This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You could specifically tie it to marriage, which has the side effect of excluding the poor in the USA.
I've been thinking that something like this is probably the way. But to fix the problem @null brings us, you need to also incorporate a piece of what I recall reading here that Hungary did recently: tie it directly to tax rates, too. IIRC, they basically said that women, after having some number of kids before some age or some such test, would not have to pay income taxes for the rest of their lives. However, that is imperfect for at least a couple reasons. First, the benefit really only comes so long as the woman is working again, which means she's rushing to get back to work and to work as much as possible, not pumping out more babies and raising them. Second, it's untethered from marriage, so she can just pump and dump random dude for baby batter (or even just swing by a sperm bank) to get her required allocation of children before going back to her now-tax-free life.
One of the things most people think we've lost in the last century is a strong incentive to stay married, even when the marriage isn't like, perfect perfect. The motivation for trying to get rid of that strong motivation is that if the motivation is too strong, then some people will end up staying in marriages that are not just not-perfect, but which are actively horrid. However, trad folks today think that we've gone too far and that we need more incentive for folks to stay together.
If the old tools to incentivize couples to stay married won't work anymore, and the best tool we can come up is tax policy, then we've got to use tax policy. Make a husband's income tax free for the rest of time, so long as two conditions are met: 1) Whatever conditions like what Hungary already has on a woman pumping out a sufficient number of babies before whatever age, and 2) The parents are still married and caring for their children.
The biggest problem is that (2) might be hard to police. That said, in the US, we already have a scheme for doing basically exactly this, so it's probably not completely impossible. We have conditional green cards for immigrants-by-marriage. You have to demonstrate (by means of tax/property/bank records, records of pattern-of-life together, testimony of family/friends, whatever) that you are still in a loving marriage, and that it's not just a sham for scoring immigration benefits. This system would have be massively scaled up (which will obviously cause plenty of problems on its own, most unforeseen), but it is in principle possible.
In any event, I meant to include somewhere in there that if it hits directly at a husband's tax rate rather than a fixed amount, it'll provide more incentive for higher-earners. Of course, there is no way this will be palatable for the left; they won't stomach what appears to be giving more money to rich people. Maybe there's a plausible middle-ground that doesn't skew the tax benefit quite as far as the tax burden itself has been skewed, but we're not really talking about political feasibility here; we're mostly just talking about the feasibility of the social engineering solution.
There was a bill proposed in the Texas house this session- which will almost certainly not pass because its author is caught up in a sex scandal that might lead to Texas recriminalizing adultery- which offered married, never divorced couples enormous property tax breaks for high parity births(specifically requiring 4 children for eligibility). The left’s screams were probably a minor prefigurement of the freak out from exempting the husbands of stay at home mothers with many children from income tax, and I don’t think it’s due to being ‘regressive’, it’s because to progressives that’s not who the government is supposed to be giving money to. Sort of like pregnancy centers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link