Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:16 and sunset is 7:35 for 13 hours 19 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 4:30 PM and Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1970, at 10:08 PM EST, an oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module explodes, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to the Apollo command and service module (codenamed “Odyssey“)while en route to the moon.
Not long ago, as one of his many daily observations1 of life on this planet, Donald Trump complained that the federal government couldn’t afford to subsidize daycare, but that states should do so.
There’s more than one way to see daycare: as the (1) raising of children and simultaneously as (2) a cost of labor market participation that reduces the actual wages parents earn in the marketplace (or deters them from working altogether). This libertarian blogger has been clear on those few times that I’ve written about daycare that I lack the knowledge to design a daycare program. By contrast, I and many others can more easily grasp the economics of daycare within society.
Fundamentally, daycare is obviously significant both as child-rearing and for its economic consequences.
Here’s Trump speaking at a private White House luncheon:
“Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.”
Later in his remarks, the president added that states would have to raise their taxes to pay for child care costs and that the federal government “could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up” for it.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
See Eleanor Skelly, Alexandra Marquez, Tara Prindiville, and Sarah Dean, Trump says it’s ‘not possible’ for the U.S. to pay for Medicaid, Medicare and day care: ‘We’re fighting wars,’ NBC News, April 2, 2026.
Oh.
As it turns out, Mr. Trump concedes the significance of daycare2 when he answers that “You got to [sic] let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.” Although he considers daycare less important than funding his expensive war in the Persian Gulf, Trump gives the game away twice over: that daycare is important and that it is so important that it should be state funded.
State funding would be justified, in my own way of thinking, only if there were no private alternatives and if that state funding produced a credible net economic gain. It’s possible, as barriers to workforce entry are serious concerns. A productive society offers its workers (and attracts potential workers to the labor market) as efficiently as possible.
The traditional libertarian arguments against government involvement may be found at the Cato Institute, Childcare, https://www.cato.org/publications/childcare. It’s worth noting that a libertarian prescription would “loosen state regulation [including zoning regulations] of childcare staffing and licensing and of home-based businesses, expand immigration, and reform federal childcare subsidies.” Prescriptions that include expanding immigration3 and reducing zoning regulations are sure to be non-starters for the MAGA movement. In our current environment, a truly private (and a sensible approach) that includes the free flow of labor into America isn’t going to happen.
The key point is that Trump, a restrictionist4 opposed to these private approaches, including free labor movement, has created conditions under which he is forced to concede that daycare should receive government funding. Someone should probably tell Tom Tiffany and the WISGOP.
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- Last night, Trump criticized Pope Leo. One doesn’t have to be Catholic to see that Trump is decomposing and decompensating before our eyes. The Catholic Church has outlasted men far more intelligent and accomplished than Trump. Napoleon, for example, who wasn’t anti-clerical as much as he was manipulative and controlling of all those around him, came and went while the Vatican is still going strong. (Napoleon could have been drunk all day and would yet have been more formidable than Trump.) ↩︎
- Trump, in his remarks, leaves unstated why he thinks daycare is important. It might be because he’s spent his life thinking about his own parenting, or because he’s considered studiously the cost of daycare to the workforce. No, and no again. One has to think there must, in Trump’s case, be a more plausible motivation in favor of subsidized daycare than his fatherly nature or grasp of economics. ↩︎
- Immigrant workers are as likely to care properly for children as any of the current residents walking around this town. ↩︎
- Only Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are less libertarian than Donald Trump. ↩︎
Upcoming posts (in no decided order): The Regents, Economic Demand, Claims of Legacy, a Particular Species of Democrat, and a Whitewater Comparative Analysis.
Thousands celebrate in Hungary as Péter Magyar ends Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule: