Federal minimum wage was to keep a family of four out of poverty, this is a 1938 labor law; this law was in effect during our ‘golden years’ 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
Today? They just ignore it as we have since the 80s; these are the results of steadily declining wages for 50 years.
BUT MUSK IS A TRILLIONAIRE HAHA STOCK MARKET 50K
They don’t want babies. They want robots.
Since corporations are people, logic dictates that robots are also people. Robots are a construct run by humans, just like companies.
Oh, and money is free speech! Tee-hee we don’t know what’s happening this was all a coinkidink beep boop
The fortunes of a few matter more than the lives of rest of us, and we’ll just watch from the sidelines I guess whilst dying of starvation… They say social cohesion starts to fall apart when people can’t feed their kids, but if they have no kids to feed, I guess it’s a win win for the ultra wealthy. They get planet earth to themselves, whilst the rest of us just wither away and die, no societal uprising, no revolution, just distractions, everywhere, all by design, it’s kinda genius to be fair.
They don’t want babies. They want robots.
Well, they want slaves. And they’re still figuring out which direction to go
🤣🤣🤣🤣
My wife and I make 120k a year and we can barely afford rent a car payment and daycare.
All we do is basically work. We have no life.
My household makes 120k and I have free childcare with family. I have no idea what I would do if I had to pay for childcare.
Yeah back in the ‘golden years’ of the 90s the were saying you needed to earn twice as much as our family did to afford kids. Somehow we raised 2, through university and all without going bankrupt.
No employer ever wanted us to have a family.
It’s almost self-reinforcing poverty. You can have one person stay home and take care of the kid(s) and lose the income, or you can give what amounts to an entire year’s wages to the daycare to take care of the kid while you work full time. Some may be able to squeeze some part time work in if they’re lucky enough to find a job that doesn’t try to make them work shifts outside of daycare hours. Day care is raising your kids for you, they start off life without you around much.
Oh good grief. Okay so if childcare should be no more than 7 percent then if you pay 1200 per month you should make $200k. This doesn’t mean that if you have two kids and pay $2400 per month you need to make $400k. That math ain’t mathing. Not everything else goes up.
Right, we are to assume that basically everyone with children is bankrupt now? I don’t think that is the case.
Costs vary widely across the vast nation. Not making anywhere near 400k here and doing fine.
For some reason the benchmark is always the highest cost of living cities in America.
Maybe the ones obsessed with making it to the top in those cities are the most vocal online. I don’t know but it’s weird how that is.
Question:
Is the plan to make it so only very rich and poor people have kids?The reasoning behind my question is that rich people are generally selfish and thus will vote in a selfish way. And poor people can usually be easily controlled or could be discounted/removed from the voting arena.
I realise I’m generalising here.
But the reasoning is there, if they ‘wipe out’ the generation of people who usually vote against then that helps, right? Or am I being too fantastical and conspiracy theorist?The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.
Generally declining birthrates and specifically the disappearance of the middle class are almost inevitable in late-stage capitalism (the stage where outward expansion is complete, so capitalists must turn their gaze inward and increase exploitation at home). Although, let’s be clear, everyone except the capitalist loses in this scenario, and it will hurt people who are currently in poverty much harder than it will the middle class who are only beginning to drown.
But there isn’t some conspiracy making this happen. It is only the machinery of the system that makes true the statement, “If I don’t, someone else will.”
I’m sure many of the educated oligarchs know that this is how the system works. It’s why they’re all building bunkers. It doesn’t need a shadowy cabal in a smoky room, though. Profit inventivizes all.
The plan is dead for a long time now. Capitalism only works if the working poor population gets renewed. They lost track of the plot and focused too much on wealth growth. Now we are in the late stage of capitalism. The stage where it no longer works but they’ll pretend it does until it collapses under their feet.
That stage might take decades though, most of us won’t enjoy what comes next.
Capitalism has never been a plan, it’s a cancer
In a viral Substack post in November, he took particular aim at the federal government’s poverty line, which traces back to the early 1960s and was calculated by tripling the cost of a minimum food diet at the time.
