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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.
By ninalanyon 2025-11-2219:221 reply 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?
By worik 2025-11-2219:57 > So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?
I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.
The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent
By jonplackett 2025-11-2220:41 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.
By nineplay 2025-11-2219:50 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.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2220:40 > 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".
By outside1234 2025-11-2218:212 reply This is probably because they are actually measuring hyperactivity when there is universal care versus 40% of it going unmeasured.
By eesmith 2025-11-2220:07 Even if you assume the statistics for hyperactivity are correct, how did the researchers decide which statistics were relevant?
In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.
For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:
"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality
"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).
There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."
The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:
"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."
By reliabilityguy 2025-11-2218:271 reply I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.
By vlovich123 2025-11-2219:071 reply Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.
By reliabilityguy 2025-11-2221:351 reply The assumption here is that only people with means got care and were surveyed. I am not sure that this is the case. Moreover, you can correct for those factors, and, I assume, any statistician worth their salt are.
By vlovich123 2025-11-2222:25 Given the reproducibility crisis, particularly in the social sciences, I wouldn’t put too much weight into the skill or honesty of the people doing that work (and statisticians they are not - more like people with a humanities background who take some statistics courses and then do numerology)
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.
America is the place without universal childcare being used as a control here.
By legolas2412 2025-11-2220:401 reply I am reading the article and it looks like it is being compared to the elder cohorts of Qubec children and also rest of Canada.
Looks like Quebec's past and rest of Canada is the control.
By jjk166 2025-11-2220:49 I'm referring to the comment you responded to comparing america to various countries that offer free childcare.
Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.
Wait a minute… that sounds like…
By Buttons840 2025-11-2218:59 That sounds like the ideal situation we have decided to make unrealistic.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:33 > Wait a minute… that sounds like…
The child tax credit.
Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.
Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
By svieira 2025-11-2219:43 It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.
> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight
This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.
Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.
By hammock 2025-11-2223:50 Since women’s lib, men’s wages have been flat while women’s has climbed. See the first chart here: https://www.businessinsider.com/gender-wage-pay-gap-charts-2...
The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.
By Wowfunhappy 2025-11-2219:30 The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.
By watwut 2025-11-2219:46 I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.
Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.
By nathanaldensr 2025-11-2219:343 reply [flagged]
By kelseyfrog 2025-11-2219:49 > The burden of proof is on feminists to prove why things they believe and optimize for are necessary and good, not the other way around.
Simple question, but what evidence would change your mind?
By watwut 2025-11-2219:49 > We need fathers to protect and provide.
Protect from what? Themselves and other men? Why do they have to provide while women are being made helpless and dependent?
> Things worked this way for thousands upon thousands of years and led to our species being amazingly resilient
It led to high domestic violence against women. Even normalized one where being the wife was considered just being a man. These are very much correlated with lack of opportunities for women to get earn and live independently. Too many men were using the "protection" as an excuse for being the primary danger in their women's lives.
By tastyface 2025-11-2219:46 What the fuck, dude?
Bud, "your" people are "getting replaced" because they’re not fucking enough. Pounding your chest about "low-IQ" immigrants and masculinity won't help: they still won't fuck until they feel they can afford the lifestyle they want, regardless of who you feel the "burden of proof" is on. Enjoy seeing -- gasp!! -- a whole lot more brown faces with scary names in the future. (As always, the kids will be alright, regardless of whatever scornful glances they might catch from insecure adult "men".)
Want to raise the next generation of humans in a healthy, humanistic way? Then you go fucking do it, Mr. Big Man. Otherwise, let us do the sensible thing of having universal child care and go back to your racist rat hole.
Someday your woke kids will read your comment and will be mortified.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2220:42 Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.
It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.
By bryanlarsen 2025-11-2219:032 reply 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.
By czhu12 2025-11-2219:10 I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2220:43 The Economist is a capitalism cheerleader, so no, they would not care for that study.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-2217:053 reply 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.
If the tax man can't see it, it doesn't exist.
.
Scenario A: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. Max stays home with them, and Alex has a job with a coworker named Avery.
Scenario B: Max and Alex are a couple and have kids. They both work, and hire Avery to watch the kids.
