Child poverty is the real problem.
https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/02/16/americas-bizarre...
https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/02/16/americas-bizarre...
This is a bizarre metric. If richer families started having children at a higher rate, or poorer families slowed down, the problem would be fixed?
What if we simply cut the pay of the upper 50%, not even redistributing the income? That would lower median income, and therefore shrink the "less than 50% of median income" demographic, "solving" child poverty.
Two major problems, though. a) By and large, rich people don't have more children and b) having a child is a good way to destroy your wealth. That is, many that are just barely in the "rich" category won't be once they have children. More, most wealth in the US does not survive generations. (And this is generally agreed to be a good thing, I believe.)
For the second, ok. Cut the pay. How? That sort of suggestion is literally "wishful thinking." If everyone could get by with less money, everyone would. Folks do grab for the advantages they can get, though, and most rise in costs and pay are ascribable to scarcity. Only wishful thinking will make housing and energy costs flat across the board. Same for social mobility. Or physical mobility.
It’s great that the lowest end of the income distribution still has enough resources to have children. It would help no one to reduce productivity.
The metric is probably not the right way of thinking about this problem.
Is the metric perfect? No. But neither is attacking it in ways that it can't be attacked.
Do you have alternatives? What are they?
The upper half of a country’s income distribution can absolutely be more or less productive compared to another time or another place. How would you go about it? Defunding education and research and starting a trade war would be great first steps.
That is, wealth is a proxy for all of those measures. And every attempt at fixing those measures has ended poorly. At best.
I'd like to see a comparison between childless families and families with children, economic starting point held constant. There is the fatherhood bonus and motherhood penalty after all.
If only 20% of children are members of age-adjusted & number of parents adjusted families with income in the bottom half then that means that the bottom half of families are being slowly genocided through the cost to have and raise a child.
But we have no way of knowing that from the national median income statistic.
This does sound like a great idea.
And why wouldn't they compare the US to other countries like Canada, Germany, UK, France, etc. ? We all already know that the Nordic countries really have their act together and are effectively a cherry picked example.
Maybe I'm being paranoid but is this what fake news looks like? The whole point of the article seems to be to further the "tax the rich" argument.
Fake news is literally made up nonsense, usually that appeals to emotion or existing political bias.
I also didn’t really mean that to be attacking, I possibly attributed malice to misunderstanding so if that’s what happened I apologize