Condoms make the baby Jesus cry.
even sven, I’d like to ask you what makes the situation in Cameroon, with its basically agricultural economy (Based on your description - that’s been the common pattern for non-industrial agriculture for millenia.) relevant to the situation in developed nations? None of us here are talking about the reasons why, in places where infant and childhood mortality are rampant, and cyclical famine is a fact of life, it makes sense to make sure one’s family has lots of installed spares. I’ll even go so far as to say I suspect that Cameroon doesn’t have institutionalized state support for families, regardless of the quality of the year’s food crop.
NZ, the US, and Spain* all may have problems with poverty, but none of them are basically subsistence economies. As such we have the affluence to be able to offer institutionalized assistance to families such as the one you describe. I also believe that all three are considered to be industrialized economies. Not only is most of the economy in those nations based mostly on the products of industry, not agriculture, but even agricultural work is far, far less demanding of lots of people to do all the chores need to keep a farm working, and which can be done, effectively by children - which is a big part of why large families make sense throughout much of history, and in places like Cameroon today. But there is no such economic incentive for people in the US, in particular, to have large families.
In fact as others have related, in an industrial economy, large families are often a drain on the family’s economies. Realistically, a family cannot expect to have any economic benefit from children until said child is in its late teens. At the earliest. (Leaving aside such travesties as mule running and child prostitution.) With that being the case, I’d like to challenge you to give me some sane, and objectively rational reasons for someone who is chronically unemployed to continue having children.
The only economic “incentvive” most of us can see is that they won’t have to face the economic hardships their poor decisions may be bringing them, because of the societal safety net in place.
BTW, lissener, get off that strawman. None of us have set a fucking minimum income for people to have a child. Nor children. What we’ve been talking about, since you can’t seem to read today, is that fraction of the population that continues to have children without looking to their own resources being able to reasonably support said children, as a chronic situation. Not a temporary situation. Chronic. Long-term. Continuing.
Normally, I like seeing your opinions. You’re not always the most politic of people, but usually you have more reason on your side than this.
Yes, people are irrational. Frequently. All people.
As for the rest, one of the reasons that people have many kids is irresponsibility. Sorry, but I think that’s true.
Now, are you comparing child-bearing “strategies” (for lack of a better term) in Cameroon to the inner city of Los Angeles? Because I’m pretty sure in Los Angeles:
Do not need lots of children to work on the farm.
Are not likely to lose several children to disease.
Can not rely on their children to take care of them when they get old (and certainly not in the same way they would on a farm in Cameroon).
Have not lost five or six kids.
Do not need to store up “extra” kids.
-Joe
Actually, lissener has a point. In a country where the minimum wage is CONSIDERABLY lower than the living wage in many areas, lots of hard-working people, by your reckoning, should remain childless. Drones, working for your conveninece and pleasure. Grilling your burgers, mowing your lawn and remaining chaste zombies.
Good luck with that.
All you people who are getting a little self-righteous moral by knocking on irresponsible welfare moms are just indulging in a mindless emotional clusterfuck. If you want to deal with the problem, you should try a teeeeeeny bit harder to really understand it.
Personally, that’s why I didn’t say anything about condoms in my post - they’re there, they’re cheap, and, excepting the potential embarassment of buying them, there’s no drawback to buying them.
Permanent-type birth control is the way to go. There’s no “I forgot to take my pill” or “baby, if you loved me you wouldn’t make me wear one of those things”. Make it reversible, so you’re not accused of"sterilizing the undesirables".
-Joe
Then Jesus needs more Astroglide.
I don’t get your point. That a person living off of a McDonald’s paycheck can’t afford a child is supposed to be a sad enough story to guilt society into paying them to have one?
Cite cite cite cite cite cite cite. And, uh, cite.