The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
By Rebelgecko 2025-11-2218:034 reply The financials of childcare don't really make sense to me. YMMV depending on your situation, but childcare costs are basically equivalent to my wife's teacher salary. And because of our tax bracket, it'd actually be CHEAPER for her to quit her job and take care of 2 kids full time, vs getting paid teach like 20 kids. There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression, but it seems broken that there's a decent financial argument for leaving the workforce.
That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:512 reply > That either means that childcare is too expensive or teachers don't get paid enough (probably both tbh)
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
By somenameforme 2025-11-2220:29 Yip. Oddly enough, this has a lot of economic parallels with cooking at home vs eating out. For a silly example, you can make an Egg McMuffin for a tiny fraction of what you'd pay at McDonalds for one. Yet McDonalds (franchise, not corporate) operate on single digit profit margins. Why?
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
Poorer people use home-based daycares, which has the same cost advantages.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2221:17 It doesn't. You still need someone to commute to where the daycare is because they don't live there, transaction costs related to payment processing, and that's often illegal if you do it for money because of zoning ordinances etc.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
By mixmastamyk 2025-11-2220:351 reply Sounds like barter to me. There are some benefits, the kid expands their social life, the parent gets to fulfill career needs, etc. There may be issues, but shouldn't be thought of in completely negative terms.
By abustamam 2025-11-2223:29 I don't think daycare is necessarily a net negative. I just don't think many families have thought the calculus through.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
By cogman10 2025-11-2218:37 Behold the glory of private equity.
Childcare is expensive because it's an industry captured by PE and in usual fashion they've increased costs while decreasing quality.
The caretaker watching your kid and the 20 other kids certainly isn't making the $20/hr they are charging to watch your kid. Even though they are doing all the work. Even their managers aren't typically making much money. It's the owner of the facilities that's vacuuming up the profits. And because the only other competition is the weirdo lady storing kids in the cellar, it's a lucrative business.
My wife did childcare. It's a major racket. Filled with over worked and underpaid employees and grift at every level. But hey, the owner was able to talk about how hard it was for them and how they actually got a really good deal on their porche (not joking) which is why nobody got raises.
It's a low skill job with a lot of young people that like the idea of playing with kids/babies around.
By codazoda 2025-11-2218:35 My kids were young 25 years ago but the same was true for us then.
By nineplay 2025-11-2219:41 The financials of leaving the workforce rarely make sense to me.
> There's tradeoffs in terms of career progression
There's X years of lost income, lost retirement savings, lost raises and bonuses ( depending on career ), lost promotions, lost acquisition of new skills which will keep the stay-home parent up to date with the modern workforce once they leave.
Teaching and nursing are still women dominated and famously supportive of women going back to work or starting work after staying home with the kids. For every other career path, good luck. How many people here would hire someone who'd be out of the workforce for 5, 10, 15 years without a second thought?
This analysis is incomplete for a couple of reasons:
1. any universal childcare scheme will involve groups larger than the median at-home familial group. Avery is watching ~1-2 kids, but if those kids are at creche, they are in a group of (say) ~4-5.
2. In much of the country, a) is financially out of reach for many couples due to cost of living generally being based around two-income households.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-2218:144 reply 4.5? At a US daycare those kids will be in a group of 20-40, with one or two adults supervising.
Varies by state and age? My very red state does not allow a group of 40, full stop. The largest group allowed is for 3-year-olds, with a 1:15 adult:child ratio. For younger children, the ratios and group sizes are smaller.
I was off on the 4-5 though. Ratio for < 1 yo is 1:6.
Anyway, this is all to the point that it's nothing like the 1-2 in in-home care. There's a reason nannies are associated with richer people.
By mlhpdx 2025-11-2219:01 Given the cost of out of home childcare, three kids more than pays for a nanny. Even two can.
Not exactly a “rich” thing, just a matter of “scale” (in YC terms).
By swivelmaster 2025-11-2218:30 In California, at least, those numbers wouldn't be acceptable.
My daughter's at an in-home daycare with IIRC five or six other kids. There are two adults there full-time, sometimes three.
Two adults supervising 20-40 daycare-aged kids is simply not feasible.
