Tax the fucking rich. People aren’t having kids for two reasons: education and lack of money. Oh, make it 3 (as said in the article): no future.
The baby bonuses are hilariously low! Some of them are just 2-3k€ as a one time payment for having a kid. Kids can cost 100k€ until they leave the house. How is a one time payment going to finance that? And subsidised childcare, while nice, ain’t going to pay for an apartment or house big enough to have the kids. Parental leave is also just a weeks or months tops. Those are just alibi measures to say “we did something”, while not addressing shit.
And of course, stop poisoning the entire damn planet and vote for parties that don’t want that. Who wants to bring a child on a dying planet? Tax the rich and invest in people, not corporations.
Taxing the rich isn’t going to lower our cost of living, the changes needed are far more systemic. Taxes don’t decide whether the government can afford to do something outside of the local level. To solve that problem, you need to remove them from power and ensure they cannot take it back.
If you want a quick bandage for the problem without addressing that last point, you’re better off implementing fixed, affordable prices for necessities such as food, housing, utilities, healthcare, etc. so they can’t be used to price gouge.
This is obviously not sufficient by itself to address all of the problems and it’s almost certain it would never be widely implemented by the government of a liberal democracy. Cutting into corporate profits is unacceptable.
Until people realize that they must forcibly take back the power to define how their countries are run (not necessarily violently, but let’s be honest, those in power don’t even respond to peaceful protests without violence) and then begin to take actions that actually weaken those in charge, we will continue to live under their thumb and suffer the treatment they deem most beneficial to themselves.
One step that can be taken to weaken them is to organize your community to create alternatives to the institutional programs they expect you to rely upon. Develop programs similar to the breakfast programs of the Black Panthers. Organize your workplaces and local communities into workplace unions (not business unions!) and tenant unions organized, run, and composed of the members who will be covered. Force them to negotiate with you and be ruthless at the negotiation table.
Show the people that they DO have power and from there you can begin to build a movement to take it back.
Maybe there are reasons other than economic ones that the choice to not bring another life into this capitalist hellscape is made?
capitalist hellscape
It’s hilarious seeing Elon Musk taking up the issue of plummeting birth rates, while simultaneously saying people who work for him who won’t commit to giving their life to his companies and sleeping in the office are lazy losers.
We made everyone work 2 jobs and got rid of every social support system and places for children to exist without being run over or yelled at while doing our best to ensure everyone is as stressed as possible… why does no one want to have kids?
Well I can tell you that none of those things are being deployed in the USA.
yeah our government shut down abortion rights and is trying to make contraception and divorce illegal. that’s the way we’re “fixing” it here.
None of these policies address that life is too expensive and difficult for people now for them to think about having kids…telling struggling people things will only get half as worse once they have children isn’t motivating anybody.
- They do address
- This not the cause anyway.
What’s the cause then according to you?
To be frank, I don’t know. I just think we are in a situation where we can rule out some of the possibilities by making comparisons between earlier societies and today, as well as different countries. For example, if we assume that bad living conditions are the root cause, then we have the problem that in earlier societies with much less wealth, that has been more demanding for the average person, people tended to have more children. In addition, we see that people in quite poor countries have a lot of children. You could save the assumption by adding a hypothesis like “if people know that life could be better but cannot achieve that better life, they are less likely to have children”. While this might work, we must note that inequality was even worse in earlier societies. The difference between a peasant and a member of the nobility may have been much greater than the inequality we see today (within most socienties). Maybe the peasant wasn’t aware of it, or whatever.
Anyway, you need a more complex theory in this case.
Sabine Hossenfelder also did a video on that, today: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bm_BGGDurd0