I had a nephew in Ohio who made plans, with his girlfriend, to have a child so they could go on welfare and not continue trying to exist on their marginal subsistence jobs. They believed that the state of Ohio would provide them with a nice car, housing, food and probably a nice cash allowance, if they just had a child out of wedlock while poor. They understood this because all their older relatives were staunch conservatives and often fans of Rush Limbaugh who bitched constantly about the sweet life that the welfare state afforded irresponsible welfare moms. They wanted that sweet life.
We and others told them that no such life existed, that much of the welfare state that Limbaugh liked to fantasize about during his oxycontin-fuelled rants had never existed, and most of what did exist had been dismantled starting with the Reagan administration and going right through to the Clinton years. They did look into it before they leapt. And they were mighty disappointed to discover that we were right, the fantasy land welfare freebies they had heard so many complains about did not exist.
(We also told them that going on welfare is not a PLAN, it’s what you do when none of your actual plans work out.)
So I say cite cite cite cite cite cite cite. I do not believe that unbridled welfare luxury living exists any more, if it ever did.
How about shooting for a non-minimum-wage job first, and then see about grunting out babies?
…I know, it’s just too revolutionary, it’ll never fly. Sorry I spoke.
Living on minimum wage is a bitch because minimum wage is pretty much starvation wages, IMO. Maybe one shouldn’t reproduce while working for minimum wage? Nah, that’s classist of me. Still, I’ll bet it’s even harder to improve your station in life (and move away from minimum wage) if you now have to shovel time and money into a child. How are you going to afford school, job training, and the time for all of it? I know my child is slowing down the retirement funding.
Now, if you’re living on minimum wage is it responsible for you to have a child? Man, with one kid money is tighter. But now you’ve got a beautiful baby girl, just like me (except I’m not working for minimum wage and we’re a two income home). So, what’s the smart move?
For the sake of not having another child we’ve taken a long-term birth control solution that will remain effective until mom is 39. The only reason I’m not…permanently disabled…is because mom wants the possibility of having a second child in the future. If we’re in the right place for it as far as our relationship, personal lives, and, most importantly (to both of us) financially, we might. I don’t think that will happen. For me, one is enough. Our contribution to the future (the world’s first Supermodel/Ninja/Neurosurgeon/Nobel Prize Winner) is plenty.
It wasn’t hard to wait till I was 32, financially stable, and had found someone who was in the same boat before I had a child. That didn’t keep me from happily fucking my way through my teens and twenties - but I was smart and careful enough to keep myself from being anchored for the rest of my life by some offspring. It also wasn’t very hard to determine that one is enough for now, and will probably remain one. When 5am rolls around and it’s time to feed lil’ Kaylee, it’s even easier.
-Joe, giving out personal details because I’m bored with this training I’m sitting in
Ya’ll do understand that God won’t give you more kids than you can take care of, right?
Yeah, I was listening to someone (a Katrina survivor?) who said that ‘God would never throw something at them that they couldn’t handle’.
:rolleyes:
Except, you know, DEATH, which is pretty typically hard to handle.
-Joe
Can I get a cite for what fraction of the working population does so for minimum wage? I’m not trying to be snarky, I honestly am of the impression that the minimum wage is mostly for entry level positions, and most employers offer some pretty hefty pay increases once their employees prove their going to stick past the ‘honeymoon’ period. (I’m going to specifically except farm workers from this discussion, I’m afraid - since they’re not covered by the minimum wage.) The only position I know of that’s not covered by minimum wage laws, aside from farm workers, is that of waitpersons. And whether one agrees with the reasoning behind that, it is a fact that wages are not the only way that they get paid.
And who’s said anything about welfare being a gateway to luxury? The general consensus I’ve read here is that it provides a bare minimum to keep people alive and housed. (Most of the time.) It’s just that the minimum being supplied is going to be adjusted for the number of children being cared for, as it really has to be if the children aren’t going to be taken away to care for them elsewhere. (Which I mentioned is an increased expense to the state.)