By sa46 2025-11-2218:31 Depends on the state and child age. California is on the stricter end of legally mandated ratios:
0-18 months: 1:3
18 months to 3 years: 1:4
3-5 years: 1:5
By nradov 2025-11-2218:29 Bullshit. Most US states have strict staff ratio limits for properly licensed daycare facilities. The exact ratios vary by state but typically this is something like 1:4 for infants up to 1:14 for school-age children.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:42 > The same total work gets done by the same group of people in both cases, but the second measures as "better" for "the economy".
It's worse than that, because it's not the same work. In Scenario B the person watching the kids isn't their parent so they don't have the same bond or interest in the child's long-term success. It also introduces a lot of additional inefficiencies because now you have trust and vetting issues, either the child or the person watching the child has to commute every day so that they're in the same place because they no longer live in the same house as each other, etc.
My SO spent a few months collecting the neighbour's daughter along with our own from kindergarten and in exchange the neighbour would make dinner for us. This arrangement started because the neighbours' shifts didn't align with kindergarten hours.
At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
By caseysoftware 2025-11-2219:111 reply > At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.
How is this bad?
Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.
Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
By Tade0 2025-11-2221:09 What I meant to say is that not only is this labour completely unrecognised as contributing to the overall economy, it's essential labour, without which other, measurable work could not be performed.
Bottom line is that the ways we measure economic output are deeply flawed.
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2217:45 It’s not measured in GDP but it is measured. For example right now it’s estimated that household production is around 23% of GDP. So quite sizable.
Part of the reason it’s not included in GDP is just that it’s not reliable to measure precisely so it’s not as valuable as a statistic for making monetary and fiscal policy decisions.
But what if Avery has the skills and training to watch 5 kids at once in a group?
By hypertele-Xii 2025-11-2218:39 How do you "skill" yourself more attention to give?
By gcapu 2025-11-2217:44 They are very different.
In scenario A, the labor of watching the kids is untaxed.
In Scenario B is Avery watches many kids and the effort per kid is reduced, but you get taxed.
By phantasmish 2025-11-2217:451 reply I have a suspicion a lot of the “why did wages stop keeping pace with the growth of the economy?” problem is because real productivity hasn’t been growing nearly as fast as our measures of it. But the measures are tied to ways for capitalists to extract more money, so that fake-growth does make line go up for owners. But there’s not nearly as much more actual work getting done as one might think from the numbers.
I mean what, 10ish% of our entire GDP in the US, and IIRC that’s generously low, is being throwing in a fire from excessive spending on healthcare for effectively no actual benefit, versus peer states. And that’s just one fake-productivity issue (though one that affects the US more than most). But our GDP would drop if we fixed that!
By somenameforme 2025-11-2219:31 It's inflation IMO. Wages started stagnating in the 70s which is exactly when the USD became completely unbacked (due to the end of Bretton Woods), enabling the government to go endlessly deep into debt, which we proceeded to do with gusto, sending inflation skyrocketing.
Somebody who's earning 20% more today than they were 5 years ago would probably think they're on, at least, a reasonable career trajectory. In reality they would be earning less in real terms than they were 5 years ago, thanks to inflation.
In times of low or no inflation it's impossible for this happen. But with inflation it becomes very difficult for workers to really appreciate how much they're earning, and it enables employers to even cut wages while their employees smile about receiving a 2% 'pay raise' when they should be raging about the pay cut they just took.
By jancsika 2025-11-2218:21 Interesting game engine:
1. Each sim gets a minimum wage of $childcare dollars
2. Each sim gets a maximum wage of $childcare dollars
By beowulfey 2025-11-2218:18 It's not just about the economy, it is about freedom of choice. What does Max and Avery feel about their careers? Would they rather be working or watching kids? If one parent has to stay home, that might mean having to give up a good career.
No one should be forced to choose between a career and kids, unless the goal is falling birthrates.
By __turbobrew__ 2025-11-2219:58 In Scenario B the government gets to collect more tax revenues, and also has additional levers to influence certain behaviour (the government will tax you, but give you a tax break if you do Y). Also, the government can make your labor worth less by printing money and increasing inflation.
