I’m completely down with this.
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Yep. If we all wait around for the optimal moment for anything, we’ll all die of old age. We can sit around waiting for everything to be ideal, or we can live our lives and try to nudge it in that direction as best we can.
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Well that is a lot softer than your initial comment. But the kids that are already here, are here. They shouldn’t suffer when people can afford to help them, by sacrificing a portion of profit.
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I don’t like that full-time McDonald’s employees earn so little that they can’t care for a family.
I do like that McDonald’s is willing to advise employees to get public assistance. Just because I wish McDonald’s paid better doesn’t mean I’d like to see this woman’s children suffering in the meantime.
People in the middle ages in Europe delayed having kids until close to their thirties, when they had a place and the income to support them… but its not exactly the same because they used to have a bunch of children, and when they died, just recycle the names… like… oh george, hes dead, but we had another george. So when we think of children as delightful little people, they probably thought about them more like farm equipment. Economic necessities. Free labor. Half of the children born didn’t make it to age 12, but they just had a ton of them, and that is why 1/2 of the population of medieval europe were children. Likely hungry ones.
Slaves in the Roman Empire had kids and just left them outside. They were taken, raised as slaves, and had little baby slaves of their very own, and left those outside… and so on. Third of the population in Rome were slaves, and yet they didn’t really have to buy them after a while. Because of this.
And we apparently have kids we can’t afford, then we go complain to other people about it. My problem with this, is that kids are going hungry, and people who can’t afford them, shouldn’t have them. First change the reason you can’t afford them. Build a safety net, get a better job, go and get politically active. Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them.
I’d hope we could do better. I’d hope a statement like don’t have kids if you can’t afford them wouldn’t be some politically charged bullshit thing. But it is.
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I forgot what I was looking for, but I recently ran into this link: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents
Apparently minimum wage earners are mostly suburban teenagers and poor people are only poor because they don’t work.
Different view: http://www.mlpp.org/raising-the-minimum-wage-good-for-working-families-good-for-michigans-economy
But that just means Mr CEO plutotwat gets rich while we provide for his employees. He should be responsible for paying forced to pay them a living wage.
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I’m sure the poor will value your advice.
In the meantime, it doesn’t address the real problem, which is our robber-baron betters sucking in money like an economic black hole, confident that they can starve the poor out and then everyone will be rich (everyone who matters, anyway).
If your scheme was universally adopted — with a pinch of fairy dust to supply the necessary education and family planning resources, since they aren’t going to get any money otherwise — then within a generation or maybe two, the poorest will be replaced with those squeezed out of the middle class by the rapacious, randian economics of the 0.1%. The poor are with us always, not because they keep breeding, but because capitalism breeds the poor like a fission reaction breeds split nuclei.
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And no one is ever plunged from comfortable middle class incomes into poverty through, say, illness, death, or natural disaster. Or maybe we should also just all be come precognitive.
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You are all just assuming that by saying not to have kids if you can’t afford it, I mean to condone depriving anyone of any kind of assistance.
It probably does not help that you are completely ignoring the fact that people can have kids and then become poor (lose a job, get injured, etc). Multiple people have mentioned this, but I do not think that you have acknowledged it.
Also, your “don’t have kids” advice basically means “don’t have sex” since 49% of pregnancies in the US are unintended and cost influences the use of contraceptives ( http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/CPSW-testimony.pdf ):
A 2009 study of low- and middle-income sexually active women found that 52% of them were worse off financially than the year before. Of those who were worse off, three-quarters said that they could not afford to have a baby right then. And while nearly four in 10 of those worse off reported being more careful in their contraceptive use in the current economic climate, many of the financially challenged women reported barriers to contraceptive use: 34% said they had a harder time paying for birth control, 30% had put off a gynecology or birth control visit to save money, 25% of pill users saved money through inconsistent use and 56% of those with jobs worried about having to take time off from work to visit a doctor or clinic.
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I don’t think capitalism breeds poor people. I think parasites on that system do.
By parasites, I mean large entities that can manipulate free flows of markets, who buy politicians and get their cost plus wasteful contracts, who suck money out of the economy and just fucking waste it, so they can skim some small percentage off the top. The Iraq war is something I view as largely driven by economics, so that a few crony capitalists could make a small percentage off that huge torrent of blood and money that accomplished nothing.
Adam Smith was a liberal… and his economic ideas a way of spreading liberal humanism.
I’d go so far as to say don’t have kids if you can’t afford it, and don’t have sex unless you can do it safely enough to not have kids if you can’t afford it. Because seriously the alternative to that is to produce a child you aren’t able to take care of. Is that fair to the child? Not at all. So don’t fucking do that!
But its much easier to get contraceptives and use them properly then it is to take care of a child.
