Anecdotally, the problem is much worse among those that contribute more in taxes than consume in public benefits. This is the real problem. Low-skill high-fertility immigration will not solve it. Child tax credits will not solve it. Welfare programs will not solve it. These problems all exacerbate the problem by growing the population below the net-income line. You may say that these people are more necessary or useful than those above, but that is a different debate.
Net-income-positive Americans are choosing not to be parents because the law is openly hostile to it. Some examples:
Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k, that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo. The only way to survive here on that is in your car. (I have done this. Not a career enhancer.) Meanwhile, nobody needs $4000/mo extra to raise a child, unless they are paying somebody else to do it. This is why women have a hard time finding mates. The only men that are willing to take that risk of relationship breakup are those with nothing to lose. It’s horribly dysgenic, and frankly awful for the kids it is trying to protect, because now they end up with a working mother and a deadbeat father, by design. And by the way, this is not a gendered issue. The first I became aware of it was by a woman that was forced to both give up her kids and pay her ex.
Child care: The licensing, certification, and insurance requirements have turned this into a human farming business. When I was growing up, kids just sort of roamed, and then the police started notifying parents that they had to send them to certified daycare, so my mom got the certification until some professional daycare moved in and started calling the inspectors any time we went outside to play in the woods. Now it’s much worse; daycare costs more than most jobs pay, and those with nothing to lose just ignore the law anyway.
The only way it makes legal sense to have children is if both parents are either on welfare, or part of an immigrant community that operates outside of the rules. My recommendation to my children will be to move out of the country immediately after graduation to a place that is more financially and legally family-friendly, then start finding a partner and having children right away. The opportunities for this decline much faster than any goals other than professional athletics.
>Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible.
Where are you getting the 33% figure from? Using the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_raising_a_child, see that for the $59,410 to $102,870 before tax income group (Average = $79,940), the average spent per year is 13,050, or 16.3% pre-tax. The percentages for the Less than $59,410 and More than $102,870 groups are 24.7% and 12.0% respectively, which suggests that as your income goes up, the percentage devoted to rasing a child goes down.
> US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k,
How are you getting 55%? According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator, at $150k salary, your effective rate is 32.3% and your marginal rate is 34.75%. This includes FICA. Playing around with the numbers, even a salary of $500k, your marginal rate is only 48.65%.
>that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo.
Using the numbers from the sources I've mentioned, you actually have a budget of $6287, and that's with 2 children.
gross income: $150,000
take home (includes federal, FICA, state): $101,545
Yeah, there is simply just too much risk involved in marriage and children these days if you aren't above a certain financial line. In our current environment, where you can't afford a house and rent rapidly increases each year, the prospect of losing 50% or more of your income is simply too much to bear.
I'd guess that in the next 10 years, these problems come to a head, and we end up with significant deregulation of some of these anachronistic policies. But it will get a lot more dire before this happens.
Strong agreement here. For the net-contributor class, it's absolutely brutal.
1) Incomes are lower than they used to be in the US and Europe than they used to be. Lots of talk about Europe's social saftey net, but less about the lack of well paying jobs (especially compared to the US).
2) Instability of work- our generation does not expect to have one job their whole life. We face being laid off without warning even from very well paying jobs. Unless you are financially independent, this makes it scary to plan for the future.
3) Living far away from parents + family that provide free childcare.
4) Several massive recessions that have severely damaged the professional prospects of the younger generations, to the point where they have significantly less wealth than previous generations did at the same age.
> The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%.
This is flat out wrong. California child support payments are done out of "disposable income", not total income. So you would pay 15% in child support and be left with 30% of your income (actually you would pay less as California allows you to deduct things like health insurance and other necessary expenses in addition to deducting taxes).
I have been recently picturing a dystopia (utopia?) wherein women sell their eggs to some kind of govt. agency which in turn hires women who are willing to carry babies to term.
These babies are then raised in child group homes by state employees all the way from infancy. Meanwhile the state pays for their education until they either graduate or until some kind of arbitrary deadline.
Thus the problem could become cost effective due to economies of scale thereby partially mitigating the cost problem.
However, it is still unclear whether to then make childbirth opt-in or something along those lines.
If we are going to farm kids, then why not do it properly?
Are coming the to US with the hope of parents everywhere: that their children will live a better life than they had the chance to do. Most of those immigrants dream is to see their children graduate university and to be safely middle class.
The world is expected to have ~11B people by the year 2100. There are plenty of people even if some countries have declining birth rates. [1] Better immigration policies solve any problems that nations with declining birth rates might have but that requires having politicians that are willing to put aside xenophobic concerns to implement sensible immigration policies.
1. North America has less of a "problem" than nearly everywhere else, since (overall) it has traditionally tolerated extremely high immigration rates, and potential migrants see it as a desirable destination.
