Yellow jacket freedom fighters spreading to London

Thrugelmir

ess0two wrote: »

The very reason working families have fewer kids, its too expensive.

People have different priorities. Foreign holidays, leisure activities, gyms, clothes, eating out.

lisyloo

Thrugelmir wrote: »

People have different priorities. Foreign holidays, leisure activities, gyms, clothes, eating out.

Clothes are fairly high on Maslows hierarchy of needs for me.

Arklight

MobileSaver wrote: »

Don't be such a drama queen; you do realise that contraception is available for free in the UK?



There we have it then, a fundamental difference between you and me. I believe people should take responsibility for their own actions and that it's morally wrong to bring children into the world when you cannot support them even with Child Benefit. And before you get melodramatic again I am talking about people who chose either by their own actions or inactions to have children.



I agree with that in principle but have a problem with the blanket approach of incentivising equally a hard-working couple and a drug-addict single mum who has no intention of ever doing an honest day's work in her life.

You appear to have some kind of poor hating agenda. No one is defending parents having children to milk a stingy benefits system. In any case, this comprises a small number of children who live in poverty, whose parents are by definition, poor - irrespective of the benefits they receive. It always has, outside of the Daily Mail.

I am still interested to know how you plan to remove people's right to have children based on their income, but you don't seem to have the fiber to stand behind your (miserably heartless) statement. So I shan't hold my breath.

Herzlos

ess0two wrote: »

That's fine, as long as the state doesn't fund it.

But if the state doesn't suitably encourage it (i.e. fund it), then we'll just need to import workers to keep up with the replacement rate, yet that's unpopular.


Poor funding for bringing up youth results in poorer youth, we should be doing all we can to give all our youth the best opportunities, because that yields us the best benefits over their lifetime. If that means taking a little bit more from the rich and giving it to the undeserving poor, then what's the problem? In the long run it means less burden on the rich (because the well funded youth are less likely to be poor), and less of those foreigners that seem to be the root of the whole Brexit debacle.

MobileSaver

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

But the problem is now critical, we've failed to breed enough children for 5 decades now, and we have a huge population imbalance

Agreed but, even taking the extreme case druggies out of the equation, are the general work-shy parents the sort of people we want to be incentivising to have children? On balance are their children likely to be a drain or a benefit to society as a whole? Answers on a postcard...

Arklight wrote: »

No one is defending parents having children to milk a stingy benefits system

In that case, my apologies, I thought that was exactly what you were defending.

Arklight wrote: »

I am still interested to know how you plan to remove people's right to have children based on their income

You've completely missed the point; I'm not suggesting the State should physically stop people having children. I'm suggesting the opposite; people should take responsibility for their own actions and not have children if they can't afford to rather than expecting the State to step in and bail them out because they have a "human right to have children." Is this really that controversial a concept?!?!

Enterprise_1701C

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Indeed.

I would advocate that many more people across a broad range of incomes should have access to additional support to have more children.

As the inevitable eventual result of continuing to breed at below replacement rate is, well, extinction...

I saw a film once, think it was Idiocracy. An American army private took part in a secret hibernation project, he was literally the average Joe. He ends up waking up 500 years later and finds he is the most intelligent guy on the planet, evolution has taken place, the less intelligent people carried on breeding the way they always do, the intelligent ones elected to wait until they could afford it. In the meantime the intelligent ones were the ones being forced to pay for the dumb ones breeding so could not afford to have kids. It resulted in a far lower intelligence across the population.

The frightening thing is I could see this happening unless people are forced to take responsibility for their actions. We cannot continue giving people more and more money when they have more and more kids, if we need more people (which I do not believe we do, especially if the pension age is wiped out which it may well be), what we need is people with more than half a brain, we need people that can actually do something with their lives. If you encourage the unintelligent to breed they are almost certainly just going to add to the burden.

Moby

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

what we need is people with more than half a brain, we need people that can actually do something with their lives. If you encourage the unintelligent to breed they are almost certainly just going to add to the burden.

I suppose one benefit of such a system in the UK would be we wouldn't have voted for Brexit.;)

Enterprise_1701C

Moby wrote: »

I suppose one benefit of such a system in the UK would be we wouldn't have voted for Brexit.;)

A rather blinkered response, maybe it takes a higher intelligence to see through the deception policy the eu has been running.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

I saw a film once, think it was Idiocracy. An American army private took part in a secret hibernation project, he was literally the average Joe. He ends up waking up 500 years later and finds he is the most intelligent guy on the planet, evolution has taken place, the less intelligent people carried on breeding the way they always do, the intelligent ones elected to wait until they could afford it. In the meantime the intelligent ones were the ones being forced to pay for the dumb ones breeding so could not afford to have kids. It resulted in a far lower intelligence across the population.

Putting aside for a moment that the issue of nature versus nurture with regards to intelligence is hugely contentious, I already posted that assistance or incentivisation for having more children should be extended to a larger cross section of society.

I'm more than happy for well educated middle earners to be given more financial support to have kids, the point is that we need to have more kids, urgently, and most especially urgently if there is any fall in net migration.

if we need more people (which I do not believe we do, especially if the pension age is wiped out which it may well be),

This isn't about needing more people, it's about needing broadly the same number of people in each age bracket so the young can replace the old in adequate numbers for society to function.

In the next decade or two the number of pensioners will increase by 25%, while the number of working age people (even if we keep net migration at the current 250,000+ per year) will increase by just 1%.

This is a crisis, a proper demographic timebomb that is already going off, for the NHS, for pensions, for the wider economy, for the care system, for government finances and servicing the national debt, for employers ability to keep their businesses going, for just about everything in society.

It has to be addressed urgently and there really is no other solution than breeding more young people or importing them.

ukcarper

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Putting aside for a moment that the issue of nature versus nurture with regards to intelligence is hugely contentious, I already posted that assistance or incentivisation for having more children should be extended to a larger cross section of society.

I'm more than happy for well educated middle earners to be given more financial support to have kids, the point is that we need to have more kids, urgently, and most especially urgently if there is any fall in net migration.



This isn't about needing more people, it's about needing broadly the same number of people in each age bracket so the young can replace the old in adequate numbers for society to function.

In the next decade or two the number of pensioners will increase by 25%, while the number of working age people (even if we keep net migration at the current 250,000+ per year) will increase by just 1%.

This is a crisis, a proper demographic timebomb that is already going off, for the NHS, for pensions, for the wider economy, for the care system, for government finances and servicing the national debt, for employers ability to keep their businesses going, for just about everything in society.

It has to be addressed urgently and there really is no other solution than breeding more young people or importing them.

New technologies could impact the number of working age people we need.