One thing having a kid made me realize is how shitty we treat parents, especially parents with newborns. 90 unpaid days off, thanks USA. Even my job which has absurd benefits doesn’t cover parental leave. California does have paid paternal leave, and that was super nice.
So this actually reveals the core problem with our system for raising children. All of the cost is dumped on the child’s parents… and then there is absolutely no claim whatsoever to any economic output that child produces. The government gets to tax that child, your local businesses get to exploit that child, but you are the one feeding, housing, and caring for that child entirely on your own. If your parents help you, great, but I think at this point we all know what kind of grandparents the Boomers are on average.
So you’ve got this 250k expense you’re taking on that society enjoys nearly all the economic benefits of. It actually makes a ton of sense for daycare workers to be as well paid and often better paid than the parents of the kid who are dropping the kid off, and for that daycare worker to be taxpayer funded. Because the government will get to tax that little tyke some day and the government gets to tax the parent who would have been staying home otherwise, and it all pencils out fine from the perspective of the government.
The only reason we don’t have publicly funded child care in the US is religious fundamentalists desire to make women having careers less appealing. Full stop. This is about women’s place being in the kitchen and it always was.
It’s not surprising people aren’t having kids given the financial facts of it. And it’s not like the childless people are miserable. Quite the opposite they have slightly lower highs and slightly higher lows. True they’ll never know what it’s like to see XYZ milestone for their kid, but they also won’t experience their kid dying of a fentanyl overdose, saying a bunch of super hurtful probably true things and cutting you off, or marrying and then later divorcing someone you detest.
My wife and I will very likely still have one. But at this point we really might run out the clock just because nobody we know makes having kids seem even slightly appealing and our current life is pretty good.
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I feel so lucky, I was offered a 3 year foreign assignment about a month before we knew we were expecting our first. Moved to Berlin halfway through the pregnancy. Had two kids in Germany. My wife got Elterngeld for each of them despite never having worked in Germany, we also got Kindergeld for both of them. After our second was born we were getting like an extra 700 euros per month.
I also had amazing private insurance that reimbursed everything 100% (regardless the hospital bills were ridiculously low by US standards). Day care is subsidized in Berlin (not in all of Germany), but hard to get into. I paid around 300 euro per month for a private daycare at my employer once my oldest turned 1.
Since I’ve moved back here I’ve experienced the realities of raising kids in the US in a HCOL area and know how good we had it.
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this is 100% correct, literally no way anyone could argue anything else
It’s really not complicated why people are having fewer children in the developed world. It’s because it takes an enormous amount of resources to raise a child in the developed world, and unlike the undeveloped world where your children = your retirement plan / cheap labor for subsistence farming there’s zero return expected on that immense investment of time and cash.
And that’s true in the Asian countries with collapse birthrates as well. Even in countries where the child care is much better than here it’s still nowhere near good enough to make the idea of having kids actually appealing to anyone who isn’t getting their head absolutely caved in by baby making chemicals. And the result is 1.4-1.7 births per woman which is far below replacement level.
Look we’ll all go back to having 2.2 kids per household, but the deal being we (the potential parents) pay for everything and you (society) get everything isn’t going to fly past us doing the bare minimum to get the parental highs and that’s 1 kid not 2-3.
So basically until society gives parents a substantially and I mean like 1200% better deal the population will crater with no end in sight. Which honestly is probably a godsend for the ecology of this planet so don’t let me get in the way lol.
our entire society is engineered around people being paired with kids, hard from my perspective to see how they’re somehow disadvantaged compared to singles. If I was married with kids I’d be paying an assload less taxes.
I took like 3 days off. My wife used unpaid leave and we scraped by. It’s crazy.
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It’s disadvantaged against single people and people with kids. Kids cost vastly more than the tax advantages.
It’s advantaged for people like my wife and I who are married but do not have kids. Every financial incentive out there encourages everyone to be like us. The only way it hits us is that we pay property taxes that mostly go to local school district funding and do not have children ourselves… but that’s also an essential part of having a nicer place to live so we benefit from it indirectly pretty strongly.
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BS nailing the shitty boomer grandparents. One or zero is the correct # unless you know for an absolute fact that you have an exception. Thought we had an exception on my wife’s side and boy was I wrong.
