Pretty much everyone can “afford” a kid. The world is full of kids raised in mud huts that live perfectly happy, meaningful lives. Objectively, children need very little. It’s our society that has turned them into a consumer driven money-pit.
If you have a strong desire for children, not having them is probably going to be one of the most tragic things that can happen in your life. Infertility among those who want children is widely regarded to be one of the most traumatic things a human can go through, period.
Just because you don’t “get” it and don’t feel that particular drive yourself doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. There are rational thins in things in this world that are not a matter of coldly weighing economic trade-offs. How much would you need to be paid to agree to never see your family again? How much would you need to be paid to agree to work for a company you find morally repugnant? How much would you need to be paid to agree to live in a living situation you hate- say in a Manhattan dormitory if you are an introverted country person, or out on a mountaintop in a cabin 1000 miles from anything if you are a city person?
OK, but now you’re pulling a Shodan. *We *don’t live in mud huts, and we’re not going to willingly, any time soon. We have to clothe our children, pay someone to watch over them 24/7 when we can’t (no leaving the baby with the four year old while we go work in the fields), pay for doctors and immunizations and school supplies and fees when they’re school-aged. That’s the bare minimum mandated by law, and it’s still lots more expensive than people living in third world countries.
Do most people spend way more on their kids than they legally need to? Sure. But it still costs money to have a kid in our culture.
I object to this idea that you must achieve some arbitrary level of wealth (usually defined as “around as rich as I am”) in order to morally have children. If that were true, most of the world and all of human history would be a bunch of selfish, immoral assholes.
If you are talking about people who are chronically homeless or something, that’s one thing. But if you are defining “too poor to have kids” is “lives in an apartment and eats lots of ramen at the end of the month,” that doesn’t fly with me. It sucks enough to be poor without everyone getting up on their high horse about how you also don’t deserve to take part in one of the most basic aspects of human existance.
Statements like that make me wish our open pedophile was still on the board. I’m certain to a pedophile raping a ten year old can be :“rationalized”. Rational is putting aside emotional reponses and making a logical, practical choice. Irrational is letting your emtions and urges rule your behavior. The urge to procreate may be strong in some people, but so is the urge to murder, rape or ingest narcotics in others and we don’t allow those people to indulge in their urges unrestrained do we?. To paraphrase Katherine Hepburn, “Nature is what we were put here to overcome.”
Watching your children die as a result of poverty or live harsh, grim lives has been a basic aspect of human existance until the middle of the 20th century in the industrialized West, but we don’t (shouldn’t in my opinion) desire for many to have that experience. You are right that being poor sucks which is why many people do look down with hatred on anyone that would choose to bring a child into that kind of sucky life.
If you are saying that people should decide for themselves what level of prosperity is “enough” to have children, that’s fine with me. But what your OP seems to be suggesting is that they should be able to count on a level of social support that is not necessary for a two-parent family.
If you decide “I have the resources to raise a child by myself” bully for you. If you decide “I don’t have the resources to raise a child by myself but the taxpayer will provide them” that is another matter. It goes back to what was said earlier - why does the taxpayer have to subsidize your choices?
You are stuck on this idea of “social support.” It’s not about that. Nobody is trying to take anything away from you.
We, as a society, make choices to support our preferred manner of living. We built a freeway system to support our enjoyment of suburbs. If we liked cities better, we would have built a streetcar system. We enjoy television, so we built the infrastructure and institutions (networks, the FCC, ratings boards) to allow broadcast and cable television. If we liked watching circuses more, we would have an infrastructure and institutions that support circuses.
We have already decided we like being single parents. That choice is done. That’s apparently how we like to live.
If this was the 1950s, and you lived in an urban center, would you be upset about all the infrastructure going up to support suburban life? Would you be telling people “it’s not my job to support your choice to live on the outskirts when there are perfectly good city apartments?” Would you oppose every road, every zoning law and every tax break that made the suburbs what they are?
We will eventually make shifts that support single parents, just like we made shifts away from urban middle-class life into suburban middle-class life. And I’m not talking about entitlement programs or giving them additional resources. It’s about the millions of bits of infrastructure and culture- most of which could go one way or another without any real financial impact- that affect how we live and work. They will change and morph to better fit our changing society.
So really it’s just a question of now or later. We can hem and haw and have millions of kids face the impact of single parenthood the way it is now. Or we can think of creative solutions and get that ball rolling a bit faster. Chances are most of these solutions will be free-market. Given how detrimental single parenthood seems to be, there are certainly some unmet needs that the free market is going to gear up (and already is gearing up) to fill. But free market solutions don’t just spring up out of the dust. Someone has to look at a situation, figure out what the needs are, and figure out how to fill them.