So, it is your learned opinion that everyone working at or close to minimum wage is doing so by conscious choice? Not at all interested in better, higher paying jobs, are they? That is INDEED an interesting viewpoint. :dubious:
From what I have seen, and what the social scientists say, the best way to stay out of poverty is not to NEVER have kids, but to WAIT to have kids. I think I read once that the best way to avoid poverty is to 1) graduate high school, 2) get married after age 20 and stay married, and 3) do not have children until you are married. Another thing I have heard is that it is important to stay in jobs for a year at a time, even “starter” jobs.
The key to all of this is creating stability in your life, which helps in establishing career paths, and when you start having kids before you get on your feet, those kids will keep pulling you back. I can easily see, now that I have a kid, how this happens. There is no way I could have juggled my first couple of jobs and kids. I had to work a lot of long hours to establish myself in the jobs, and I did not have enough status at the companies to have a lot of flexibility in those hours. I am not exactly a millionaire now, but I’m comfortable enough, and having the freedom to bust my ass without distraction when I was young clearly made a huge difference in where I ended up. THIS is the message that we have to get across to people, along with the information about how to avoid having those babies in the first place.
I’d guess they were in entry-level jobs for the most part. Like the first job I had, which wouldn’t have paid for me to live by myself, let alone provide for dependents. Under those circumstances, if I’d carelessly or deliberately brought a child into the world, you’d have been justified in excoriating me for a fool.
I know where you can get an old hat and coat for that strawman, btw. :dubious:
I worked with a woman who was, at age sixty or so, caring for her great grandchild. That was her comment about the fact that children are born to such young parents. She belonged to a fundamentalist church, and really believed it to be true. Eeek.
Sure as fuck didn’t exist for me or my mother.
I find this thread infinitely more annoying than I did last night.
I find idiots that continue to be reproducing annoying as fuck, but I sure as hell wouldn’t suggest such an oppressive and dehumanizing technique as mandatory sterilization or encourage cut backs on what little aid exists so that people will start starving and find themselves ‘‘motivated to get a job’.’ It’s such an ignorant assumption that many welfare recipients and impoverished people do not put everything they possibly can into making their situation better but this fucking classist system does everything they can to kick them while they’re down.
Guess what? POOR PEOPLE DON’T DESERVE TO BE POOR.
Right, because it’s so fucking easy. I couldn’t find anything better than a minimum wage job as a fucking COLLEGE senior and my husband spent 8 months with a COLLEGE DEGREE before he found anything less than minimum wage. My mother has an M.S. in Engineering, managed her own business for 12 years straight and now works in a factory.
I’m so disgusted with these attitudes, these constant implications that having money makes you of more worth to society, proves you work harder, proves you’re more responsible. You don’t know shit until you’ve walked a mile in someone else’s shoes. I am an intelligent, responsible, and capable human being, I did not deserve to live in poverty and I do not deserve to live in material comfort to the degree that I do today. This entitlement bullshit has got to stop.
So hypothetically you’d have had to wait a few years before having kids? Oh the humanity. :rolleyes:
Take your issues and shove 'em, kiddo. No-one’s been making these implications - only stating that if you can’t feed your own kids you shouldn’t conceive them. Where you got entitlement out of that, only you and Baphomet know.
No one is saying those things. The point isn’t that waiting to have kids before you climb out of minimum wage isn’t just helping society…it’s helping you. Looking at the example of your life that you have given, the question is why were you working minimum wage as a college senior/graduate, and why are you no longer working minimum wage now? A lot of people work minimum even as a college graduate…I know I did. I am not particularly troubled when I hear that someone under, say, 25 is working minimum wage…they are the ones who are supposed to be! The question is, how do we, as a society, help those folks get on a path to better jobs in the future, so that they can be comfortable enough to have kids without worrying about how to feed them? NOT having kids at this stage is one of the best ways. The key to being a successful adult is to take on responsibilities as you can handle them, not before.