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One of my biggest issues with the way government expenditures are discussed in this country is that they never ever talk about the return on the investment. Public funded childcare creates more children, public education creates a more educated more productive workforce, and infrastructure spend increases the supply of literally everything for literally everyone. Obviously it’s possible to waste money on child care, education, and infrastructure but if you look at it in the aggregate what you see pretty clearly is that a tax dollar in yields more than a tax dollar back out in the future and that’s in real terms.
All of these right wing assholes are constantly going on about running the government like a business, meanwhile I, a businessman, would gladly pay for every remotely renumerative college degree in America in exchange for the difference in taxes paid between that person with and without that degree. It’s an obviously good play with a progressive income tax system to push workers up the income ladder where they’ll not only pay taxes on more income but at a higher %.
I have zero investment ideas that have returns like these government projects do to the government. And that doesn’t even account for all the tax recapture on the income/sales taxes on the workers, the permits on the new economic activity, etc etc etc.
There’s a reason why these kinds of things are directly correlated with economic prosperity. It’s because they make sense in the real world.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
But remember kids giving rich people huge tax breaks pays for itself through increased economic activity.
Honestly the biggest flaw in our system is that our government is treated like terrain rather than a player on the board. At this point I almost wish the politicians were on commission like the corrupt regional/local guys in China during the development boom.
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This whole country has been brainwashed by capitalist propaganda.
European countries are far less rich than us and provide massively better quality of life. All that extra money we aren’t using to provide child care and other necessities is being siphoned away by assholes like the Kochs and Sacklers. It’s so gross.
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That’s just how it be in USA #1. Billionaires existing is a tax on everyone else’s quality of life.
There could still be billionaires in a world with infrastructure spending, and good quality education and childcare provided by the government. Arguably they’d be richer. A bunch of the reason this shit makes me so angry is DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND PARETO EFFICIENT ANYTHING?
THERE ARE NO LOSERS TO FULLY FUNDING THE +ROI GOVERNMENT SPENDING PROJECTS. THEY ARE LITERALLY BETTER THAN FREE. YOU COULD USE THE MONEY EARNED TO FUND FUTURE TAX CUTS FOR RICH ASSHOLES IF YOU WANTED.
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE RICH ASSHOLES THAT YOU CAN BUY DOWN THE FUTURE TAX RATE BY INVESTING IN CERTAIN KINDS OF GOVERNMENT SPENDING NOW? BECAUSE THAT’S A DEAL I PERSONALLY WOULD TAKE IMMEDIATELY.
AND IF YOU WANT TO DO THIS CRAP WITH DEFICIT SPENDING THAT’S FINE BECAUSE IT HAS A HUGE POSITIVE ROI.
If you interpreted all of that as me screaming know that I was and I am happy it had the intended effect. There is nothing as perverted to me as being presented two options and having one be clearly better for you and literally everyone else and the other is clearly worse for you and everyone else and pretty evil as well… and choosing option number 2. Zuck has done this a bunch of times which is why I hate him so much lol. Ditto for Mitch McConnell. They could have made different choices and it would have been better for literally everyone including them. They chose evil in a vacuum and I do not grok it.
On the +ROI projects we’ve elected to do this as a society. We’re simply doing things incorrectly for the sake of doing them incorrectly. And I swear to god everytime I look into why we do it that way it’s always and/or racism/religion.
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Mitch not nuking Trump on 1/7 was one of the biggest own goals in American history.
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Well this one is interesting
https://x.com/politics_polls/status/1714384494126317607?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
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Whenever I see a good Biden poll I’m like why isn’t there a social media Biden account just cherry picking the best polls and spamming them relentlessly, and then I realize next to nobody, not even the truth social people following the former President’s, subject themselves to looking at all his posts, as we do, thanks “goofyballer”.
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Yeah my take is still that this is meaningless and I don’t know why we’re bothering to poll. Actually yes I do, it’s to fuel terrible the sky is falling takes on this site.
The sky is falling in like 11 places legitimately so there’s plenty to justify the feelings of anxiety without catastrophizing it past the early cyberpunk dystopia we actually live in.
Yeah there are a handful of things going on in the current meta where the wealthy are actually making long-term -EV decisions for themselves and fucking everyone worse off than them in the process.
I hope uncle Joe has some more solid security plans when he shows up in Israel