Comment by Simon_says | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Simon_says | Hacker News Reader

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I think, but I'm not sure, that at her income level, the Earned Income Tax Credit will let her get a net refund from the federal government? And Texas doesn't tax income.

Savings have to come from the biggest choices in your life. You've already assumed a bunch of poor choices in your model of this hypothetical person. You didn't mention your city, but I found $400-500 2 bedroom apartments on a quick Craigslist search on the outskirts of Houston. Why is this person living in a (presumably expensive) city? The main reason to move to the city is better jobs, but if she's making $9-16/hour, she may as well live somewhere less expensive. A lot of people in that income bracket live with parents or other family. Why does she need 2 bedrooms? My wife grew up sharing a single bedroom apartment with 3 other people and until she moved to the USA, it never occurred to her that it was the slightest bit unusual. Kids adapt; they'll be fine in one room. Why is she a single mom? Where's dad? Is he dead? Shouldn't the life insurance payout cover this stuff? If he's alive, shouldn't he be kicking in support? Maybe don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life?

> don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life

Often the choice to have kids is at a more stable point and then things go downhill.

sure, and there should definitely be help for this situation, but what fraction of low income parents is this really?

Of course everyone is going to focus on that sentence when I also mentioned many other poor choices this hypothetical woman is making.

Tragedies will occasionally come out of left field, so I believe you can find real hard luck cases where everything was sunshine and rainbows when the couple decides to have a kid. But based on the people I've known personally the people with messed up lives are a subset of the people make consistently poor decisions. I bet that 9 single parents who are struggling financially out of 10 have some identifiable poor choice you could find if they were totally open and honest about their history. Does she have a 6 month emergency fund, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a large enough home, home insurance, a stable marriage, stable employment, flex in the budget? I think if you restrict to looking at parents who fit those criteria prior to the decision to have kids, the sliver who become this down on their luck is staggeringly tiny. And the parents who don't fit these can't afford kids.

> Does she have a 6 month emergency fund, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a large enough home, home insurance, a stable marriage, stable employment, flex in the budget?

Are you proposing that only the top 10% most economically secure people should have children? Because if you check those critera you'll find it's a surprisingly small minority of people that meet all of them.

(Something like half of all Americans have no emergency fund at all. Is anyone who lives in an "at-will" state truly in stable employment, either? And so on.)

Not in those terms. But I believe that list is achievable by the overwhelming majority of Americans if they were to make better decisions. The ones who can't afford to save a 6 month e-fund when they're childless are living precariously as it is and sure can't afford the disruption to their budget a kid would entail.

I feel like I'm talking into the wind here. I guess I hold unpopular opinions around here. Is personal responsibility so unpopular? Or do people not believe that decisions we make affect our lives?

Ultimately it comes down to: knowing nothing else about someone's life other than that they are poor and have children, what is your default assumption? Blame the person or blame the system they live in? This is even more acute when we're talking about people in statistical terms - the individual stories and details vanish and you're left with pure statistical artefacts.

The presumption that it's people's own fault that they are poor often comes with a presumption that they're lying or evasive when it comes to explaining why they're in that situation when really they don't want to have to justify their existence all the time.

Doubly so in areas of reproductive choice. Not only is abortion extremely controversial in America, but access to contraception is hardly guaranteed and not necessarily free.

And again, I think you're vastly overestimating how many people could realistically achieve your standards just through their own decisions. Are your standards achievable at all on minimum wage?

(edit: think about this on the larger scale - an America where everyone has 6 months savings and no personal non-mortgage debt would have a financial industry with hundreds of billions of dollars in very different places ...)

6 month emergency fund? Have you seen how many people in the US are living paycheque to paycheque? I know many people who make six figures who would struggle to meet that requirement.

Having grown up as a military brat I know about poor and I know that this kind of self-serving look-down-your-nose "advice" is just rationalization for living well in a society that enables sociopathy

If you can't afford a 6 month e-fund, you can't afford kids. A 6 month e-fund is not even that hard; you have to re-arrange your spending over your lifetime and not even spend less in total over your life.

I'm sorry you had to go through that as a kid. My beliefs on this subject are rooted in an empathy and caring for kids who could have had better childhoods if their parents had their shit together a little more.

