Federal minimum wage was to keep a family of four out of poverty, this is a 1938 labor law; this law was in effect during our ‘golden years’ 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
Today? They just ignore it as we have since the 80s; these are the results of steadily declining wages for 50 years.
BUT MUSK IS A TRILLIONAIRE HAHA STOCK MARKET 50K
They don’t want babies. They want robots.
Since corporations are people, logic dictates that robots are also people. Robots are a construct run by humans, just like companies.
Oh, and money is free speech! Tee-hee we don’t know what’s happening this was all a coinkidink beep boop
They don’t want babies. They want robots.
Well, they want slaves. And they’re still figuring out which direction to go
The fortunes of a few matter more than the lives of rest of us, and we’ll just watch from the sidelines I guess whilst dying of starvation… They say social cohesion starts to fall apart when people can’t feed their kids, but if they have no kids to feed, I guess it’s a win win for the ultra wealthy. They get planet earth to themselves, whilst the rest of us just wither away and die, no societal uprising, no revolution, just distractions, everywhere, all by design, it’s kinda genius to be fair.
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🤣🤣🤣🤣
My wife and I make 120k a year and we can barely afford rent a car payment and daycare.
All we do is basically work. We have no life.
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And despite the horrors of reality, some people are still fighting and even dying to get into the US.
It must be worse where they are coming from
Yeah, there’s the Afghan who was gunned down in the US, while trying to settle down after evacuating with his family as refugees once the Taliban took over.
But otherwise not all of those trying to get in are from very impoverished countries, as others are coming from places where they would have been far well-off than being in the US. Such is the myth of healthcare and social security in the US, as it’s usually the favorite subject of discussion among comfortable boomers in the Philippines.
My household makes 120k and I have free childcare with family. I have no idea what I would do if I had to pay for childcare.
In a viral Substack post in November, he took particular aim at the federal government’s poverty line, which traces back to the early 1960s and was calculated by tripling the cost of a minimum food diet at the time.
The poverty line’s narrow focus on food leaves out how much other expenses are now sucking up incomes and lowballing the minimum amount Americans need to get by.
Green estimated that food makes up just 5% to 7% of household spending, but put housing at 35% to 45%, childcare at 20% to 40%, and health care at 15% to 25%.
Base something on a single metric, and it doesn’t take long for it to become pointless…
Because that’s the only thing anyone is paying attention to.
Calories are cheap, and subsides for shit like corn syrup is hurting more than it helps. But it pumps the calorie count up which trades short term starvation for slightly longer term health issues.
It’s nothing new, different demographics have been trying to raise the alarm for decades, generations even.
Everyone just ignored it till it hit the suburbs, and now want to act like it’s brand new.
If they took my average Costco bill, ported it over to Whole Foods prices, then tripled it, I could retire.
Also why bring a kid into this hellfire right now.
Because now is the best time to be alive, ever. I could take you back 100, 200, 500, 1000, or 5000 years ago and things just get shittier and shittier the further back we go yet people kept having kids.
Not quite true. 20-30 years ago would be better than now. Slightly worse medical science is offset by everything else being farther up the collapse timeline.
I get our argument but I don’t think it’s accurate to overlook how terrible things have gotten in the past few decades just by taking the longview.
You’re kidding yourself, things may have seemed better 20 years ago but the economy was being bolstered by sub prime mortgage nonsense, it collapsed 2 years later and we’ve not had good times since.
How about climate change? 20 years ago there was hope. You want to introduce a kid into a world that is ending? Tell them hey, we made this world for you. You’ll fight in the water wars of 2040?
You’re saying things were better 20 years ago because there was false hope? By that logic 2020 must’ve been the best year ever because CO2 emissions actually dropped.
And because we were 20 years further from the collapse.
It’ll collapse or it won’t collapse or we’ll do something different, same as we always have. Pining for a rose tinted snapshot of 20 years ago or 30 years ago won’t make things better. It’s the same bullshit nostalgia fetishism the far right have for the 50s or 60s or whatever. Some things are worse, a lot of things are a lot better. All we can really do is support those we can support and make things better where we can.
US life expectancy has also gone down during that time.
Okay?
How about climate change? 20 years ago there was hope
Twenty years ago, we invaded a country to steal it’s oil while dismantling the nascent EV/Solar industry to protect fossil fuels
We are here today precisely because things were worse twenty years ago
You’ll fight in the water wars of 2040?
Better fighting to preserve water tomorrow than bloody your hands fighting for oil yesterday
20-30 years ago would be better than now.
Tell that to anyone currently living with AIDS.
No, it’s not. It’s not a constant progression.
In most countries, the best time to be alive was the 60s-90s. Since then the world has been going downhill in everything that matters. Yes, sure, tech has evolved and all. But having the wonderful opportunity to be glued to a screen for half your life doesn’t make it the best time to be alive.
