New York’s push for universal child care starts from a place most people understand, but making it a reality is a daunting challenge.
Yes, child care is expensive. Families are stretched.
Many parents want to work more but can’t find care that fits their schedules or budgets.
The idea that the city or state should step in is an easy sell.
Even under optimistic assumptions, however, a fully universal child-care system would cost more than $14 billion a year, permanently added to the state budget.
Mayor Mamdani’s supporters argue that shifting the cost to government would make New York more livable for families with young children, while creating new day-care jobs.
State can’t deliver
But that assumes the state can actually deliver licensed care at a huge scale to hundreds of thousands of kids.
Right now it can’t. The city doesn’t have enough facilities or workers to provide full-day care for every infant, toddler and preschooler — and building that capacity will take years.
But Mamdani’s plans don’t just call for setting up more regulated child-care centers.
“We will also subsidize child care at home for families who prefer a trusted neighbor or relative to take care of their child,” Mamdani promised last year in a campaign video.
Who wouldn’t want that kind of flexibility? In theory, it would allow families to choose care that fits their lives, instead of forcing them into rigid systems that don’t yet exist at scale.
Yet that also gives the government unprecedented reach into people’s homes — while opening the door to all kinds of fraud.
Care provided in private homes is extremely hard to verify, and easy to rip off.
Any system that pays relatives must rely heavily on self-reporting: hours claimed, care provided, necessity asserted.
There is no practical way to confirm whether care was actually provided, how much of it occurred, or whether multiple adults are being paid for the same child.
New York has already seen how such trust-based systems operate — and how they can fail miserably.
Just look at the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, which pays family members to care for elderly or disabled relatives at home.
CDPAP was created for both humane reasons and as a cheaper alternative to institutional care.
But its reliance on self-reporting and private settings has made it difficult to oversee, leaving the state struggling with widespread waste, fraud and mismanagement.
Just last week, The Post reported that CDPAP lost more than $1 billion to middlemen and theft over the last decade.
Child care would be even harder to oversee.
The prospect of paying family caregivers also raises numerous practical questions: Are caregivers employees or contractors? Who handles payroll taxes? How are hours tracked?
None of this means families don’t need help — they do. And flexibility matters.
No clear rules
But flexibility without clear rules creates systems the state cannot realistically govern.
And a top-down state subsidy will leave families increasingly dependent on the government.
There are other alternatives.
If Mamdani and Gov. Hochul want to support families with children, they could put more agency in the hands of parents with tax credits.
That way, families can choose the care arrangements that work best for them — without becoming addicted to government handouts.
Universality built on informal, hard-to-police arrangements risks repeating mistakes this state is still trying to fix.
Liena Zagare is editor of the Manhattan Institute’s Bigger Apple Newsletter.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
