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
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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.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
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.
And despite the horrors of reality, some people are still fighting and even dying to get into the US.
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.
No employer ever wanted us to have a family.
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.
* in the US
We currently pay something in the range of 250€ a month for after school care of our 2 kids, including lunch; full kindergarten care for both was around 500€ before in Germany.
Funny thing though: birthrates here are dropping even worse than in the US…Birth rate is, as inconvenient a truth that it is, inversely proportional to education and the liberty of women. You’d be hard pressed to give any developed nation that has a high birth rate.
What are housing prices in Germany?
I find housing is the thing that really drives down birth rates, coupled with rapid inflation that the CPI doesn’t capture.
Housing prices in the last few years have exploded in Germany, but the reduced birthrate preceded that rather recent effect.
When looking at the statistics, main reason is less that parents decide completely against children, but more that they have less children. So the average nowadays is just 1.35 children per woman compared to 2.5 children in the 60s.
Main driving factor here seems to be more self determination of women and a more rational approach to family planning overall, tied to increased levels of education.Why is the rental rate so high, and median income so low relative to the average income in Germany?
I’d also be curious how many bedrooms the average house has relative to the US. I’d assume the number of bedrooms is far lower, and that they prioritized cheap small housing to attempt to boost affordability, which lead to renting being more desirable.
This then would cap family sizes as the median income can’t afford more rooms, and actual ownership of a family bearing home is prohibitive.
Are you serious?
This shithole country I live in. We have funds to create a gestopo and ice camps here in the US and there’s no real support for new parents.
Comical that Republicans constantly bitch about people not getting married or having kids, then make sure there’s no way they can support said kids. Fucking dimwits
Wages have been falling for 50 years. If only the Democrats win, they could reverse this! Maybe someday ¯_ (ツ)_/¯
If only the Democrats win
Excited to hear how the 2026 landslide isn’t big enough to do anything, again.
After a few decades, it starts to get old
Fortunately, my wellbutrin cuts the edge off, it’s a Brave New World!
$180B for ICE. Another $150B to expand the Pentagon. $1T in tax cuts.
Sorry, no money for child care
US always wants to force women to stay home. What shithole doesn’t have parental leave?
Control Women, you control 50% of the population.
Landlords of course want 100% of everybody’s paychecks.
In many municipalities child care is even completely free of charge.
(Only for low-income families where I live.)
From society’s standpoint it is also a good idea to let pedagogues mentor young kids and give them social interaction with same age peers. Also best way for foreign kids to learn the German language and customs, reduces possible later social problems.There’s also a lot of stupid laws that prevent like a small daycare from operating in like a suburb area. Certain types of smaller businesses should be exempt from zoning and they’re all things that are super expensive.
God, that would be amazing. I pay $1200 CAD for my child care.
$1500usd/mth for 1 kid here. Thats considered low in the US. I know people paying more than $3k.
Yea, I have a friend that recently moved to the states, and their rates jumped too.
They were on a local, government subsidised, $10/day program too!
The US isn’t fully industrialized and we do kind of have some protected “pre-industrial lite” style religious communities like the Amish that distort population rates and previously used high immigration rates to sustain the economy until like sept 11th 2001.
Like the real problem is time and diversions. More diversions = less boredom = less fucking. More hours and jobs = less fucking. I’m pretty sure you can directly correlate advertising revenue with lower birth rates.
I’m not convinced the fucking has declined. :-)
I guess it is more that by now it is decoupled from family planning, which combined with more rational considerations (tied to higher education levels) lead to reduced family sizes.
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.
@ $200k a year, it would be more than 5x my current income. I sure hope somebody wants to take care of my soon-to-be kid for about tree fiddy.
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.
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%.
Yeah that tracks. For my family we spend about $500/month on groceries, around 35% of our income on housing (call it about $1600/mo including utilities), and until our vehicle was paid off around 25% of our income went to that.
We got lucky in that we had a family member willing to babysit for us while I went back to college then when they started getting too toxic I snagged a job making just enough for my wife to be a stay at home mom. We absolutely could not have afforded kids if it weren’t for either of those factors didn’t work out. We’d probably still have my wife and I working opposing shifts and both being just sleep deprived enough to be biting each other’s heads off and possibly divorced by now (we had the opposing shifts thing going when we got married, and when she had a week off for her wedding, we both started getting good sleep again and stopped fighting and I had a second honeymoon phase as I was like “oh yeah I remember why I fell in love with you again!”)
If they took my average Costco bill, ported it over to Whole Foods prices, then tripled it, I could retire.
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?The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.
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 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 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 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?
Society has become outright hostile to parents. Cost is a major reason, but far from the only one.
