HN Reader

This is fantastic! I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential. Families who were previously in poverty because the mom would struggle to pay for childcare to work can now have assurance kids are ok while the mom can pursue jobs, start her own small business (huge chunk of businesses are small businesses ran by women) and prosper. If you pose your child’s safety vs another dollar, most parents would vote for their children. But if the children are taken care of, parents can give the economy their best and the taxes paid and GDP gained will pay back for the expense manyfold.

I'm going to take the reverse position. I don't like this policy.

I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.

This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.

It's easy to promise things, but hard to deliver them. How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"

Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?

Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?

Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?

It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.

What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.

Childcare is a great way to kick this off - it's politically hard to fight against anything "for the children" and it's not a stretch at all to extend coverage gradually, as people see the benefit and want it elsewhere / just one more year / etc.

Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.

Just as a general aside - The amount of hubris when it comes to Early Childhood Education is always astounding to me. So many people assume they are experts because they were a toddler once or can become an expert just by reading a couple books. How many people on HN are even aware there is an entire specialty in Education devoted to preschoolers for very good reason? ANY program that attempts to put kids in a good daycare with trained professionals is a win for everyone.

The reason we need this is because both parents need to work because wages are so low families cannot live on a single income. I wish we could fix that rather than allowing even more people to work putting more downward pressure on wages.

Where is the money coming from to keep these services afloat? The federal funding environment seems less magnanimous these days, plus as other have pointed out, New Mexico is not an economic powerhouse.

> New Mexico has expanded access to no-cost child care to families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, reducing financial strain on tens of thousands of families.

This is confusing me, is this the same as "at or below the federal poverty level" or is there something I'm missing with that 400%? Do you have to be 400% below the federal poverty level to qualify?

They'll probably just pass a law that states can't do this? Just like many states passed laws against municipal fiber.

It baffles me (as European) that any politician, or informed voter, would stand up for non free child healthcare. Let alone the moral aspect of denying a child healthcare because she happen to be born into a low income family, it can’t possibly be economically advantageous for any society to ignore child healthy issues and it’s future.

"child care available to all New Mexicans"

Does this mean a stay-at-home mom or dad can get a daycare license and get paid by the state to take care of their own children?

> Programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate. New Mexico estimates an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals are needed to fully achieve a universal system.

Is this a reasonable wage in New Mexico? Here in Southern California you could not find qualified candidates for that but I know general cost of living is higher.

This is awesome.

I suspect that for every one job the government would subsidize for a daycare professional, that we’d see three women enter the workforce.

That’s a net of four people employed.

I have no proof of this aside from my own experience watching parents struggle to find care for their kids. Even well off ones where I live. In Massachusetts!

Good for you, New Mexico. I’m rooting for you.

Every state should have universal childcare, however we should also be offering universal birth control as a compliment.

As I read the back and forth here…

When I lived in Norway 35 years ago, I’m pretty sure they had this. Little kids went to barnehagen. I think as early as 1. Can anyone from the Nordic states chime in? Is that still the case? Does it work? I would guess Sweden and Denmark were similar.

Everything about this thread sums up how brutal America is. It’s wild.

Most people are forgetting the sine qua non: No billionaires were harmed in the making of this law.

I wonder what other laws like this can be passed that do not harm billionaires.

Slightly tangent. At some point in future I can imagine humanoid robots will be doing this job. Of course, the robots need to be super reliable before we hand over the our kids

New Mexico also issued an order removing barriers to pharmacies giving COVID boosters.

https://www.nmhealth.org/news/vaccine/2025/8/

The states are stepping up.

“No cost universal child care” Also: “savings of $12,000 per year”

So this will be financed by a voluntary election by those who support it, i.e., voluntary increase in the various taxes people pay in NM?

We have something similar in Quebec, $7 CAD per day. It's one of the coolest societal things in the province. Yes we pay a lot in taxes, but we have stuff like this.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-unive...

I think DC has the start of a really good system here. There's universal Pre-K 3 and 4. Most elementary schools offer it, but you can also get a large subsidy to go towards a private daycare. I'd love to see that expanded to all ages. Day cares here are super heavily regulated (and thus expensive) and apparently the paperwork is a nightmare for the day care, but in practice it's super easy for parents.

