My biggest concern with some of such programs, including UBI and child tax credits, which rely on the number of children in a family, is that it incentivizes poorer families to have more kids.
It may not be a popular opinion, but I generally see poorer families with more kids, regardless of the race, while more affluent families generally have fewer kids. This puts more economic pressure on poorer families and such kids generally don't end up getting good education or going to college.
Unfortunately, I don't have an alternate solution.
People don’t have children so they can get a tax break.
Your argument is remnant of a moral panic over “welfare queens” in the 70’s which continued through the 90’s [1]. It’s been found tax incentives like these actually reduce family sizes over time [2].
But people avoid having a second, third, or fourth child if they know they can't afford it. Bringing in epithets from the 70s isn't helpful. The original commentator was clearly offering an opinion that wasn't rooted in racism.
I agree that the opinion was not rooted in racism, another sibling thread makes that clear. However it is still a reactionary stance that should be educated. Every UBI or welfare proposal cannot simply be shut down because because of a leaky argument like this. The cost of having and raising children goes well beyond the meager tax credits or UBI proposals anyway.
Is there anything wrong with classism, and is there any reason to lump these together that is not extremely specific to the USA?
I grew up relatively poor, and I am generally very classist (modulo educational opportunities, i.e. for adults with no/little other disadvantages) because, well, I knew and saw a lot of poor people; almost all the same ethnicity as myself.
Kinda, yes. You can have a opinion that is classist/racist without being a classist/racist. This is one of the points of systemic racism/classism. You have this opinion because it's been informed via the zeitgeist of American rhetoric.
The question is, given this new information, do you update your priors and your opinion?
I disagree, but for what it's worth, in case you were not able to tell from my username, I'm an immigrant, from India.
While I have been here in the US for many years, much of my life, including college education and a few years after that, was in India. So, not sure if I'm afflicted by the American systemic racism.
That might be an incentive worth having. Otherwise the USA will join other countries with a declining population shortly.
It really isn't in the metric of most people having kids to get more benefits. No matter what the benefits are, the costs of kids eats them. I am not accusing you of this, but it is a popular trope in some news circles to point out the welfare mom popping out kids for more benefits, It really doesn't work that way. You can watch people locked up in prison for killing someone over $20 tear up over their kids. If you don't have children you might not know the immense desire parents have to provide the best they can for their kids.
As far as poor families having more kids, yes I am one of them. But I have gone to university, and I have paid more in taxes than my entire family ever received in benefits. So that was a good investment.
The welfare queen meme that somehow having kids is a net income gain for poor people simply isn't true, and never was. Kids are incredibly expensive, and there really isn't much economy of scale with them.
The reasons why poor people have more kids has been well known among public health and economic researchers for years. It's lack of family planning and economic opportunities.
There’s plenty of economy scale to having more children. The bare necessities scale quite rapidly with sleeping space (one more bed costs less than one more room) and large pot cooking (one trip to the store and buying in bulk). Most children’s clothing can be handed down to at least one other child.
The child rearing also scales when you have a single earner family unit as even the stay at home parent’s eyeballs can be shared. And after a few years the older children themselves provide some of that as well.
What doesn’t scale are things we used to consider luxuries. Plane tickets, paid summer camps, or private school tuition.
I think it’s more selfishness on the part of higher income earners than anything else that prevents them from having more children. Both in time commitments and the thought of having to give up or pare down an expensive vacation.
Not the GP, but all of the above is true. There's a warped "coastal 9.9%" perspective on having children where someone in the Bay area working at FAANG on principal level told me they cannot afford a 2nd kid because of how much private school/bigger house/... would cost. There's also the model the rest of the world uses, and probably "normal" people in the USA too, where you share a room with your siblings, wear your older cousin's clothes and then pass them on to your younger sister when possible, etc. ;)
Children are not expensive for most poor people, I don't understand how you can claim that. Most poor people have stronger family networks, because a lot of poor people are immigrants, with stronger communities than most 'Americans'. If you have family / community help, children are not expensive at all.
My mother was an english teacher in a predominantly hispanic area. The women (it was mostly women given time of day) openly admitted to having more kids for the checks. I have no problem with that personally. They hardly paid anything extra for their kids. They had grandmas, sisters, friends, churches, etc to take care of the kids. And my mom watched them too during class. Didn't cost them very much. Education in this country is free.
The 'studies' that find having kids costs more money, assumes everyone lives like rich white people.
OTOH the birth rate is below replacement rate, sometimes much below, in quite a lot of developed countries. increased immigration will lead to social unrest; not increasing the birth rate leads to demography of Japan (now) and China (in 20-30 years).
children should be a pressing political issue no matter which way you look at the problem. if you add environmental impact of every child, even more so...
Fertility is literally just a measure of how many people children people are having. Your data is largely capturing the fact the age at which your income tends to peak and the age at which people tend to have children are very far apart.
People generally earn more after being in the workforce many years. It is no surprise, to me, that older people are having fewer children than young people.
Because I think you are trying to answer the question of whether giving a specific person more money would cause them to have more or fewer children. You want the marginal fertility associated with a given marginal change in wealth. If you don't control for other factors then you are just taking cultural influences (e.g. that possibly some national origins or races prefer larger families) and multiplying them by the association between that race and wealth (e.g. that some race within a given country is systematically impoverished). So, that would be an invalid analysis without the control.
Because the credits come no where near close enough to cover the actual expenses of having kids and this constant means testing makes programs harder and more expensive to enforce, and very few people are having kids to get credits and the credits are designed to ensure that those children have some sane baseline of support?
I sincerely apologize if you feel that way, though that was not my intention. It if matters at all, not that I need to defend my comment in such a way, I'm a social liberal.
It is an observation and I will accept if there is a different reason, causation vs correlation.
There is no proof that credits incentivize poor people to have kids and plenty of proof that credits help poor. working, middle, and upper-middle class people afford the children that they do have or want. It's the welfare queen mythos repackaged all over again.
Additionally, what is the problem with having more children if the family is able to support them at some baseline with these credits? If a credit allows a family to plan for and have a child that they wanted, what is the harm to society and you caused by this?
It may not be a popular opinion, but I generally see poorer families with more kids, regardless of the race, while more affluent families generally have fewer kids. This puts more economic pressure on poorer families and such kids generally don't end up getting good education or going to college.
Unfortunately, I don't have an alternate solution.