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I don't buy that the state is capable of good childcare, and since I'd sooner build my own killdozer than let them put my children in such a facility, all this means is that I'm now competing in the market (for food, jobs, housing) with those who don't mind using it and so have substantially-lower monthly expenses. Oh yeah and my taxes are higher now too. Hard veto from me.
Well, the set of people who don't mind using it would be drawn from both people who otherwise would raise their own children and those who would otherwise go childless. The latter will compete with you on those terms regardless (modulo the one-time competitive advantage from the cash injection), and you shouldn't forget the downside of letting birthrate decline continue as usual, which is that the entire pyramid scheme of big society may collapse. Surely you can't be completely indifferent towards the prospect of being left to your own devices in old age with no medical insurance or pension (any savings might at that point be confiscated or devalued by inflation, and for good measure they might also legally restrict the right of any children you raised personally to preferentially support you rather than slaving away for the entire cohort of geriatric millennials). Reducing the probability of this scenario at least a little winds up on the other side of the scale.
The premise seems to be that all children are equal, whereas I expect that the ones who end up in government-run childcare facilities will almost entirely be net drains.
Well, that's the speculative part of the proposal. Nobody doubts government childcare facilities are garbage right now, but I would like to see how far we could go with a moonshot to make it not so. It's not hard to justify considering we are essentially looking at an epidemic of people unwilling to put up with the work of childrearing in the form that is expected.
From Minnesota to Somalia, and back again. The problem isn't resources, a daycare is not a complicated service to provide, the problem is the kind of people who'd want to be in charge of the program, how much they'd wan't to skim off the top, and what they'd want to do with other people's children.
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