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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of local retirees who are resentful that their taxes are paying for public schools. They seem to have forgotten that someone paid for them to attend school.

Regarding parental time off, it's conceivable that their own parents never had that support. Maternal/parental leave is taking decades to roll out - perhaps as long as it took for public schooling to become universally available.

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The problem with this analogy is that everyone uses the school system at some point in their life, but not everyone is a parent at some point.

But everyone was a child at some point

Of course? So what? Many of those children will not have children of their own, so that puts them in a different class than their parents. Which is why that is different then going to school.

My parents never got time off to just take care of me. I was on my own. Do I get a refund or a credit? Maybe a vacation voucher?

Can life not be better for us or our children than for our parents? This kind of thinking keeps everyone down.

That's a separate argument from claiming that everyone was once a child so they must have benefited from something similar.

Even further, just because you benefited indirectly through a parent, someone who doesn't have children is still receiving less benefit than someone with children. They are getting the benefit twice. Whereas a childless person gets it once and indirectly.

They should file for FMLA benefits retroactively. Ask them to look into it. Also, who fed you?

Whether or not you agree that society should support children, your criticism of the analogy makes no sense.

How so? The typo? Everyone uses the school so everyone should not complain. Everyone is not a parent so the analogy breaks down.

Kids aren't some abstract thing, they are new people that get jobs and work to pay your social security payments and fix your roads and stuff. We need kids because we need people in society. Everyone needs parents around, even if they aren't one themselves.

There's no lack of parents or children so none of these points seems to matter anyway. Overpopulation is actually more of an issue.

> Everyone needs parents around, even if they aren't one themselves.

No, children need adults around. Everyone does not need parents around. This is all far off base from what my comments stated and just your opinions about parents.

Everyone is raised by a parent at some point.

Again of course, but it still excludes people without kids. You're repeating the same thing in a different way.

But your workmates kids push the society forward so you will have better retirement and their taxes will pay for your roads you gonna use with your wheelchair when you're old and grumpy.

I've never gone to public school and I know a lot of other people who haven't either.

Ignoring the fact the education costs have skyrocketed since they went to school

>education costs have skyrocketed since they went to school

Going back 70 years, you could say that about most large scale services.

So has the cost of caring for old people but they don't complain about that.

That's a brilliant point.

Do public taxes pay for my care when I’m old?

I thought we just got Social Security which is a fixed rate.

Medicare is one of our largest, non-discretionary outlays.

Yes, most seniors survive on Medicare.

Our society has completely forgotten how prevalent and crushing elder poverty was prior to Social Security and Medicare being enacted.

The majority of seniors in this country depend at least partially, if not wholly, on Medicare/SS to not be destitute and uncared for. The numbers for retirement/health savings for seniors beyond Medicare/SS are very bleak.

And yet we are perpetually at risk of throwing it all away for some short-term political points.

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