The poverty line’s narrow focus on food leaves out how much other expenses are now sucking up incomes and lowballing the minimum amount Americans need to get by.
Green estimated that food makes up just 5% to 7% of household spending, but put housing at 35% to 45%, childcare at 20% to 40%, and health care at 15% to 25%.
Base something on a single metric, and it doesn’t take long for it to become pointless…
Because that’s the only thing anyone is paying attention to.
Calories are cheap, and subsides for shit like corn syrup is hurting more than it helps. But it pumps the calorie count up which trades short term starvation for slightly longer term health issues.
It’s nothing new, different demographics have been trying to raise the alarm for decades, generations even.
Everyone just ignored it till it hit the suburbs, and now want to act like it’s brand new.
If they took my average Costco bill, ported it over to Whole Foods prices, then tripled it, I could retire.
I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids. I know people will say the reason is a lack of education or insufficient access to birth control, but if that’s the case then what causes people to have fewer kids is a better education and more access to birth control, not unaffordability. And that seems to be supported by the fact that households making $50k to $75k have more kids than households making $150k to $200k. Yeah, they’re both making less than $400k, but the people making $200k are much closer to $400k, yet they have fewer kids.
Protip: the low incomes are dependent on children. If you have a kid your income goes down
Inequality is the primary factor. If people making $150k to $200k can reasonably conclude that having children would be a burden on their future economic prospects (in an already uncertain future), they will decide against it. $50k to $75k is probably more in the “fuck it, we might as well have more sources of potential labor and income and maybe a subsidy or two since we’re already at this point”, and people making $400k or above have nothing to fear from child expenses.
Nah. The people having the kids aren’t generally thinking about another source of labor. I come from a stinking, filthy kind of poverty. Sex is free entertainment and family planning costs money or time to get to the clinic and you have to deal with assholes who think the family planning clinics are abortion factories. So you think “if we’re careful it won’t happen, I’ll just pull out”.
A lot of quiverful ministries are also home to the very poor. Some of them are given teaching for how to get extra money from the government for every kid. The man works, the woman does not, and the older kids are in charge of the younger ones. Childcare solved, in their eyes. I could be mad at them for gaming the system, but I’ve already got too much anger in my heart over the government blaming it on the “welfare queen” stereotype. You know the lie. Black woman with 5 kids from 6 daddies, every one of the daddies is gone. When in reality the system gamers are poor white evangelicals of a specific flavor.
Ah, good point. Made the mistake of thinking everyone was a rational actor.
Also, another “fuck Reagan” for perpetuating that harmful stereotype.
That’s why they’re shutting down the department of education ignorant people have more kids. It’s explained in the beginning of idiocracy
It’s because they don’t have access to birth control and women don’t have rights in a lot of those impoverished societies
They have more kids and then saddle the older kids with all of the parental responsibilities
A lot of that might also be location based. Where I am right now we’re paying ~1700/mo for daycare. Wife got a job for nearly double our current combined income (for 260k) so moving to Boston, daycare going to ~3000/mo and housing going from 2k/mo to looking at 6-10k/mo. It almost feels like a paycut…but at least driving should become more optional.
Meanwhile in Sweden the fee is capped at about $200/month.
Until the rich have their wealth repatriated by the working class, people will continue to not have kids.
My wife and I just had our third kid. We don’t make nearly that much, but we’re quite comfortable.
If childcare costs $400,000 then would it be more financially viable to have one parents stay at home and provide care and quit their job/career?
Neither of the parents probably make that much, so if it saves $400k it would save money. If that figure is actually true.
So it says you need to make 400k for childcare to be doable. It presumably takes into account the cost of childcare, in addition to other factors.
That being said, I knew folks who quit working to avoid paying for childcare, but it was mainly because spending 30k on childcare when your takehome pay is 35k seemed pointless. I’m not sure I agree with that, though I understand the thought process.