By jazzyjackson 2025-11-2218:541 reply Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do, it's just not compensated for fairly. The wrong thing to do is ensure the parents are working for low wages + have children raised by low wage workers.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-11-2220:15 > Child rearing is the most economically important task a mother can do
This is really only true in the post-WWII Western nuclear family. Most cultures historically and today have group elements to childbearing.
I'd argue that that's the wrong goal. Ideally, families can afford to live off of one salary so that mothers could choose to continue to care for their children if they wanted to do so.
Currently, very few families are privileged enough to live off of one salary. Both parents need to work in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, or that free childcare isn't a good interim solution. But important to keep the end goal in mind.
By Braxton1980 2025-11-2220:442 reply The government can set up free child care as it has already set up other similar programs.
How would the government make it so that a single salary can provide for a family? Wouldn't this require massive interference with the economy?
By abustamam 2025-11-2223:23 Yeah, that's why I said it wasn't an easy problem to solve. No need to let the infeasibility of a perfect solution get in the way of a possible, yet however unideal solution.
By venturecruelty 2025-11-2221:09 I mean, a lack of cheap housing is also a policy failure.
Also, there's already massive interference with the economy, all the time, every day. It's just hard to see, and the working class doesn't benefit from it. Housing isn't just magically expensive by some law of nature.
By jagged-chisel 2025-11-2217:161 reply They would need to be building tanks and airplanes.
We've strayed pretty far from the original topic here, but the reality is that the US military is literally running out of working aircraft because they're so old. The average age of USAF aircraft is now about 28 years. The fleet was allowed to decay and not substantially recapitalized during the GWOT. Many of the fighters in the combat coded inventory aren't even allowed to hit their original 9G maneuvering limit any more due to accumulated airframe fatigue. Now we're paying an overdue bill.
And let's please not have any uninformed claims that somehow cheap "drones" will magically make large, expensive manned aircraft obsolete. Small, cheap drones are effective in a trench warfare environment like the current conflict in Ukraine but they lack the range, speed, and payload necessary to be useful in a potential major regional conflict with China. And the notion of relying on AI for any sort of complex mission in a dynamic environment remains firmly in the realm of science fiction: maybe that will be feasible in a few decades but for now any really complex missions still rely on humans in the loop to execute effectively.
Oh yes it’s about time the US enters another war so we can justify even more military spending and less spending to improve the livelihood of the people.
Just kidding we are already doing that with Venezuela.
By nradov 2025-11-2222:52 You're really missing the point. If we're going to have a military at all then we have to constantly keep building new combat aircraft (and other weapon systems). The old ones wear out and become obsolete. Ironically this is the best way to prevent a major war, through deterrence. (I do think that attacking Venezuela would be stupid and pointless.)
By WalterBright 2025-11-2218:372 reply The problem is that fighter aircraft have gotten too expensive to afford to build, even for a nation.
By nradov 2025-11-2219:02 Sure, that is a problem. Ironically the best solution from an overall expense management standpoint is to drive economies of scale by building more and retiring older units on an accelerated schedule to cut maintenance costs. Keep production lines running continuously instead of periodically starting and stopping. The F-35A, while badly flawed in certain ways, is at least relatively affordable due to high production volumes.
By mlhpdx 2025-11-2219:06 Not to build, but to build and maintain. We never budget for maintenance (we as in companies and governments).
By lenkite 2025-11-2218:00 Everyone should learn how to build drones.
Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
I think we should act with empathy and care for each other.
The government does not need to be run like a fucking business.
It's because it runs like a business that we're able to enjoy a high standard of living.
If the economy stops growing, or worse, degrades, everyone will suffer incredibly. Job loss, investment loss, higher cost of living.
There's a wide gulf between childcare for none and childcare for all.
I'm an atheist, but some of the cheapest childcare is at churches. Orders of magnitude cheaper than private childcare because they already have the infrastructure for it. I've had affluent people turn their nose at the idea of Christians watching their kids. But there are entirely affordable options if you're not being choosey.
By TimorousBestie 2025-11-2218:451 reply I don’t understand the conjunction of “the state should not subsidize childcare with taxes” and “the church should subsidize childcare with underpaid labor and tithes.”
By tbrownaw 2025-11-2220:23 Church membership is voluntary.
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.