I doubt that this is true. Most children are born to two-parent families in the US. What you are suggesting is that we need to give greater support to single-parent-by-choice families, and thereby encourage and enable it. My contention is that this is bad social policy, because the children of single-parent households tend to have higher incidences of expensive social pathologies.
You are making an (imo unjustified) assumption that the rate of single parenthood will go up no matter what we do. I believe we need to do what we reasonably can to discourage the rise of single-parenting, or at the very least not penalize those who make the more effective and efficient choice.
I’d like to think we can do a little better than mud huts, in the U.S. at least. If children need so little why do we need to go out of our way to help single parents anyway? You’re saying our infrastructure needs change in order to better support them–isn’t that admitting as much that it is a pretty big thing to have a kid?
No we haven’t! Some selfish, irresponsible jerks have decided they want to be single parents and expect other people to support their choices and cleanup their mess. He77, I don’t think a closed two-person nuclear family is a good enough social support system to raise children,
This seems to be a logical error (albeit a common one, here and elsewhere).
If someone thinks a given proposal will make the situation worse, you can’t dispute that by challenging him to come up with an alternative that will make things better.
It’s possible that there is no alternative that will make things better. Or it’s possible that while this person can think of valid reasons that the suggested solution will actually make things worse, they can’t think of a better solution. Whichever.
Bottom line is that every proposal needs to stand on its own.
In this particular case, Shodan is arguing - if I understand him correctly - that the problems of single parenthood are such that attempts to alleviate the problem are likely to exacerbate it. Because while they may make things better for children of single parents, they will likely also increase the number of children of single parents. And since these children face serious obstacles regardless of anyone’s best efforts, the harm will thus outweigh the good.
Note that I’m not saying you can’t disagree with this. But I am saying “OK, Smart Guy, so what are you going to do about it?” is not an appropriate response.
I can agree that making it a tax deduction is not a great idea but phasing out the benefit is even worse.
[minirant]One of the most unnecessarily complicating things about the tax code for individuals are all the phase out features that were put in to deny 1% of the population a tiny deduction. There is no reason why the child dependent deduction should be any lower for someone making a million dollars than someone making $25K. If you want the rich to pay mroe then just raise the goddam tax rate. Don’t HIDE a bump in tax rates by phasing out deductions.
We save very little by denyiing the student loan interest deduction to those who make more than 100K and yet we choose to complicate the tax code by phasing out this deduction a 5 percent at a time until it is entirely pahased out at 120K (I don’t know the numbers exactly but I know there is a phase out) rather than simply raise the tax rate for those that make more than 100K. Its this back door bullshit that gives a kernel of truth to all the accusation of the “i don’t want to pay taxes” conservative.[/minirant]
I think that a 50% tax credit (IOW you get 50% of the child care costs back up to $5000 or whatever) would work better and be more equitable but in the end you are talking about altering behaviour for a group of people for whom it makes sense to work with a $5000 discount on child care where it didn’t make sense without that discount. A very small sliver. No. I would be very surprised if a child care subsidy was revenue neutral.
Yeah and some people associated it with better police practices. The fact of the matter is taht we still have crime so we can’t get rid of the criminal justice system by saying “well if people stopped committing crimes, we wouldn’t need the criminal jsutice system”
I guess one way to look at it is that you are subsidizing the woman’s decision not to get an abortion, another way to look at it is to say that of all the needy people in the world the least culpable for their own condition are children born into poverty.
And we as a society have decided that we prefer to ask for more from those who gain the most from being a member of our society in order to provide basic needs and opportunities to those who are neediest and least to blame for their own condition.
Would you feel better if we took the kids away, put them in an orphanage and chemically sterilized the parents until they were financially responsible enough to raise their own children?
So I assume that you support abortion, right? Or are you saying that not only is having children reserved for those who can afford to raise children but having SEX is reserved for those who can afford to raise children?
Barely. I think somethign like 40% of children are born out of wedlock these days.
Its been a looong time since the nurses at maternity wards could assume that the father and mother were married.
I think the suggestion is that while you are trying to reduce the frequency of single mothers, you have to deal with the fact that single motherhood will persist. Feeding a child or relieving some of the child care burdens of having a child are hardly an incentive to have children. it reduces some of the disincentives but noone is going to say to themselves “OOOOOOHHHH, I can totally rake in all that free child care if I go out and get myself pregnant and become a single mother, I can already taste all that free childcare now… graaavvvvvyyy”
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You are making an (imo unjustified) assumption that the rate of single parenthood will go up no matter what we do.I’m pretty sure the assumption is not that single parenthood will increase, the assumptuion is that it wil not go away.