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Comment by Glawen | Hacker News Reader

Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints.

They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices

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Costs are out of control. I know families where both parents were big tech SWEs and one quit their job because losing that huge salary was about the same cost as childcare.

Exactly. How do we expect parents with multiple lower income jobs to manage this at all. We don’t have universal childcare and Reaganites fucked us with the nuclear family bullshit.

> think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices

How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish.

Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.

If those people expect to continue to live on after they retire, then all the products and services they rely on in that stage of life will be performed by the children of their peers, the ones who had them at enormous personal and financial cost. They are externalizing the costs of there being people to make the economy work in their old age to others so they can take more trips. In fairness, if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes (enormously higher in fact to get close to making up the difference). Those taxes get re-directed to childcare for those that need it. Fair?

> if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes

We do actually have this today in the US through policies like the earned income tax credit, child/dependent care tax credit, and child tax credit, which primarily reduce taxes for people with children (and therefore put a relatively higher tax burden on childless people).

There’s also a large tax credit for adoption costs. I wonder if GP comment would result in more births, or something like H1B arrangements for personal tax reasons.

As a US citizen, why on earth would I bring a new innocent child into this modern capitalist christian nationalist hellscape? We just had to have a judge force the government to fund food stamps for another month for fucks sake. I would be more likely to adopt because the child already exists and needs love and care.

We adopted. So many things today are in opposition to Christ’s teachings. The politicization of helping the poor. The individual reaction to problems by wanting so much wealth that those problems don’t apply to me.

Adoption is costly but for now there’s a tax credit. And I suspect every company would like to have the kind of employee who adopts. Some will pay large proportions of the cost, but not the median employer.

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