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Comment by Kivern7 | Hacker News Reader

Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.

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Children are a massive asset for tax-payers. Money is a claim on the production of a country. Without that production, money is just a useless piece of paper or useless entry in a bank database. And for a country to produce, it needs people of working age.

More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing? It goes up until some cannot afford to pay and demand balances supply.

Without a working age population, your retirement assets will be inflated away into worthlessness.

Yes at a society level, but individual parents bare the costs.

So far rich world governments and individuals haven't found an optimal incentive/cost share ...

Nobody thinks like this. Not a single intelligent, successful, prosperous woman is going to be even slightly motivated to have a baby over the long-term viability and credibility of fiat currency, whereas I personally know of two people who only exist because their welfare-dependent mother impulsively took advantage of a government cash bonus by getting knocked up by a man she barely knew, and then promptly did so again with a different one.

We're not asking mothers to think like this. We're asking legislators to think like this.

The time horizon is too long and the gains too far into the future for legislators to care. It’s short termism all the way down.

> Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing?

The cost does not change. This situation that you describe is already present a many countries who have an acute nurse shortage. The gap as always is filled by immigrants from the global south.

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