Politicians reflect their voters' views. In most countries immigration rates are at least an order of magnitude too low to compensate for low fertility and will stay that way.
2. Most of the projected increase in global population is due to an expected increase in lifespan, meaning a greater number of old people. They don't have kids.
The big reservoirs of working-age people are in sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. Not many of them have the skills and funds to enable intercontinental migration. Yet.
Not sure why declining birth rate is a problem, though. Maybe we'll get around to automating some of the things.
Declining birth rate is a symptom, not a disease. Immigration may be a workaround but not a fix.
The key reason why young Americans don’t want to have children is because the cost of living including raising a child has been exploding for last 20yrs. Housing, healthcare, insurance, student loans and cost of education- all have gone up exponentially when the actual wages have not gone up.
Immigration is a workaround but it has inevitable side effects. Including dilution of labor, assimilation and not to say many
Of the core issues mentioned above affect immigrants alike.
Finally one of these surveys that even allows for the answer that people just aren't interested.
It is always hilarious how this sociology field only attracts people that think children are the most fulfilling thing they ever did and everyone else must want that so there must therefore be some other problem like economics.
I can't read that article, because I don't have a WaPo login, but previous evidence indicates that people are having fewer children than they'd like to.
I'm not having kids because kids suck and I'm doing my part to prevent climate change. I can look beyond the preprogrammed brain chemistry that tells you having kids was "the best thing that has happened to you in your life" as you lose 10 years off of your life in stress and all of your friends.
On the one hand, you do you. Also, others do what they do. Everyone has their own circumstances.
For me, your "look beyond preprogrammed brain chemistry" comment smacked of elitism. As though people with kids are somehow bound by rules you have transcended. Seems arrogant to assume the reasons others do what they do and boil it down to something as trite as that.
Will I say that my kid is "the best thing in my life" on my deathbed? Maybe.
Is my kid worth it to me in a purely selfish personal happiness sense? Right now, I would do it again no question.
I’m surprised to see so few responses of the state of the world and climate change. huh.
Also, whats up with Pew’s sample? ~9,700 people 18+ in the sample and only ~3,900 are 18-49. Surely that should be the bulk based on demographics… or at least more than 40%?
> one day, just like in Rome, immigrants outnumber the natives and tell them to disappear.
Really? Wow, when did that happen?
I went to Rome 3 years ago and the overwhelming majority of people there were Italians. Even many of the tourists in the Vatican were from other parts of Italy.
[+] [-] jl2718|4 years ago|reply
Net-income-positive Americans are choosing not to be parents because the law is openly hostile to it. Some examples:
Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k, that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo. The only way to survive here on that is in your car. (I have done this. Not a career enhancer.) Meanwhile, nobody needs $4000/mo extra to raise a child, unless they are paying somebody else to do it. This is why women have a hard time finding mates. The only men that are willing to take that risk of relationship breakup are those with nothing to lose. It’s horribly dysgenic, and frankly awful for the kids it is trying to protect, because now they end up with a working mother and a deadbeat father, by design. And by the way, this is not a gendered issue. The first I became aware of it was by a woman that was forced to both give up her kids and pay her ex.
Child care: The licensing, certification, and insurance requirements have turned this into a human farming business. When I was growing up, kids just sort of roamed, and then the police started notifying parents that they had to send them to certified daycare, so my mom got the certification until some professional daycare moved in and started calling the inspectors any time we went outside to play in the woods. Now it’s much worse; daycare costs more than most jobs pay, and those with nothing to lose just ignore the law anyway.
The only way it makes legal sense to have children is if both parents are either on welfare, or part of an immigrant community that operates outside of the rules. My recommendation to my children will be to move out of the country immediately after graduation to a place that is more financially and legally family-friendly, then start finding a partner and having children right away. The opportunities for this decline much faster than any goals other than professional athletics.
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
>Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible.
Where are you getting the 33% figure from? Using the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_raising_a_child, see that for the $59,410 to $102,870 before tax income group (Average = $79,940), the average spent per year is 13,050, or 16.3% pre-tax. The percentages for the Less than $59,410 and More than $102,870 groups are 24.7% and 12.0% respectively, which suggests that as your income goes up, the percentage devoted to rasing a child goes down.
> US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k,
How are you getting 55%? According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator, at $150k salary, your effective rate is 32.3% and your marginal rate is 34.75%. This includes FICA. Playing around with the numbers, even a salary of $500k, your marginal rate is only 48.65%.
>that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo.
