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>If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service. It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

> Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service.

Why would it work in such a way for this when it works the opposite for everything else?

> It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

If the subsidy is enough to pay for the "fancy" daycare then everyone can afford it because everyone gets the subsidy. If it isn't, you haven't done that to begin with, because then the public daycare is underfunded and the wealthy parents use their money to opt out of it regardless of whether it's operated by the government.

> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.

It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.

> Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost.

I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.

> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.

And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.

> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.

> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.

The person having so many children on such a low income is probably also living in very confined space. I'm sure those kids love the change of scenery!

> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.

> I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

The amount of the subsidy is an independent question. Regardless of the amount you choose, it can then be in kind or in cash.

> Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

If you give someone with less money the amount of money it takes to pay for a quality daycare, they obviously now have the money to pay for it -- you've just given it to them.

At which point there are two possibilities, right? One is, they use it for that, in which case your objection doesn't apply. It's the same thing as happens if daycare was provided in kind.

The other is, they use a less expensive daycare because they need something else more than they need the more expensive daycare, e.g. they would use the extra money to buy food. Then what you're really doing is forcing them to use the more expensive daycare when given the choice they'd have used the money for something they regard as more important. That's not actually helping them when they're right, but assuming they're wrong is assuming that you know their circumstances better than they do.

> And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever.

Only under the assumption that being a homemaker isn't work.

> None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

Daycare as a business/government has costs that daycare as a family member doesn't. The former needs a separate piece of real estate to operate out of, insurance against claims by the family, the full complement of support staff for accounting/legal/HR/etc. The latter uses their own home which is a sunk cost and doesn't require the rest of it because they're not an organization.