its constitution

cnn.com

23 points8bitsrule5 comments

I'm not against using O&G tax revenue for early education and the like, but I struggle to see why this needs to be in the constitution of the state. A law would have sufficed. Basic legal documents like constitutions should be confined to negative rights (freedom from the government doing something to you) instead of getting creative with positive rights (freedom to have something that the government needs to provide you with, on the backs of taxpayers). See Chile[0] for an example of a place that tried to achieve utopia by writing it into a constitution.

Plus, the exact details of the thing seem ill-advised: according to TFA, it would make child care free for families that don't appear to need it, like a family of four making $111k a year (in a state with low cost of living), twice the state's median income.

[0]: https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/09/08/chile-s-rejection-o...

> it would make child care free for families that don't appear to need it, like a family of four making $111k a year (in a state with low cost of living), twice the state's median income.

I was wondering exactly how low cost of living NM is.

Infant/Toddler daycare in my high COL city costs between 24k-33k a year.

Albuquerque is 1/3rd of that.

Damn.

Also

> But the national average cost of child care – $10,600 annually

Is a horrible statistic. What type of child care? Full day toddler? Elementary after school program? Did they all get averaged together?

Ugh.

Anyway, figure 111k a year, maybe 80k after taxes and savings, two kids, so that is still 20k a year, or 20% of the family's take home income.

The real reason for these programs is that quality (or even just "not terrible) child care shows dramatic improvements in lifelong cognitive abilities. That, ideally, results in higher earning potential and then more taxes going back to the government long term. Lots of secondary effects of course, lower crime, a workforce better able to meet the needs of an information economy (assuming we aren't replaced by ai), etc, etc.

The best way to get rich people to donate and campaign against something is to exclude them from it. A $1500 tax credit for someone making $1m doesn't amount to much but psychologically they'll still fight to preserve it because they benefit from it.

Besides: if your goal is to encourage people to have more kids then even someone making $111k/yr still has to pay for childcare which can make it a career vs child conversation or a "push goals back a few years" conversation. Raising kids is hard enough without having to make tough choices or materially reduce your lifestyle (beyond the unavoidable time commitment).

If you don't care either way then go ahead and clamp down on the program or eligibility. For however much you tighten the screws you'll have that many fewer people having kids or dropping out of the workforce.

I think it's in the constitution because constitutional amendments are the only way to put something to a referendum in many/most US states. For a national constitution this would be unacceptable, in a state constitution I think it's fine

I'm still appalled at how expensive it is to raise a child here. I was paying close to 3k/ month for toddler care, which is almost half of my net salary. I made 170k last year, which is well above the national average, yet I was living paycheck to paycheck, and I don't live a lavish life; no car, no student loan, no mortgage, I don't pay rent because I married into a home. I can't fathom how somebody making the national average survives.

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