I see all these comments in the vein of 'why should you force people to work in the mines and not get to love their child' and I wonder if any of these people have ever had toddlers. I love my kid, and love spending time with her. But she really likes daycare (and now school). Not only does she get better socialization than me taking her to the park for 2 hours, but she learns skills that I wouldn't be consistent about teaching. It turns out, being taught by people who have years of practice and degrees in childcare is a pretty good idea!

We did Prek-4 at our public school and you could immediately tell the difference between the daycare kids, the nanny kids, and the home-parent kids. The daycare kids were much more prepared and able to cope, and this is at a school where parental involvement was quite high. I don't think the different approaches are universally better or worse, but it's clear to me that the quality of the daycare and the parent matters a lot more than which one you choose.

This is really great!!!

Imagine if we saw mostly headlines like this rather than things like "Trump threatens war on Chicago" or "Supreme Court approves racial profiling", or "Columbia students deported for protesting" or "Trump delays tariffs for 90 more days".

Sounds great.

>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.

How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care

[1]https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...

Im probably in the minority on this opinion but I think its crazy to entrust your children to low paid strangers with no stake in their development during critical times in their lives.

I support my tax dollars going to pay for universal child care. This is likely the second or third largest expense for young families. To be honest, I do not know how people can afford to have multiple children in daycare in any major metropolitan area.

Excellent, it's a start ... anyone else predicting this will be get cancelled by the dumpling for being too Communist. It's on my bingo card.

I'm very unfamiliar with New Mexico (having only been a tourist in Albuquerque and Santa Fe for a few days), but according to U.S. News it ranks 50 out of 50 for education: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education. Given some level of geographic mobility it doesn't seem like a place I would want to raise a child.

Am I mistaken? Thoughts?

This is is honestly an economic nobrainer. Of course it needs to be tuned correctly for the context. I hope they they look at the long history of this in the Nordics. There's an insane amount of economic research readily available.

Is there a mandated state ratio of workers to children? In Michigan, by law, it is 1:4.

It is great to offer free childcare to all citizens, but if those childcare facilities are inadequately resourced the quality of care will decline.

If AI does actually lead to large economic gains but also high unemployment, then we should be able to invest most in social programs like this and let people make a good living providing them. (as well as all other workers, through wage subsidies)

That said, if you don’t have a job… do you need childcare? But I’m assuming there will still be enough demand from those employed

Apparently until now they've been providing this only to families below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. FPL is $32,150 for a 4-person family, so $128,600 combined family income (2 people working for $64,300 each -- and that's before fed and state taxes are deducted). Since that is far from being wealthy enough to "just" spring for expensive care, I'm glad to see this.

My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.

That's wild. New Mexico is fairly notorious for having terrible medical and social safety net stuff.

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.

Nice! Illinois had something similar called AllKids but that was for lower income families [0]. More states need this in US.

[0] https://hfs.illinois.gov/medicalprograms/allkids.html

Important context here is that New Mexico's state income tax rates are in the "red state" bracket. Notably, they are lower than states like Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Montana.

what happened with socialization, friends and parents

I just want to +1 this post before it gets flagged for being "political" or whatever.

I grew up in the 1980s and have watched America slide from being a civilization that was the envy of the world into something resembling empire or feudalism or I-don't-know-what. The US literally declared its independence from England to shrug off authoritarianism/aristocracy. Yet we've reproduced that wealth inequality here.

We're going to have to draw a line in the sand that says that we believe that we can build a dignified society together. That means that we've got to stop worshipping rugged individualism when our billionaires got rich on government contracts and let children starve in poverty. The hypocrisy has reached self-destructive proportions.

If free childcare is gonna sink the country, then we're already sunk. Same with free healthcare and free education. You want to know what sinks a country? When grocery prices triple and (waves hand at everything).

Despite being 31st in educational funding, New Mexico has ranked 50th in juvenile education for 8 years in a row per the Annie E. Casey foundation:

https://www.aecf.org/interactive/databook?l=35

You can research for yourself and see other evidence that the educational outcomes for children in New Mexico is generally very, very poor.

Expect similar results with New Mexico's "universal" child care.

New Mexico has some serious generational social issues. Extreme poverty, lack of education, lack of work (or most anything else) ethic are very common. Drugs and alcoholism are endemic.

I wonder if some of the intent behind this is to reduce some of the generational effects by exposing children early to at least some semblance of order and sobriety? Then when they enter school they have more of a chance.

I'm not by any means "socialist inclined" but I can't say I'm against this program because the situation is dire enough something must be done.