Very few other countries have free childcare. In Europe I'm only aware of Slovenia and a couple others. Canada doesn't have anything close to the universal system that's in New Mexico.
By tomp 2025-11-2219:38 Slovenia doesn’t have free healthcare, only subsidized.
By ivan_gammel 2025-11-2219:28 Berlin, Germany. Admission from 1.5 y.o.
In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Also even if it is cheap, children can attend it few days a week, staying sick at home almost every week for a day or two. Not every employer can tolerate such worker.
By ninalanyon 2025-11-2219:30 > In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
Norway. The maximum price for barnehage (kindergarten Norwegian style) is 1 200 NOK per month, about 120 USD, but never more than 6% of the household's income. Every child is guaranteed a place. Families with low income get 20 hours a week 'core time' free. Children can attend from one year old until they start school at five or six.
See https://www.statsforvalteren.no/innlandet/barnehage-og-oppla...
By coryrc 2025-11-2220:52 > In which country there is a cheap childcare, especially if we are talking about children under 3?
France AFAICT
https://www.newsweek.com/us-mom-unpacks-costs-child-care-par...
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/explainer-how-childcare...
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.
I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.
By vidarh 2025-11-2218:44 I grew up in Norway, that while it doesn't have UBI does have a safety net that meant the notion of ever living in poverty was just entirely foreign to me growing up, and for me at least I think that made it easier to take the decision to leave university and start a company.
The risk of ending unemployed was just never scary.
By meagher 2025-11-2217:49 This was a worry for me when leaving my full time job in 2022 to work on open source. Our OSS project was able to pay rent, but was concerned about healthcare costs for my partner and me (NY state has extended COBRA coverage, but it's extremely expensive). My co-founder lives in Australia, which has free basic health care, so he was up for leaving his job before I was.
Taking the risk was one of the best decisions I've made, but if I had a chronic health condition/higher healthcare costs, probably would not have been comfortable.
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2217:47 I think it’s more likely that UBI discourages business creation than encourages it.
Though the studies seem to show roughly zero net effect so perhaps these cancel out.
Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group.
A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed for life, or the goalposts move to claim that UBI shouldn’t be about anything other than improving safety nets.
Unfortunately I think the UBI that many people imagine is a lot higher than any UBI that would be mathematically feasible. Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it, far beyond what you could collect from the stereotypical “just tax billionaires” ideal. Try multiplying the population of the US by poverty level annual income and you’ll see that the sum total is a huge number. In practice, anyone starting a business would probably end up paying more in taxes under a UBI scheme than they’d collect from the UBI payments.
By vidarh 2025-11-2218:55 The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.
For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.
Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".
Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
By JoshTriplett 2025-11-2217:442 reply > Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it
Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully) worry that it won't last more than 4-8 years because the subsequent administration will attack it with everything they have, and thus treat it as temporary.
By caseysoftware 2025-11-2219:17 > And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
That's a major claim. Which places under UBI (or in one of the experiments) has that manifested?
> And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize).
This is hypothetical, isn't it?
By vidarh 2025-11-2219:05 Depends what you mean.
We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.
In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.
In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.
That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
It takes a good idea and a willingness to take a risk to start a business. I don't think that risk aversion is what's stopping new businesses, there are a lot of people who do a lot of what I consider too risky.
Instead, what I wonder is how many new businesses wouldn't be viable under a tax structure that provides ubi and health care. Not to be dismissive but that's definitely a concern in a world replete with fledgling businesses that mostly fail.
By SoftTalker 2025-11-2218:221 reply Yeah this is sort of the reaction I had. Removing "risk" with UBI and free healthcare and free childcare also removes the filters for a lot of people who would be bad at running a business. If you don't have the stomach to take the risk and do the work to make your idea a success, then maybe you shouldn't try.
We don't need millions of more failed businesses as the result of giving everyone UBI.
By watwut 2025-11-2220:26 Why do you need people to make big risks livelihood to do business? People from affluent environment start businesses the most often and they dont really risk all that much. They know they will get help if it fails.
In fact, successful businesses started by people who can return back to good jobs if it fails are completely normal thing.