Using the numbers from the sources I've mentioned, you actually have a budget of $6287, and that's with 2 children.
gross income: $150,000
take home (includes federal, FICA, state): $101,545
cost of 2 children: (234,900 / 18) * 2 = 26100
remaining: $75,445/yr, or $6287/month
[+] [-] uejfiweun|4 years ago|reply
I'd guess that in the next 10 years, these problems come to a head, and we end up with significant deregulation of some of these anachronistic policies. But it will get a lot more dire before this happens.
[+] [-] medium_burrito|4 years ago|reply
1) Incomes are lower than they used to be in the US and Europe than they used to be. Lots of talk about Europe's social saftey net, but less about the lack of well paying jobs (especially compared to the US).
2) Instability of work- our generation does not expect to have one job their whole life. We face being laid off without warning even from very well paying jobs. Unless you are financially independent, this makes it scary to plan for the future.
3) Living far away from parents + family that provide free childcare.
4) Several massive recessions that have severely damaged the professional prospects of the younger generations, to the point where they have significantly less wealth than previous generations did at the same age.
[+] [-] lalaland1125|4 years ago|reply
This is flat out wrong. California child support payments are done out of "disposable income", not total income. So you would pay 15% in child support and be left with 30% of your income (actually you would pay less as California allows you to deduct things like health insurance and other necessary expenses in addition to deducting taxes).
[+] [-] crateless|4 years ago|reply
These babies are then raised in child group homes by state employees all the way from infancy. Meanwhile the state pays for their education until they either graduate or until some kind of arbitrary deadline.
Thus the problem could become cost effective due to economies of scale thereby partially mitigating the cost problem.
However, it is still unclear whether to then make childbirth opt-in or something along those lines.
If we are going to farm kids, then why not do it properly?
/s
[+] [-] tomjen3|4 years ago|reply
Are coming the to US with the hope of parents everywhere: that their children will live a better life than they had the chance to do. Most of those immigrants dream is to see their children graduate university and to be safely middle class.
[+] [-] holonomically|4 years ago|reply
1: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
[+] [-] tuatoru|4 years ago|reply
Politicians reflect their voters' views. In most countries immigration rates are at least an order of magnitude too low to compensate for low fertility and will stay that way.
2. Most of the projected increase in global population is due to an expected increase in lifespan, meaning a greater number of old people. They don't have kids.
The big reservoirs of working-age people are in sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. Not many of them have the skills and funds to enable intercontinental migration. Yet.
Not sure why declining birth rate is a problem, though. Maybe we'll get around to automating some of the things.
[+] [-] mercy_dude|4 years ago|reply
The key reason why young Americans don’t want to have children is because the cost of living including raising a child has been exploding for last 20yrs. Housing, healthcare, insurance, student loans and cost of education- all have gone up exponentially when the actual wages have not gone up.
Immigration is a workaround but it has inevitable side effects. Including dilution of labor, assimilation and not to say many Of the core issues mentioned above affect immigrants alike.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Soapysmith|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
It is always hilarious how this sociology field only attracts people that think children are the most fulfilling thing they ever did and everyone else must want that so there must therefore be some other problem like economics.
Turns out the onion satire article was spot on
https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying...
[+] [-] dionidium|4 years ago|reply
See here:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...
Matthew Yglesias also touches on this in this interview about his book, One Billion Americans, which argues (in part) for more pronatalist policies:
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-on...
It turns out that it's really difficult and expensive to raise children and more people will want to do it if you make it less so.
[+] [-] nknealk|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-clim...
[+] [-] 1270018080|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _carbyau_|4 years ago|reply
For me, your "look beyond preprogrammed brain chemistry" comment smacked of elitism. As though people with kids are somehow bound by rules you have transcended. Seems arrogant to assume the reasons others do what they do and boil it down to something as trite as that.
Will I say that my kid is "the best thing in my life" on my deathbed? Maybe. Is my kid worth it to me in a purely selfish personal happiness sense? Right now, I would do it again no question.
[+] [-] dionidium|4 years ago|reply
In fact, people with children live longer and have more social interactions, on average.
See: https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-...
And: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-kids-live-longer-20...
[+] [-] riversflow|4 years ago|reply
Also, whats up with Pew’s sample? ~9,700 people 18+ in the sample and only ~3,900 are 18-49. Surely that should be the bulk based on demographics… or at least more than 40%?
[+] [-] diveanon|4 years ago|reply
Adoption is always a great option if you want a child to raise.
[+] [-] klipt|4 years ago|reply
Where do you think adopted kids come from? Someone still has to have biological kids.
[+] [-] coolso|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelbondurant|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] eigengrau5150|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] iammisc|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Bostonian|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] akomtu|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] diego_moita|4 years ago|reply
Really? Wow, when did that happen?
I went to Rome 3 years ago and the overwhelming majority of people there were Italians. Even many of the tourists in the Vatican were from other parts of Italy.
[+] [-] thatcat|4 years ago|reply