Why the Rich Should Get Free Public Childcare Too
Critics see Zohran Mamdani’s inclusion of the wealthy in his new free public childcare initiative as a flaw. It’s actually an integral part of the policy’s design, rooted in the fact that universal programs are far more enduring than means-tested ones.
Zohran Mamdani’s childcare 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. (Matt Roth / the Washington Post via Getty Images)
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.”
Its author, Eliza Shapiro, presented a range of perspectives, to her credit, including the view that progressive taxation already addresses any potential unfairness. Mamdani’s childcare centers will be tax-funded, and income taxes rise with household tax brackets, so wealthier Upper East Siders are already paying more for public programs. The article also acknowledges that not everyone in the neighborhood is wealthy, and that the center will also serve residents of less affluent areas like Roosevelt Island and parts of Chinatown.
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.
On the surface, the argument for means-testing seems convincing: it’s hard enough to find the money for social programs, so the people who need them most should be the first in line. It might appear confusing that Mamdani, someone avowedly committed to affordability for the working class, isn’t automatically keen to prioritize the poor and leave the rich to their own devices.
But Mamdani, a democratic socialist in the Sanders tradition, is acting on an underlying political theory: the scarcity of funds for public programs and their vulnerability to cuts are not fixed facts. They’re political realities, and universal programs are more politically defensible and durable than means-tested programs. In other words, if you want a functional and long-lasting public program that aids the greatest number of people, and that a wide range of people feel vested in defending, you should design it so that everyone, rich and poor, can access it.
Targeted Programs Make Easy Targets
Simply put, targeted programs make easy targets.
When only the most vulnerable and least powerful people in society benefit from a particular entitlement, especially in a system where higher earners pay higher taxes, it ends up looking like charity. And just like in any household, charity is hard to defend when times get tough. When the economy fluctuates and middle and upper classes feel the squeeze, even the ideologically progressive among them start looking for ways to ease their tax burden. Inevitably, they start asking why their money is going to state-sponsored charity. Programs like SNAP and Medicaid end up on the chopping block, as they were last year.
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.
By contrast, universal programs are much more durable. They generate buy-in from a broader segment of the population and, over time, establish themselves as permanent social institutions that we largely take for granted. The most obvious example is public K-12 schools, which are constantly subject to political assault but also draw so many defenders from all walks of life that losing them entirely seems unthinkable.
A means-testing approach might say that public schools should be available only to people who can’t afford even the cheapest private school. But this would risk dooming public schools to extinction, as the many people barred from accessing them might grow weary of paying for them. Privatizers and right-wing opponents of tax-funded public services could take advantage of that weariness to wipe them out. Instead of responsibly prioritizing low-income people’s needs with means-testing, then, we could end up relegating people who can’t afford private school to lives without education.
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.
How to Enshrine a Social Right
Before Mayor Bill de Blasio began the push for universal pre-K in 2014, New York City offered means-tested subsidies to help low-income people afford childcare, including pre-K slots reserved only for eligible families and income- and work-based voucher programs. Unsurprisingly, they were under constant threat of rollback. After the 2008 financial crisis, for example, 10,000 vouchers were eliminated through budget cuts.
De Blasio’s intervention was designed to create an enduring pre-K option that would naturally benefit low-income people most, since they’re the most reliant on it. And how do you do that? By making it available to everyone, even people who can spring for childcare on their own. Plenty of them will use it, because childcare is expensive enough that most households benefit greatly from a free option.
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.
When you understand this, you see that the appearance of a free childcare center on the Upper East Side, happening concurrently with the rollout of similar centers in poorer parts of the city, is not a bug at all. It’s a feature meant to overcome the flaws of means-testing and make public childcare something that, like public education for older kids, we all take for granted as a basic feature of a functioning and humane society.