The data on UBI isn't out there, but it is notable that countries with similar tax rates to the US manage to have universal healthcare and more expansive safety nets. Some examples: New Zealand (tax rate ~30% less than the US), Korea, Switzerland, Australia, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Norway.
Americans really should be asking why we're paying a significantly higher tax burden than New Zealand and not getting similar services as part of the bargain.
Put another way: the US is incredibly rich compared to other countries. Our poorest states have higher GDP per capita than most rich countries. And our taxes are not particularly low. Our social issues are 100% about how we choose to allocate our shared resources. The good thing is we can always choose to make different choices.
By Aloisius 2025-11-2222:23 New Zealand effective taxes rates are generally higher than the US, not lower unless you're doing something odd like comparing based on average local wage.
Switzerland, the Netherlands and Japan all use the Bismark model (contributions for insurance), so taxes don't really reflect the cost of universal healthcare.
The issue in the US is not an allocation problem. The average person in the US already pays more in taxes that are spent on healthcare than in any other country. We're just so inefficient with our spending that we only manage to cover a fraction of our population with it.
By bluecalm 2025-11-2219:21 Switzerland has mandatory healthcare insurance and subsidies for low income earners. The insurance is provided by private companies. It's not really universal healthcare system like in most EU countries.
Private insurance can work out fine if regulated well. In USA you have regulatory capture that makes services expensive. Impossible barriers to entry coupled with terrible regulation on price transparency and a lot of cartel like behavior.
By airstrike 2025-11-2217:41 UBI is both a pipe dream and unnecessary.
By tenpies 2025-11-2218:06 n = 1, but if we get UBI, I will immediately start a precious metals brokerage business.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2218:38 Obamacare is threatening to capsize the country with its cost.
By dmix 2025-11-2218:47 America is #3 in the world in per capita public education spending (Luxumberg being #1). Which is the education system I always see Europeans maligned as producing “dumb Americans”.
US also ranks #1 in public healthcare funding both as per capita and as percentage of GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_spending_as_percent_of_...
By RestlessMind 2025-11-2218:11 Reality doesn't match your claim, for example when one looks at European countries who have all of that.
By jazzyjackson 2025-11-2218:572 reply Why is "the economy" our highest priority here?
By Aloisius 2025-11-2222:47 Why is the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services (aka, the economy) the highest priority?
Well, mostly because it's required to keep the vast majority of people in society alive and the effects of disruption are only second to war in terms of potential for misery.
By roughly 2025-11-2220:13 It’s not, but we seem to have to keep convincing business people that they’re part of society, so it helps to be able to appeal to their pocketbooks, too.
Have you seen comparisons between American and Canadian productivity? It’s definitely more complicated than just socialist leaning government programs make the country more productive.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2218:39 The Canadian economy is not doing very well.
And yet every single socialist, European country is behind the US in terms of their economic output.
By lordnacho 2025-11-2218:55 So tired of the argument.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
Yeah, it’s like forgetting that the point of money in life is living, rather than the money itself.
By dmix 2025-11-2219:08 Life is not about checking off boxes on how much free stuff you can hypothetically get from the government either. That has tons of costs and risks just like everything else in life. It’s all relative.
Totally agree.
However, this only works in a high trust society, which we no longer have.
Trust is irrelevant, families gain the after tax income of working mothers but society gains not just the pretax value but the actual value of work generated. Thus subsidizing childcare and moving the needle to align society’s benefits and family benefits is a net gain without the issue of trust being involved.
The same is true of quality public education etc, however creating US vs THEM narratives are politically powerful even if they don’t actually reflect reality.
By MichaelZuo 2025-11-2217:462 reply How can trust be irrelevant? Why would anyone want pretenders and deceivers to have better families?
If you yourself alongside everyone else in your country benefits why should you care if you happen to dislike some of those people?
Because YOU are paying for those benefits and they aren’t. If you truly don’t see how offering something for free would attract all the freeloaders, increasing the load on those who work, there’s no saving you.
By Retric 2025-11-2221:12 What I am describing is you literally saving money.
If a government can convert a 1k outlay into 1.1k of tax revenue that same month you aren’t actually paying for those benefits you are getting a little revenue instead of zero revenue. Due to their debts operating across such long timescales people make the same basic argument for things that take longer to see positive returns, but daycare is a very short loop.