People dont stop having kids because they suddenly hate the concept. It’s in our nature to have kids. We don’t want kids anymore because society has turned so hostile that it completely overruns our instinct to have kids.
It’s not even the best time to be alive during my lifetime
Try not to dwell in the “woe is me” narrative. Today’s younger generation has some challenges, but thinking “this is the worst any generation has ever had it by far” is total bullshit.
Crazy to compare the modern day to the Great Depression or the Civil War Era and pretend you’re doing someone a disservice by raising them with love and care.
You talk about hellfire when it has literally never been better to be alive.
Of course, the Western quality of life has taken a stumble. We’re slipping back into 1980s levels of prosperity from a civilizational peak.
But the real horror of the future is knowing Americans won’t be on top. Why bring another American into the world if they’ll be no better than someone from India or South Africa or Brazil? Might as well just end it here. Die Now!
The real horror of the future is climate change, which is usually the first thing people cite when questioning if it’s a good idea to bring kids into the world at all.
You could have said this about nuclear war 40 years ago, or the Holocaust 40 years before that.
As it stands, a few online gooners swearing they’ll never make babies with their Canadian girlfriends is a moot point.
But the “I’ve made the logical decision to choose not to have children” line is largely cope in a society where people who do want kids struggle so hard
I pray and wish America isn’t on top. I hope it collapses and never recovers.
That isn’t my reason for not having kids, it’s climate change and the global rise of fascism. The US is a factor, yes, but not the only factor.
Also, personally, and many will disagree, there is no real reason to have kids.
I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids. I know people will say the reason is a lack of education or insufficient access to birth control, but if that’s the case then what causes people to have fewer kids is a better education and more access to birth control, not unaffordability. And that seems to be supported by the fact that households making $50k to $75k have more kids than households making $150k to $200k. Yeah, they’re both making less than $400k, but the people making $200k are much closer to $400k, yet they have fewer kids.
Inequality is the primary factor. If people making $150k to $200k can reasonably conclude that having children would be a burden on their future economic prospects (in an already uncertain future), they will decide against it. $50k to $75k is probably more in the “fuck it, we might as well have more sources of potential labor and income and maybe a subsidy or two since we’re already at this point”, and people making $400k or above have nothing to fear from child expenses.
Nah. The people having the kids aren’t generally thinking about another source of labor. I come from a stinking, filthy kind of poverty. Sex is free entertainment and family planning costs money or time to get to the clinic and you have to deal with assholes who think the family planning clinics are abortion factories. So you think “if we’re careful it won’t happen, I’ll just pull out”.
A lot of quiverful ministries are also home to the very poor. Some of them are given teaching for how to get extra money from the government for every kid. The man works, the woman does not, and the older kids are in charge of the younger ones. Childcare solved, in their eyes. I could be mad at them for gaming the system, but I’ve already got too much anger in my heart over the government blaming it on the “welfare queen” stereotype. You know the lie. Black woman with 5 kids from 6 daddies, every one of the daddies is gone. When in reality the system gamers are poor white evangelicals of a specific flavor.
Ah, good point. Made the mistake of thinking everyone was a rational actor.
Also, another “fuck Reagan” for perpetuating that harmful stereotype.
I think you understand this pretty well. For educated people parenting is a choice. They wait for the right moment in the career, they make sure they will be able to provide their children with everything they may need and that their kids will have optimal conditions for growth and development, they consider their other passions and projects and weight them against having kids.
Uneducated people simply have kids and don’t really give it a second thought. You have kids, you feed them some junk food, give them phone to play with and that’s it. You’re a happy family.
This is an oversimplified explanation. I think its more complicated than this, there’s a rural urban divide as well and kids have historically been effective farm workers in some capacity. So if pre-industrial areas or agricultural communities utilize child labor, then kids become a very immediate return on investment.
This cost for kids changes in industrial societies where work is overseen by factory managers and kids get put into dangerous positions without oversight. The incentives become fucked and kids start getting crippled. Sending kids off to school starts to become a better return.
This is also evident in demographics where industrialization is immediately followed by declining birth rates.
If you gave parents money for kids doing well in school, it would lead to a lot of weird conflicts but it might offset the basic financial incentives around children.
Yes, I was talking about developed countries. In developing countries the incentives are different but they also work on a different level. The difference in birth rate between developed and developing countries is much bigger than between families with different incomes in developed countries.
Stupid people do stupid shit. Smart people use their brains.
To be fair not every uneducated person is dumb. And not every smart person makes good decisions. But overall, I think it’s true.
Stupid people do stupid shit. Smart people use their brains.
-Almost System of a Down
Sad, but I’ve witnessed many versions of this.
A lot of that might also be location based. Where I am right now we’re paying ~1700/mo for daycare. Wife got a job for nearly double our current combined income (for 260k) so moving to Boston, daycare going to ~3000/mo and housing going from 2k/mo to looking at 6-10k/mo. It almost feels like a paycut…but at least driving should become more optional.