The future does not look too promising.
Yes.
You can’t let them explore on their own to build independence and confidence without CPS being called on you.
When kids misbehave in public, all the boomers get their panties in a wad. My parents get flustered when the grandkids get loud playing together in a back bedroom.
Getting kids launched well in life, with some chance of adult prosperity, requires thousands and thousands of dollars in private clubs/ competitions/ tutoring/ schools/ etc - the highly competitive nature of the US economy has reached down into elementary aged children at this point. Where I live, people even pay for tutoring to get their children into GT programs.
Financial demands on parents have increased, but so have non-financial demands.
Unless you have a lot of support from extended family (which also means that you live near them), I really don’t see how parents do it.
Lost my wife in September. Girls aged 6 and 3. I’m already a hollowed out husk of a human, without support from grandparents that live in the same city I don’t know how I’d ever get by. I am a parent and I don’t see how parents do it. Sorry to dump but this resonated with me.
Dad of girls myself and have experienced (and helped support my family through) a loss that felt similarly severe, when I was kinda too young to do so. Nothing you could say would bother or surprise me (at least not too much), so - with all sincerity, feel free to drop this random Internet stranger (me) a line anytime. Can be literally about anything, I don’t know you and promise to never judge, no matter what you say. There is nothing about what you’re going through that invites sanity, wellness, reasonableness, etc.
Good friend of mine is facing similar, on an unknown but not great timescale. It’s rough out here. I’ve got some gas in the tank for now. Holla if ya wanna, don’t feel any obligation, but don’t talk yourself out of it for silly fruitless reasons either, I guess I mean.
Edit: and if me DMing you first and laying out some credibility on my own story helps you get the ball rolling, I can sum that up too. Again just saying, there’s enough barriers in life, no need to introduce false ones (unless they’re helpful, anyway).
It doesn’t help that the state of schooling and instruction here has grown abysmal, largely non-functional.
Kids, on average, aren’t learning shit here.
While “preparing for” and entering the economy of today and tomorrow. Things are grim.
I am actually really angry that in the aftermath of Covid, and all the ground that children lost, that we did not overhaul schools to be year-round like they are in Asia. Kids lost whole years of education with the endless school closures!! Why the fuck didn’t we make it up with the summers?! Why did we just go back to the same shitty broken system?!
Sadly because the rich would never allow it to be funded, so it was never a serious possibility, and summers off is among (or the sole?) thing keeping many many educators hanging on at this stage.
Make no mistake, far as I’m concerned they should all get probably 100% raises no bulshit, and anyone who was at it throughout COVID should get some kinda large thank you bonus too.
Aren’t a large portion of them glad to have summers off because their kids have summers off? I think if there was a paradigm shift of childcare needs like that, it might not be so bad.
Yeah that’s probably an important point and I should be slower to phrase things like I’m speaking for teachers en masse.
Frankly the public school system is largely babysitting so adults can work and has been for a while, no reason we couldn’t reorganize that to function better. Well. There are reasons. Just not good ones.
Edit: ya know what, I really just springboarded off of your thought to deliver my own half-related frustration. Even without needing to change money in big ways, there could be large improvements from reworking the schedule. Certainly for students’ ability to retain any info. Thoroughly agree with you and apologies for the unneeded slightly off topic bummer vibe.
Also why bring a kid into this hellfire right now.
From a pragmatic point of view?
“In a time of dragons, raise dragon slayers.”
Those fighting for a better future now will get old. Thankfully, so will those seemingly-immortal bastards ruining that future.
We need future generations, educated and supported and prepared to take up the mantle.
As Bruce Lee put it: “Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to overcome a difficult one.”
We need to come back around to the idea that we are here for a bigger purpose than to be comfortable and happily wither, as even
ifwhen we are victorious, someone needs to maintain the solemn responsibility to keep evil at bay, because it will try again.We all want our children to be happy and healthy and safe. But we also must prepare them to bear the same responsibility we do. Part of resistance and war against the principalities and powers and forces of darkness in this world, is to make sure righteous ideals live on.
Thank you Sir/Madam for this inspiring response to capitulation!
you’re not wrong, but how would you feel if you were born for the purpose of fighting in a war you never chose to? kids aren’t “for” anything, they’re people.
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.
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.
Because they had no means to have sex without kids.
We’ve been able to pull out for a long time.
That said, what do you think is going to happen to our capacity to produce modern safe prophylactics at scale of we let guys like RFK Jr keep running things.
Technology isn’t a given. It’s a surplus benefit of a modern society. One that can degrade over time just as easily as it can accumulate.
