Excerpts
Late last month, the New York Times highlighted what might be considered a weakness in Zohran Mamdani’s universal free childcare plan: the rich will get to use it too. The article, titled “They Pay $34 for Burgers. Should Their Child Care Be Free?,” enumerated the consumerist excesses of a tony Upper East Side neighborhood slated to receive a daycare center, then questioned whether a city facing a budget crisis “should be using taxpayer money to fund free services that some families could pay for themselves.”
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But Mamdani’s critics get the last word: the piece concludes with one expert articulating the view that the first childcare spots should go to children from the lowest-income households, expanding up the income ladder on a sliding scale as funds become available.
This approach is known as means-testing, or gatekeeping access to public services behind eligibility requirements and restricting that eligibility to people with limited means. Examples include Medicaid, SNAP, and Section 8 housing vouchers, all of which are available only to low-income people. The opposite of means-testing is universal program design, where all people, no matter their income, are entitled to a particular benefit just for being members of society. Examples include public education, Social Security, and Medicare, where we all pay in with our taxes and all get to benefit directly.
The virtue of means-tested versus universal programs is not a new point of contention between centrist Democrats and the progressives and democratic socialists in their midst. During the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton differentiated herself from opponent Bernie Sanders by saying, “Now, I’m a little different from those who say free college for everybody. I am not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump’s kids.” The charge was that Sanders, by championing tuition-free public higher education open to all, was paradoxically backing a giveaway to economic elites. Clinton, favoring the same approach as the Mamdani skeptics quoted in the Times article, advocated beefing up financial aid for applicants from low-income backgrounds only.
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So, sure, you can save money up front with means-testing. The problem is that the programs themselves are incredibly vulnerable. Because only one group directly benefits from them, only that group is incentivized to defend them — and it happens to be the most politically disempowered segment of society.
In practice, instead of elevating the needs of the poor, means-testing ends up throwing them to the wolves. And this is all on top of the bureaucratic dysfunction of means-testing, which ends up blocking millions of working-class people from programs they’re eligible for, sometimes by design.
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But when you make a particular entitlement accessible to everyone, people stop thinking of it as a welfare boost and start thinking of it as a social right. We don’t think of public education as a handout to people who can’t afford the normal way of doing things, which is to pay for education themselves. We think of education as something that everyone deserves and something that benefits our entire society to universally provide.
This makes privatizers’ and austerity-mongers’ jobs a lot harder, as they now look like they’re trying to send a sacred cow to the slaughter. Universal programs create more sacred cows, putting would-be slaughterers in a position that’s tough to defend.
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As for the wealthy people who still prefer private childcare and resent having to pay for public day cares — and, indeed, there will be many on the Upper East Side, where the truly rich inhabit an exclusive, rarified parallel reality — their complaints will be less persuasive to the much larger portion of the population that is accustomed to childcare as a basic universal good.
With his free universal day care initiative, Mamdani is trying to extend the same logic to the care of even younger children. His policy is driven by the recognition that the best way to protect entitlements for the poor is to embed them in a scaffolding of social rights for all.
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