The woman profiled has six children. The government cannot afford to meet all the financial needs of people who have large families and then decide they want a college degree.
> And when parents get more education, their children tend to do better [0], not only in school but in all sorts of health outcomes.
[0]: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/parental-education/
I can understand your desire not to provide material support for people who decide to have large families, but surely her six children made no such decision? To me, helping these kids’ mother complete a college degree seems like an exceptionally cheap intervention — especially since that money comes from a private foundation (the Amarillo College Foundation) and not the government itself.
But granted, I don’t know the magnitude of the positive effect on the kids.
I sincerely believe people who have more than one child (perhaps with exceptions for natural twins and so on which I assume is rare) ought to be increasingly more responsible for their children. Once you have a hockey team over several years (not one of those rare cases of twins or triplets) I am honestly able to look at someone's eyes and say "you're on your own, buddy". However, that is besides the point.
The point is that we can reduce the cost of college. It is already absurd that state universities have to compete against the likes of Colgate and Colorado College. We can and must reduce regulatory burden on our state schools while requiring drastic cutdowns in spending on non-essentials. We don't need a big football team in any state school. We don't need an athletic complex. Strip away anything that isn't related to actual education or scientific research. No school has an airport. No school has a rocket launch pad. Why do we need multi-million dollar sports centers or dormitories? Why do we need a police force? Cut pay for all administration and force them to be at or below the pay for a tenured professor. In fact, get rid of most of the administration. A lot of the things they do is simply not the job of an educational institution. If the likes of Harvard and Yale want to do those things they are more than welcome. However, keeping costs low should be a primary concern for state schools and we should empower as well as require them to do so.
She would get more from having dependants, it’s definitely super tough but doable if you can work during break with the ~$20 min wage as it wouldn’t affect payments.
Although it sucks seeing a University doing all this the silver lining really is that the worst bits of America really do bring out the best in these people that help.
I also think calling the comment a 'trope' is unreasonable. This looks to be an incredible lucid example of possible, if not probable, abuse. Yet that's masked in the appeals to pathos. How is mentioning this anything like a trope? If there is viable reason to believe that empathy/sympathy is being abused, it certainly seems valid to consider it and point it out!
Or you could simply put the kids into foster care. Which has a very bad track record compared to being with mom.
So the data leads to prevention. (Education, or forced sterilization/abortion.)
Unless you embrace immigration or natalism (or both), your (age) demographic story is not going to look good in 20-30 years.
That embrace of immigration is perhaps the main reason the US has had a strong economy. Immigrants fuel the US university system, the strongest in the world, and the tech economy, which feed off each other. And accepting immigrants has led to a cosmopolitan feel in the US, which makes high-skilled immigrants want to come here. That is a big reason why New York is a finance capital.
The United States is now destroying its unique brainpower advantage by destroying immigration (basically in pursuit of political power by one party). It's a disaster for the US. But the smart immigrants will now go to other countries for university and start companies in other countries. It's a huge opportunity for other countries.
Immigration was certainly good for our economy too.
The only place you get significantly more than you put in is Medicare, and that's because healthcare costs in America are out of control. More kids doesn't help that.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/12/03/aarp-lo...
That's because it is an "I'm paying for my parents" fund. When the system started out it paid benefits to people who never paid into the system. The only reason there is any money in the "trust fund" at all is a result of population/GDP growth. If there was a population decline from too many couples having only one child it would bankrupt the system.
Moreover, the social security "trust fund" consists of government bonds, but bonds held by the government itself are just self-canceling worthless paper. Every dollar of credit is also a dollar of debt that the people who supposedly paid into the system actually spent on past government services. It's their children who inherit that debt whether you call it a "trust fund" or not. And if they have no children, the debt falls on someone else's children.
> Remember, too, that if you're self-employed or make a lot of money you're going to get back significantly less than you put in because of the way the caps work.
There are corresponding caps on social security tax for the same people. And self-employed people don't actually pay more, the "employer portion" is a subterfuge to make the social security tax rate seem to be half what it really is. Employers just deduct it from what they're willing to offer as compensation, which makes it seem like people are being paid less when they're really being taxed more.