I mean, my sex ex courses were mostly taught by conservatives, but we were always told the pull out method alone isn’t going to get the job done. Though, I think it’s supposed to be decently effective if the woman is also tracking her ovulation carefully and you abstain during ovulation.
Pretty sure the re-enslavement of women into perpetual baby makers is part of their plan.
Not just women
Are you talking about trans men? Or are you talking about other types of slavery?
Fair enough. Kids were also their retirement plan.
It’s not even the best time to be alive during my lifetime
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.
20-30 years ago would be better than now.
Tell that to anyone currently living with AIDS.
My support worker just got a new client and she said they bought their house for about 30k$ decades ago and are now sitting on millions.
Who the fuck can afford a house or kids or anything other than the bare minimum.
Costs keep going up, wages stay the same or often get smaller. What. The. Fuck.
I literally had to take a paycut to get hired by my former employer again.
Things are definitely not getting better than they were
They’re clearly getting better for your employer
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?
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
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?
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.
The argument could be made that kids conceived right now will be the next richest generation as we have to be rapidly approaching the breaking point with the current second gilded age
You literally have no way of knowing that though. I hope you’re right, but that’s just wishful thinking.
I mean choosing to believe things won’t get any better is just pessimistic thinking, plus its counter-productive because if you don’t believe in a better tomorrow how can you make today the first/next step towards a better tomorrow?
The best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. Why not be hopeful about the future and lay the groundwork to make some small improvement to your corner of the earth?
Bro, deciding to continue living is also wishful thinking tho.
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.
Protip: the low incomes are dependent on children. If you have a kid your income goes down
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.
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.
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.
The child tax credit makes a huge difference. It’s something like $6k per kid per year when they’re under the age of 8 I think it was? When you’re only making around 40-50k per year, an extra 8-10k each tax season is a huge opportunity to improve your finances. I knew one family that had 3 or 4 kids, probably made about 40k per year, they’d stop paying their electricity bill during the winter because the utility can’t legally disconnect you from your heating source in the winter then pay off the debt each tax season.
Additionally many of our social safety net programs are based on family income, with the income threshold increasing as family size increases, so a family making 50k a year with 1 kid might not qualify for food assistance, but a family making 50k a year with 3 kids probably will. Medicaid also will cover fulltime childcare in many states, further negating the financial hurdles of having kids, and once the kids are old enough you can have the older kids babysit the younger ones further reducing costs (of course parentification is very pervasive in this way!) there’s a lot of hurdles that this funding can bypass (then of course put parents in a tight spot that they have to figure out when a new technicality is added to kick them off of these benefits)
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.
If you’re looking at people in developed countries where more kids doesn’t necessarily mean more labor, the difference can also be somewhat explained by religion and quality of life concerns. Extremely religious people in the us, who tend to be less educated and have lower incomes, may not believe in contraception and believe that “god will provide”. That may sound like an exaggeration, but I personally know someone with 7 kids who cannot afford to feed them but thinks that they will go to hell if they use condoms and denying their husband is also a sin somehow. They just talk about how god intended for their family to struggle. That’s not a mindset you generally see in high income families.
The other factor is quality of life (and yes, education). If you’re making enough to afford a home and a good education for 1-2 children, you may be looking to give your child a good life and a good springboard for their future. If you know that no matter what you do, you will never be able to afford a college education for your child, then that makes having a child “less expensive” in that regard. You know you won’t be able to afford sports or extracurricular activity equipment, or new clothes, so while a family earning more may spend a smaller percentage of their income on any single child, the resources they are expecting to be able to provide them increase. A lot of low income families may have the approach that if a child is fed they’ve done the thing. Check mark on parenting for the day. If that’s the approach to parenting then it’s less resource intensive than a more involved approach that some high income families may have. I want to be clear that this is not a moral failing or some kind of judgement being passed. I think a lot of people don’t realize the day to day of very low income families. There are still people in the US raising families with no access to electricity or even running water. They have a very different background and understanding of what a family looks like. I don’t think they are inherently evil for having more kids and being unable to provide for them in the way others may expect, but I also think that’s not an excuse to allow children to live in unsafe conditions. I legitimately believe that if we had better education in low income and rural areas that you’d see this disparity drop, as they learn the different options education can provide and strive to ensure their own children get the best education and support possible.
They have more kids and then saddle the older kids with all of the parental responsibilities
pretty much, they’re desperate for you to make more white babies
oh…you’re not white?
i’m calling the polICE
YDI. should have been born white instead.
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
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.
Meanwhile in Sweden the fee is capped at about $200/month.
And birthrate is still very low.
the cost of having a child is more than just childcare
Until the rich have their wealth repatriated by the working class, people will continue to not have kids.
