Free Universal Daycare Is Fool's Gold

Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico announced plans to offer free universal childcare to state residents by lifting the previous income restrictions. Rules still need to be hashed out and the state legislature must approve the final proposal, but the Land of Enchantment may soon be providing daycare at zero cost to every parent in the state. Currently, the income restriction for such benefits is four times the federal poverty level, or $128,000 for a family of four.

Gov. Lujan Grisham plans to pay for this extravagant new benefit with surplus government income from surging oil and gas production. Since 2020, New Mexico has been funneling these surpluses into an early childhood education trust fund that is nearing $10 billion in assets with an additional $500 million per year in investment earnings.

Admittedly, that’s a huge chunk of change and yet, Gov. Lujan Grisham estimates that the legislature will still need to appropriate another $120 million per year to pay for the program’s planned expansion. That’s a 26% increase over the current spending level of $463 million.

Although I vigorously oppose the premise, New Mexico deserves credit for its advance planning, including the stockpiling of budget surpluses. However, all 50 states - including New Mexico (see below) - are in debt and most of them run a hefty budget deficit every year, so the idea of free universal daycare is not easily transferable to other states.

Meanwhile, a deep dive into New Mexico's actual financial condition reveals some rather startling information.

According to Truth in Accounting, New Mexico had a $9.8 billion debt burden as of 2020 with Bloomberg projecting a $165 billion debt burden in the future due to unfunded mandates.

So, it looks like starting in 2020, New Mexico simply started robbing Peter to pay Paul… or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Eventually – and inevitably – the oil and gas boom in New Mexico will end, and those record (and possibly phantom) surpluses will also disappear. Which leads me to my first reason for opposing the concept of free universal daycare.

It’s simply too expensive… and the costs are inexorably and irrevocably passed on to unsuspecting taxpayers who bought into the idea without considering the overall price tag.

You talk about your buyer’s remorse!

That shiny new sports car sure looked cool in the showroom window, but no one told me about the expensive monthly payments, the exorbitant insurance premiums, the prohibitive maintenance and repair bills, or the fact that it only averages 10 mpg.

Reason #2 is that free universal daycare is decidedly unfair to single people without children and childless couples, especially seniors on fixed incomes. They already pay property taxes to subsidize the public education system in their area, but you can somewhat justify that because good school systems increase property values. But being taxed a second time to provide free daycare for other people’s kids is the epitome of taxation without representation… and we fought a War of Independence to free ourselves from such bondage.

Third, free universal childcare provides parents with the perfect excuse to abdicate their childrearing responsibilities, thereby assigning that power and authority to the State. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is the government indoctrinating our children at increasingly earlier ages with anti-God rhetoric while undermining our founding Judeo-Christian principles and traditional American values.

Our children are a precious gift from God and are on loan to us for a few fleeting years. Forfeiting those teachable and highly impressionable moments during the most formative time of their lives should not be something that the government encourages or enables by dangling free daycare in front of overworked and unsuspecting parents.

(For those people who argue that free universal daycare gives children an educational "head start" and leads to better grades, higher test scores, and future academic success, there is this irrefutable fact: in 2024, New Mexico with its "almost" free universal daycare ranked dead last in education for the 8th consecutive year, 49th in family and community, 48th in economic well-being, and 50th in overall child well-being according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.)