By balamatom 2025-11-2221:40 So that we don't get even more of them!
While in a low trust society, which you obviously already have, people are most productive when they're at perpetual risk of starvation.
No, you simply are unable to reap the benefits that are available to high trust societies.
By balamatom 2025-11-2221:26 Reap 'em? I'm unable to even conceive of them!
By linksnapzz 2025-11-2217:371 reply "productive"
By balamatom 2025-11-2221:39 Simplest way to increase total absolute output is always to stop providing intake.
Obviously, this fails almost immediately; operative word "almost". Definition of "almost": longer than a moment. Definition of moment:
As it happens, high-trust societies have just spent the better part of a century teaching their constituents to "live in the present", atop half a millenium of teaching them that time is a thing linear, discrete, and properly scaled for decision making.
Ergo: if the time between doing something stupid and realizing you did something stupid is longer than your attention span, you're a perpetual motion device.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2218:355 reply > 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!
By ivan_gammel 2025-11-2219:143 reply > 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.
> Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
By ivan_gammel 2025-11-2222:09 Well, that‘s not related to this specific conversation, but industrialization in socialist states did that in a number of cases. Soviet Union between 1950s and 1970s has seen significant growth and by various accounts achieved up to 5x improvement in purchase power compared to Russian Empire at its peak, in 1913 (how much goods could a worker buy for their salary, not including welfare, which was obviously superior in SU). I‘m not saying socialism is good, the price paid for that was terrible. And anyway my argument wasn’t that there were better societies, just that America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans (and let’s not forget that 60% of the time in that century there existed slavery). People went there not because it was great (and not everyone went there, many German settlers chose opposite direction, moving to Wild East, helping colonial expansion of Russian empire). It was just marginally better than certain places in Europe with its wars and famines.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2222:161 reply Every nation that exists or ever existed took land by force. And yes, there were public works projects.
The government did not engage in welfare until FDR.
By ivan_gammel 2025-11-2222:25 I agree on that. It doesn’t make your previous comment right.
By seizethecheese 2025-11-2219:281 reply This comment is sort of weird. Like you’re finding technically true rebuttals that don’t really refute the high level point.
By ivan_gammel 2025-11-2220:001 reply The high level point is idealism not grounded in historical facts and probably not worthy spending time and going deeper with criticism, because full rebuttal isn’t some expert knowledge - ChatGPT can do that for you. America of 1800s is everything but libertarian paradise and is not truly exceptional. Industrialization in Europe increased prosperity while building welfare states at the same time.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2222:53 Not truly exceptional? Some fun facts:
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
America truly is exceptional.
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
By WalterBright 2025-11-2222:56 LOL, thanks for the kind words! I just happened to like working on compilers, as few programmers will touch them. If you're ever in the Seattle area, we have a monthly D Coffee Haus where we drink and talk about languages, compilers, airplanes, cars, and physics. All are welcome!
(Even C++ people show up! All in good fun.)
> 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.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2223:00 The price of freedom is always paid in blood.
> This country was 100% founded on community sacrifice.
I recommend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and if you really want to get into it, the Federalist Papers. I don't recall any of that advocating free food for all, UBI, free healthcare, etc.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2220:481 reply > 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).
By WalterBright 2025-11-2223:07 Yes I know about that theory. But it has problems.
When the US was founded, half of the states were slavers, the other half free. Guess which half prospered? The free North! Which stagnated? The slave South.
Did you know that the Slave South was unable to supply their troops? They were largely barefoot. The reason they were in Pennsylvania was to raid a shoe factory (but got smashed at Gettysburg instead). Towns and cities and industry sprouted up all over in the free North, not so much in the South.
The Civil War resulted in burning the South to the ground. Poof!
As for natural resources, why is resource-rich S. America mired in poverty? Why did the Indian nations never industrialize, and remained poor? Why did resource-poor Japan become super rich after being burned to the ground in WW2? Why did resource-rich Russia never become prosperous? Why did zero-resource Taiwan become a wealthy powerhouse? Why is resource rich Africa still stuck in poverty?
There is no connection between resource rich and prosperity.
