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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical.

In the US, anyway, it's not that the money does not exist and is not currently being spent on children, but more some combination of:

  1. some parents are terrible at parenting, and would not spend the money on properly raising children, leaving them even more illiterate, innumerate, and unprepared for life in a civilization than currently
  2. The government isn't very good at telling the terrible parents apart from the decent ones in advance, and is obsessed with disparate impact.
  3. Most costs for having a stay at home mom (or equivalent) are fixed, such that even if a state were diverting all their education costs into the program, and that was $15,000 per year per child, and the family was totally fine raising 4 children for $60,000/year, it still doesn't quite work out temporally, since the children (and therefore the income) will likely be staggered about 2 years apart, and so the first child, especially, will put the family in a bad position.
  4. Most of the people in a position to take advantage of a program like that, because they're able to form a stable relationship (which would ideally be part of #2, but of course would go wrong for political reasons), are already having children anyway. It's the people practicing serial monogamy, looking for the ideal partner and maybe finding him at 40 or not at all, who should be having children but aren't.

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