(I didn’t see any rules against purely text posts to stimulate discussion. But if this is against the rules, please let me know)
Some discussion if you’re unaware.
…conclude that “shifting priorities” about family, careers, and how to allocate one’s time and resources is the most likely explanation for the dramatic reduction in rates of childbearing seen among more recent cohorts of young adults. We have not found compelling data support for more readily observed (and potentially altered) policy or economic factors, like the price of childcare or rent.
So, is this a problem to you at all? If it is, then how would you address it? If it isn’t, is this a problem that can be addressed along with addressing what you believe is the greater problem? How?
Honestly, I think at some level, the issue is that raising a child is labor- a lot of it, and it’s work that needs to be done full time (hence why when neither parent can be home, kids are generally sent to daycare or school depending on their age), but which is also unpaid. A lot of people probably won’t like this, because it would be a huge government expenditure that would require higher taxes on everyone not benefitting, and people would probably object to paying for other people’s kids, but I think to really fix this, we need to pay a parent from each family that has them to stay home and take care of their kids. And not to the degree we currently do, I mean an entire, living wage income, with no requirement for any other kind of work for that parent (indeed possibly the opposite, since the entire point is to treat raising that person’s family as their adequately compensated full time job). Leave it up to the parents involved which one of them is the one to do this, have the system be flexible to allow for the family to switch which parent is taking on this role if they want or need to, and increase the amount a bit with multiple kids to deal with increased cost of supplies and such.
Basically, I think that to really fix this, the system needs to be set up so that the cost of having and actually raising and being there for a kid is offset entirely, such that the decision to have one has no financial impact on a family at all.
Oh man, that is a bold policy solution!
It’s a well-known fact that having children makes you poorer, and I think that’s what you’re trying to address it. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to reduce the effect of having children to nothing financially. I mean, if a data scientist with an annual salary of $200K has a baby, then it makes less sense to give them their full salary than an Amazon wage slave that has a baby who works for $20/hr.
I may not have made myself clear- I don’t mean that we should pay people the wage that they were making before they leave to raise their children; a policy like that would give those who least need the help the most money and leave someone struggling to make ends meet before having kids still not having enough after the extra expenses associated with a child are added. What I meant was that we should calculate a reasonably comfortable living wage for a given state or region, add the average additional cost a child would involve for things like food and clothing expenses, and pay a parent from each family that amount. My assumption was that this is probably more than or roughly equivalent to what most people make, and so would if successful mitigate the cost of having children. I suppose it would still make kids a net cost to people who are very well off, but these people less need the help anyway
Yeah, I can get behind this.
If you set a per City or per county minimum income and every family that falls under the income level receives the difference as long as at least one person in the family is working a full-time job and there is at least 1 child in the household then that would go a long way to solving the issue.
Sure it would suck for the people that are making $5 a year more than the annual minimums to know that their neighbor that’s working minimum wage at McDonald’s is making almost as much as they are, but wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world that wasn’t littered with abject poverty for no reason other than rich people have no upper limit to how rich they want to be?