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You don’t have to be a radical libertarian or a hardcore traditionalist — I’m neither — to see the problem with the government bribing parents to turn over their kids to the care of others.
Pressuring parents into the full-time workforce also runs against the basic preferences of many Americans, including the lower-earning Americans who are most severely targeted here. In one survey, only about 30 percent of married moms said their “ideal” work situation would be full-time employment, with 40 percent wanting to work part-time and roughly a quarter not at all. (The remainder say they don’t know.) Another survey found that “53% of married mothers prefer to have one full-time earner and one stay-at-home parent while raising children under the age of five”; single-earner arrangements were most popular among the working class.
And would more professional child care be beneficial for kids? That’s an area of social science that’s hardly settled, and a lot would depend on which kids got put into day care and preschool, how good the care and instruction ended up being, and so on. Almost certainly, however, at least some kids would be worse off in some ways.
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