The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Child Care for All? In New Mexico? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Ready to level up your geopolitical insight? Join Peter Zeihan's Patreon and get 50% off your first month with code PZ50. Black Friday Sale: https://bit.ly/PZBFSaleDespite New Mexico's hot air balloon festival and dramatic landscapes, there's not much else going for the state. They rank low on economic and social indicators, they have an arid climate, they're navigating complex racial and tribal dynamics...needless to say, they could use a win.Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3MlGBu7

Everybody, Peter Zion here, and as you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are upon us. And so, just like everyone else in the Western world, we are offering discounts on new signups for whatever level of our Patreon system that you're interested in. You've got our base reader level where you get all the videos and the Daily Digest as they come in, then you have an advanced level, the analyst level, where you also get to participate in an ongoing Q&A with me every quarter and try to stump me. Lots of other frills here and there. If you use code PZ50, you get 50% off of your first month,

regardless of what the sign-up happens to be. And that will last throughout the weekend. So hope to see you guys join in the party. Welcome to the crazy train. Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado. And today we're going to talk about something that just went down in New Mexico, of all places. Now, for those of you who are not from the United States,

New Mexico is a gorgeous state, but it comes in near the bottom of basically all the rankings that you don't want to come into the bottom at. So, you know, crime, labor force, participation, income levels, educational levels, infrastructure industry. It's had a lot of problems. It's a pretty arid area. There are very few places to get reliable rainfall. You've got two major cities in Santa Fe, which is an old historical town that is now the administrative center in Albuquerque, which is the major population center. But infrastructure is difficult because you've got the Rio Grande Canyon that basically cuts right through the middle of the state. and you have a lot of desert and a lot of semi-arid.

That's before you consider racial issues or the fact that this is one of the densest concentrations of Native Americans, and there's an issue with reservations, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, there's a lot that hasn't worked out great for them, but the reason I wanted to talk about them is that they just came up with a new policy where everyone now qualifies for state-covered child care.

One of the problems the advanced world has is that raising a child is a real, effort. Back in the olden days when we were all agriculturalists and lived on the farm, kids were free labor, so parents would have as many of them as they could because they helped on the farm. When you move to town, that economic benefit goes away and you just have the expense without any of the monetary benefits. So over time, we've had fewer and fewer and fewer children. One of the things Europeans tried when they tried to reverse this is it really matters what type of social program you put into place. So, for example, if you just say that

if a woman is pregnant that she gets a extended maternity leave, what that means is that no one will hire a woman. And so women in their 20s are just simply unemployable. The places that have pulled this off, getting their numbers back up, it all comes down to child care. Because if you force a woman to choose between being a mother or being a worker, she will then choose one of the two. And that means that some of them won't have kids or some of them won't work. you hate to get a problem with the workforce and with your demographics. But if the state can provide a degree of child care, then parents don't need to make that choice.

And the numbers go the other direction. Now, there are undoubtedly a thousand details that matter in the New Mexico situation. So this is not me endorsing what they're doing except in principle. It matters how you pay for. It matters how you regulate it. The New Mexicans are preling on using income from the oil fund. they basically have a sovereign fund at the state level. They expect that it's going to cost them about $600 million a year.

We will see if that is feasible. We will see if that is realistic. But for the first time in the United States, we actually have somebody at the state level that is thinking about what the future of the demographic profile looks like and what the future of the workforce looks like and is actually putting a fair amount of money behind what might actually work.

I call that good news. Thank you.