Excerpts
Better watch out for pigs flying around, because the New York Times has discovered class consciousness, or at least is pretending to, as long as it can also snipe at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is already delivering on one of his central campaign promises: Bring down the high cost of child care by expanding the city’s universal pre-Kindergarten programs to serve younger children. He plans to make universal daycare available to all the city’s two- and three-year olds by the end of his first term.
But wait, asked the Times this week (gift link): If “universal” really means universal, and free child care will be available not only to minimum wage workers but also to people in well-off neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Upper East Side, doesn’t that mean that rich people will benefit, too? And if everyone benefits, how can that be democratic socialism, huh?
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You need to read all the way to the 11th paragraph to learn that while the Upper East Side has a lot of rich people, it’s also “more socioeconomically diverse than its stereotype. It is home to many renters and city workers, and it contains the gradations of wealth that make the city’s current affordability crisis so complex.”
And that really is the point of Mamdani’s plan for universal daycare: Make it available to anyone, and it will be broadly supported. It’s the very same logic as any social program that’s designed to be universal. Available to all, and paid for by taxation, so even if rich folks aren’t paying tuition for their kids, they are paying their fair share.
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Why yes, it’s the same reason that Joe Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit was available to nearly all parents: Sharply reducing child poverty is a good thing, and if the credits help the middle class — especially if they had lasted beyond the initial few months before the Biden version expired — the benefits will build a constituency that will sustain them politically. Give EVERYBODY eat!
The Times pretends that all sounds terribly suspicious, and notes that some places that are aiming for universal childcare, like California, have made it free for low-income people while letting middle-class folks access it on a discounted basis. In other words, means-testing, which is the surest way to limit a universal service, reduce its constituency, and make it ripe for cutting, since now it’s welfare, a benefit that’s wasted on “those” people. And, of course, means testing requires a level of bureaucracy that will use funds that could better be used to provide the service to more people.
So hell yes, let the people who eat expensive hamburgers have free child care, because they’ll keep the system funded for all the parents who need Hamburger Helper. While we’re at it, let’s also make sure the latter parents have options to get fresh veggies, too!