Protip: the low incomes are dependent on children. If you have a kid your income goes down
That’s why they’re shutting down the department of education ignorant people have more kids. It’s explained in the beginning of idiocracy
It’s because they don’t have access to birth control and women don’t have rights in a lot of those impoverished societies
They have more kids and then saddle the older kids with all of the parental responsibilities
It’s almost self-reinforcing poverty. You can have one person stay home and take care of the kid(s) and lose the income, or you can give what amounts to an entire year’s wages to the daycare to take care of the kid while you work full time. Some may be able to squeeze some part time work in if they’re lucky enough to find a job that doesn’t try to make them work shifts outside of daycare hours. Day care is raising your kids for you, they start off life without you around much.
Yeah back in the ‘golden years’ of the 90s the were saying you needed to earn twice as much as our family did to afford kids. Somehow we raised 2, through university and all without going bankrupt.
You were still relatively close to the gold standard at that point, so housing was still affordable.
Look at median income to 3+ bedroom home values now.
Meanwhile in Sweden the fee is capped at about $200/month.
And birthrate is still very low.
Oh good grief. Okay so if childcare should be no more than 7 percent then if you pay 1200 per month you should make $200k. This doesn’t mean that if you have two kids and pay $2400 per month you need to make $400k. That math ain’t mathing. Not everything else goes up.
Right, we are to assume that basically everyone with children is bankrupt now? I don’t think that is the case.
Costs vary widely across the vast nation. Not making anywhere near 400k here and doing fine.
For some reason the benchmark is always the highest cost of living cities in America.
Maybe the ones obsessed with making it to the top in those cities are the most vocal online. I don’t know but it’s weird how that is.
Question:
Is the plan to make it so only very rich and poor people have kids?The reasoning behind my question is that rich people are generally selfish and thus will vote in a selfish way. And poor people can usually be easily controlled or could be discounted/removed from the voting arena.
I realise I’m generalising here.
But the reasoning is there, if they ‘wipe out’ the generation of people who usually vote against then that helps, right? Or am I being too fantastical and conspiracy theorist?Generally declining birthrates and specifically the disappearance of the middle class are almost inevitable in late-stage capitalism (the stage where outward expansion is complete, so capitalists must turn their gaze inward and increase exploitation at home). Although, let’s be clear, everyone except the capitalist loses in this scenario, and it will hurt people who are currently in poverty much harder than it will the middle class who are only beginning to drown.
But there isn’t some conspiracy making this happen. It is only the machinery of the system that makes true the statement, “If I don’t, someone else will.”
I’m sure many of the educated oligarchs know that this is how the system works. It’s why they’re all building bunkers. It doesn’t need a shadowy cabal in a smoky room, though. Profit inventivizes all.
The plan is dead for a long time now. Capitalism only works if the working poor population gets renewed. They lost track of the plot and focused too much on wealth growth. Now we are in the late stage of capitalism. The stage where it no longer works but they’ll pretend it does until it collapses under their feet.
That stage might take decades though, most of us won’t enjoy what comes next.
Capitalism has never been a plan, it’s a cancer
The plan is to pillage the wealth of the local population via insane asset prices and extreme rentierism around essentials such as housing and then when the amounts being returned by the pillaging and exploitation start to slow down due to the impact from decades of lower birthrates because of living in such a dystopia, importing young adults from countries with higher birth rates - i.e. immigrants - and have far-right political forces funded by the very people pillaging the country loudly blame said immigrants for the feeling of life getting worse and even pain that most people feel as consequence of the pillaging of the country.
Certainly this is what I’ve seen in multiple countries in Europe.
The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.
The plan is to move all the money to the top 0.1%. Low birthrate is just a side effect of that. The plan was always to fill in the gaps in workforce with illegal immigrants who are cheaper and easier to steal money from. Currently I’m not sure what the plan is. Robots? Abandon manufacturing altogether?
No employer ever wanted us to have a family.
If childcare costs $400,000 then would it be more financially viable to have one parents stay at home and provide care and quit their job/career?
Neither of the parents probably make that much, so if it saves $400k it would save money. If that figure is actually true.
Did you at any point between misreading this headline and deciding you’d solved a blindingly obvious problem, think to read the link?
This isn’t Twitter. Stop with your responses to 140 characters.
Oh and by the way, “just stay home” is pretty shitty as a solution even in itself because taking years off work is significantly damaging to one’s career and women are disproportionately expected and pressured to be the ones to do so.
So it says you need to make 400k for childcare to be doable. It presumably takes into account the cost of childcare, in addition to other factors.
That being said, I knew folks who quit working to avoid paying for childcare, but it was mainly because spending 30k on childcare when your takehome pay is 35k seemed pointless. I’m not sure I agree with that, though I understand the thought process.
Until the rich have their wealth repatriated by the working class, people will continue to not have kids.