Different people take different lessons out of being poor. My parents were poor too. They struggled (and sacrificed) on their own to care for me an my sibling.

Having kids when not entirely 100% secure in your future is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the parents make sure things go okay for the family. But that's hardly the case most of the time, and people over-extend way more than they can conceivably manage/sacrifice-to-handle. That's where family planning should help (by sharing knowledge), not just giving out free birth-control.

People need to be damn sure that they can provide for the kids, or that they will give 110% in order to make it so. But, welfare is sadly pretty-much at a point where it's just paying people en-masse to have children rather than helping people that got into bad situations. That's not moving society forward, or helping the needy; that's creating/breeding generation upon generation of a dependent under-class that will just vote to reinforce said government handouts.

Maybe don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life?

Most children aren't actually planned. They occur because mother nature has spent millions of years perfecting the art of tricking people into liking sex.

Or, as I sometimes say, our genes are like virii: They don't care how miserable they make you in their quest to reproduce themselves. Coincidentally, genes and viruses are both made of RNA at their root (DNA being two RNA, basically).

Oh, I'm totally with you on the root causes. I'm just resentful that I pay more in taxes to support kids when the parents don't care enough to ensure they have a stable life prior to bringing them into the world.

And while I agree with you that evolution is powerful, reliable birth control is recent enough that we haven't adapted to it. It's quite possible to control when you have kids via abstinence, birth control, and abortion. But it does require long-term thinking and contentiousness, and my point is that these sob stories are mostly missing these personality traits.

I consider such questions to fall under the purview of sexual morality. As such, they are complicated questions that are very poorly served by draconian policies that people who can't afford a kid just should not have one.

Taken to its logical conclusion, I see no reason why that would not lead to a society where murdering kids up to a certain age is the expected norm when the family falls on hard times. If there is a god, I would hope he/she/it would go all Sodom and Gomorrah on it.

When we make public policies, we need to start from a baseline assumption that human sexuality exists and sometimes babies happen and those policies need to respect the privacy of the couple whose coupling created that child and their right to make a hard and complicated decision balancing multiple different interests. Sweeping policies of "just don't have kids" go horrendous places, including forced abortions of late stage pregnancies which are essentially murder because the baby is developed enough it would be viable outside the womb if the mother went into labor.

...or, just accept that if you are going to have kids with no income, both the parents and the kids life is going to be tough. If you're going to make decisions like that, you shouldn't expect the rest of society to pay for it.

You may call that sexual morality, I call it common sense.

Our economic system is predicated on people having children.

I'm not against people having kids.

No, you just want to punish them for doing so.

That's dishonest arguing. I said no such thing, and I don't want to. By and large parents seem to be pretty happy with their kids, and I say more power to 'em.

Quite the opposite. I'm interested in people changing their decisions in such ways that children have better lives. Simultaneously, I'm am very much against my tax bill and my city's crime rate being higher because of completely avoidable problems.

Is there any number of mistakes one can make for which we shouldn't be taking from others to support them?

As much as it's debated in the US, abortion still is something.

But also, she will have to work a second job because no one gives full time work at that pay level. That's the brutal cost of ACA.

That’s not the brutal cost of ACA, that’s the brutal cost of inserting businesses into healthcare via offering them tax incentives for no reason. Simple solution exists:

1) government provides taxpayer funded healthcare

2) government mandates everyone buys health insurance via healthcare.gov

3) government is not involved in at all, including Medicaid and Medicare and does not offer any kind of assistance to business to offer health insurance such as tax deductions

It seems to me that a lot of government laws are created assuming people will continue to do what they have been regardless of how the rules changed. The idea that people will do something different in response to a law, like switching from few full time positions to lots of part time positions to avoid paying benefits, seems to be completely dismissed.

It reminds me of therapist mandated reporting of child abuse making it so those most at risk of committing child abuse no longer seeking therapy, leading to an overall increase in harm. Or the HIV laws in California that resulted in people refusing to get tested. And it makes me think that limiting ones ability to own a gun based on mental health will result in people being less likely to seek mental help. Why is there such dismissal of secondary effects of laws even after seeing them occur?

I didn't even consider that. I was just looking at the decisions she made.

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