By selimthegrim 2025-11-2218:452 reply > 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
I disagree with Walter here but the US wasn't founded by urban immigrants. There's a difference between pioneers, like the Mennonites in Mexico, and immigrants, like digital nomads in Mexico. The former are almost always more popular than the latter.
By selimthegrim 2025-11-2221:07 Even so, do you think the Mennonites or Mormons in Mexico would agree with no community sacrifice as as part of their narrative?
By WalterBright 2025-11-2223:09 I grew up next to the Hispanic neighborhood in Arizona, and the schools I attended were about 30% Hispanic.
By xnx 2025-11-2221:23 > Funny how we keep forgetting the past
The remembering/forgetting what "made America great" is very selective. Factory jobs: yes! Labor unions: (silence)
By add-sub-mul-div 2025-11-2217:064 reply 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.
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent
It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem.
The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate.
When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
By runako 2025-11-2218:20 There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits).
Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all).
Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
By WalterBright 2025-11-2218:422 reply > 1% of the recipients are fraudulent
Google sez:
"The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
By Aloisius 2025-11-230:03 Em. "Improper payments" includes mistaken payments, overpayments and underpayments.
It is a measure of payment (or non-payment) errors, not fraud.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-2220:51 That doesn't mean 11% of recipients are fraudulent.
By OGEnthusiast 2025-11-2218:002 reply Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
Where does mass trustworthy behavior (ie, "a high trust society") come from?
From the perspective of 2025, it's pretty incredible how much of a higher trust society we had as recently as 2019.
By Braxton1980 2025-11-2220:501 reply How are you measuring this?
By loeg 2025-11-2221:59 Vibes.
By tstrimple 2025-11-2219:15 It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.
By selimthegrim 2025-11-2218:451 reply Do you have more references about this?
It's a very recent story, but for example:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a...
The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:
https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
By selimthegrim 2025-11-2221:081 reply Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
By coryrc 2025-11-2223:20 You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news.
"Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
By terminalshort 2025-11-2217:331 reply Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?
I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits.
With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
By coryrc 2025-11-2223:26 Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2217:49 There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
By terminalshort 2025-11-2217:531 reply But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
By Braxton1980 2025-11-2221:01 That $200billion means about 17% fraud in a program with minimal checks
By ryandrake 2025-11-2217:11 Don't forget: When they help billionaires and trillion dollar business, it's framed as driving prosperity and stimulating the economy.
By Braxton1980 2025-11-2220:541 reply 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.
By add-sub-mul-div 2025-11-2223:31 A mentor once told me that telling people something is much less effective than leading them to realize it themselves.
Of course you're right, but spelling it out explicitly leads to a partisan flame ware.
Maybe people should stop voting for the party that does that then. And for politicians that do that then.
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2217:50 Turns out most people apparently don’t actually want that. Or at least not that strongly to overcome other factors.
Weird how people seem to think democracy only works when their side is winning.
By loeg 2025-11-2219:12 Neither major US political party has a great track record here. On balance, I prefer one over the other, as I'm sure you do too. But they're both pretty far off from my ideal set of policies.
By macintux 2025-11-2217:24 It turns out that the promise to hurt other people more is a winning strategy.
By anon191928 2025-11-2216:58 it's because people dont operate with facts and truth. they just want lies instead, sad reality
By softwaredoug 2025-11-2216:591 reply 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".
By softwaredoug 2025-11-2218:34 We put massive public funding into vaccine. We also seemed to fund healthcare a great deal (now being pulled back as ACA subsidies expire). Covid was the basis for a lot of short term emergency measures in early Biden, even late Trump I, admins.
By zeroonetwothree 2025-11-2217:51 We developed vaccines in record time, saving millions of lives. If that’s “feeble” then I guess I’ll take it every time.
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
By sudobash1 2025-11-2218:18 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.
By paradox460 2025-11-2220:50 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
By EasyMark 2025-11-2222:11 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
By jameslk 2025-11-2223:23 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
By Aloisius 2025-11-230:17 Are immigrants privileged then?
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.
By jameslk 2025-11-2220:20 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
By EasyMark 2025-11-2222:12 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.
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.
By mothballed 2025-11-2220:122 reply 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.
By abustamam 2025-11-2221:01 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.
