Let's put it up for a vote. There are more of us than you, so you lose. Hah! Fuck you. C'mon now quit wasting time and get back to work, you. My five unplanned children from drunken sex with randos need more money for subsidized daycare.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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No offense but there is something deeply wrong with your worldview and I think you may need to speak to a professional.
"The government should disincentivize making more citizens and make it much more expensive to do so" is a take that definitely belongs here.
Until they reach the age at which they can work, children are a drain on society. They receive public schooling and receive the same benefit from public services that adults do, yet they contribute nothing in return.
"Future citizens are a drain in society until they aren't, so we should make their caregivers pay more to the government while they're also paying out the nose to raise them"
By increasing taxes on parents instead of reducing them, you not only incentivize safe sex and abortion, but you shift the burden of raising a child solely to the individuals who are responsible for the fact that that child exists.
"We should be actively sabotaging our society by destroying the incentives to make the next generation"
I am a strong advocate for social programs: Single-payer healthcare, welfare programs, low-income housing, etc, but for adults who in turn contribute what they can. A child should only be supported by the individuals who created it.
"If you can't support your child on your own while paying higher* taxes, good fucking luck birther"
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This isn’t unpopular, this is plain wrong. You seem to be so blinded by your hate of kids that you forget they’re critically essential for the society to function
Parents already pay higher taxes on everything they buy for their kids.
You need one jacket. My fam needs 4. I'm paying 4x the sales tax you are. I drive my kids to school ..I pay more gas tax.
The only place parents get a break is on income and the only reason is because we have to pay for at least 2x the stuff.
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Say what you will about humans on earth, annoying kids, etc.
But the state needs bodies. Kids are future workers, and they state wants healthy, capable workers. As such, tax credits are offered not as a prize to the parents, but an investment by the state. The state is hoping parents will have a bit more money for healthy food, housing and education for their kids, thus creating workers who are a bit healthier and more capable.
Human capital is a real thing, at a state level. Lose your input, and you'll grow weak.
You may not have had a perfect, or even good upbringing, but any tax credit your parent/guardian received didn't make it worse. If you did have a good upbringing, think of all the variables that went into that. Tax credits are a small part of that.
Upvote for using the sub correctly
A carefully crafted shit take ... up voted!
Unpopular as advertised, sure. But man, what an absolute weapons-grade bad take, with beginning to end poor reasoning.
What a horrid take. Here's my up vote for a truly unpopular opinion.
The reason they get a tax credit is because it costs a lot to have a kid and raise it and all that cost is taxed so they get a break because they are already putting more in then you as a single person and when the parents die they leave behind a new tax payer and when you die nothing will be left behind
Individuals choosing not to have kids should pay an extra tax that should go to the ones having children.
Choosing not to have children is a perfecly acceptable individual choice, but the consequence is that you become a net negative for the economy.
Taking on the burden of child-raising is an essential task that is net positive for the economy, which has been way underappreciated for too long.
If people don’t reproduce enough, we aren’t going to have enough workers. Fortunately though, there’s always a steady flow of immigrants to solve that problem in wealthy countries. After a few hundred years, many societies might look very African/Arab/Asian. If you want to further speed up that process, you could start taxing reproduction too.
I don't get this one... If I am a productive worker and self fund my retirement, how am I a net negative?
Because you aren't replacing yourself. It might not be net negative while you're alive (though I would be very surprised if your 'self funded" retirement wasn't helped along significantly by the tax code (either tax breaks you get for saving for retirement or tax breaks tour employer gets for matching contributions, etc) the state will outlive you and need a replacement...one you didn't contribute to the system.
This overlooks the uncomfortable truth that most humans in the developed world consume far more resources than they produce.
I'm not for parents paying higher taxes, but some of the counter-arguments here seem to assume having more children is unquestionably a good thing in all circumstances. They read more like dogma than rational thinking.
Net consumption (if I'm understanding your definition here correctly), while important to the economy, gets a little weird when you think about how individual choices impact the overall economy. Technically, if I were to buy less than I'd otherwise use of something, that'd lower GDP (the standard, if very flawed, measurement of economic activity) because I wouldn't be circulating those funds among other workers. Buying more than I need actual improves the economy right up until the point we run out of the inputs for production. It's gets more confusing in a service-based economy because service workers don't technically produce any resources...instead they free up time/energy by doing things for resource producers to make more resources or they aid the process of getting those resources to the folks who want to buy them.
None of that means I disagree with you. From a resource-consumption standpoint, there's good arguments on both sides of the aisle...each new person DOES use more resources than is sustainable long-term, but we also need enough people to keep the economic engines running smoothly. A big part of why life got harder after the pandemic (and one that doesn't get talked about much) is that so many workers died or were disabled beyond the ability to work. That's part of why you see the child labor laws relaxing most in industries that were hit hardest by covid (like factory farming). It's definitely not always the moral choice to have kids, but to tie it back to OP, the state definitely has an interest in people having the right amount of them.
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Then I'm net neutral.
No, neutral would be to have 2.1 children. That keeps the population steady.
I see you haven't met their youngest, Decimo.
Modern society needs more children not less.
The world needs less people. I'll die on this hill. We were just fine with 1 billion people. Now we have eight times that,
I wouldn't say I agree with OP, but yeah, until we can ensure good quality of life for everyone and completely reverse environmental destruction, we should discourage bringing more children into the world.
I don't have kids and I take the train. I still pay taxes to build schools and roads because I know we're going to need SOME of them one day. While I am hugely biased toward the idea of massively-dense islands of housing and services, to cut down on maintenance (and use of) roads, keeping transportation medium and education targets and goals in the hands of voters - an idea that is only barely better than every alternative - allows for direction and guidance later (through voting).
We fund the things we need to keep within our control, should we ever wake up and exert that control.
bad opinion, thanks for the laugh, upvoted.
if you care
society has a vested interest in humans being not shitty. part of that interest can be ensured in public education, but the vast majority of what makes a child a good and proactive member of society must come from the parents. human beings turn out better if they have food, a roof over their heads, education and social guidance, and at least one parent or guardian (even better if it’s two). when they don’t have any of those things? things get really bad really fast.
tax breaks and tax credits are are one fine method to make sure that undue burden is not placed on the ones bringing up the next generation of laborers, without paying the parents outright. you characterization of children as “a drain on society” is at best refusing to see the whole picture, and at worst absurd.
While we are at it any one who is irresponsible enough to become a parent shouldn't be a parent!
Who do you think will be paying your pension when you get old?
I don't suppose OP would want to go on pension and work until they die - after all, they don't want to be a drain on society!
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