As for people who fall into poverty because of accidental reasons, or some economic downturn… thats completely reasonable and happens to people. Its happened to me. I was a dot com refugee. I ended up waiting tables. There is assistance for people in this position with families. It needs to be more robust.
However having kids when you can’t afford it doesn’t fall into the category of emergency situations. Mostly its willful negligence. Its not ok.
However having kids when you can’t afford it doesn’t fall into the
category of emergency situations. Mostly its willful negligence. Its
not ok.
So, basic biological purpose runs headlong into an economic and political system intentionally designed to allow the already rich and powerful to retain their control over resources. Humans living to have children (because biology does that to a body) told not too because thoughtful but ultimately tame social libertarian has noticed that given circumstances, it isn’t fair to the child.
Yes, people do choose not to have children. Your words are big hearted, but your policy is nothing more than eugenics: if the system has screwed you over enough that you don’t make enough money, then you shouldn’t have kids. Some people aren’t going to wait for The Revolution in order to satisfy their basic biological imperatives, and rather than trying to be nice about your eugenic-ish sweetly worded advice (“Won’t someone think of the children!”) we should be tearing the whole disgusting system down (at least the part that denies a full time worker the income needed to raise a family).
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I bet nobody had ever thought of that. Oh wow we shouldn’t have kids until we can afford to support them, what a massive revelation by some dink on the internet, my whole world has changed.
Seriously?
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You point out that minimum wage is $2,000 below a ridiculously low federal poverty line (all your words there) and yet you claim its people choosing to have kids they can’t afford that is the problem. FFS.
Wages don’t need to be as low as they are in the US. I get that the economy is in crisis over there, but wages never caused that problem, in fact low wages more than likely contributed greatly to the current sorry state of affairs (it was people defaulting on loans that detonated the problem after all).
Here in Australia I recently quit a job where I earned over $20 an hour washing dishes… during the week… Saturday’s would earn me $24.67. Public holidays $38. Restaurants could afford those wages, because they can also charge more for a meal out because people have more spending money. Staples in Australia are more expensive than the US, but certainly not so much so that our lowest earners are in anywhere nearly as shitty position of people like Nancy.
Oh, and Australia has safety nets. Healthcare, that sort of thing…
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Like most things - this whole issue is complicated on several levels.
For a bulk of minimum wage workers, they are more or less young, completely unskilled workers still in school and not exactly starving in the streets because they still live with their parents or dorm etc. They really don’t need a wage increase.
Then there is the basic concept of paying people what the market we bear, free markets etc. Of course we all know that if large companies are completely unregulated, they will usually take advantage off that.
Then there is the portion of people who are older, relatively unskilled with low job prospects, and working at McDonalds or WalMart is one of their few options.
It is hard for me to support mandatory pay raises, as one size doesn’t fit all. How do you say, “This 17 year old deserves $X, and this 30 year old deserves $Y for the same job.”
The fact is for every older low wage employee who has to go on welfare, means the gov. is supporting them with food stamps etc. This basically boils down to corporate welfare - which doesn’t sit well with me either.
Your argument is based on assumptions that aren’t particularly sound, academically speaking.
The medieval period in Europe, covering the 5th through the 15th century, encompassed several societies, cultures, and countries. Certainly, at one point in one location – late 13th century Prato – men married when they were nearly 40 years old, while the wives they took were closer to 25 years old. Yet, by 1371, the average age of marriage in that location had shifted to 24 for men, 16 for women. This appears to be due to the Black Death. (Gies, Frances. Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. 2010).
It might be worth exploring if communities in crisis tend to see marriage and/or childbirth at younger ages than more prosperous communities.
Your assumption that common children were viewed as “farm equipment” seems to come straight out of Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood, which has since been fairly well refuted by scholars such as Orme, author of Medieval Children.
A cursory glance into Wikipedia shows that your grasp of Roman history is also wanting. Yes, infant exposure was common, but a master had a social obligation to care for the vernae (children born to slaves) on his property.
Never mind the fact that slavery wasn’t necessarily a lifelong condition for those alive at that time. Manumission was common, as was the ability to purchase one’s way out of slavery. Slavery was with some frequency a tool… a tool of last resort, but a tool nonetheless. Slaves unfortunate enough to work in dangerous occupations also died with some frequency. As a result, the supply of slaves did have to be constantly replenished, which means that the Romans did have to continue to purchase – or otherwise acquire – their slaves for the duration of their empire.
The point of this discussion isn’t simply to help illuminate where your scholarship might be off, but to demonstrate that if your premises are based on flawed generalizations, then your conclusions might also be in error.
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People choose to have children. Its pretty easy to avoid. Its a fairly predictable process.
I’m not a eugenicist. I don’t care about people’s sense of entitlement when it comes to having kids they can’t afford.
I’m certainly open to the idea my premises might be in error, and to the idea I’m wrong about not having kids you can’t afford. Care to explain why having kids you have no means to take care of is a good idea?
