More Americans say they’re not planning to have a child, U.S. birthrate declines | Hacker News Reader

More Americans say they’re not planning to have a child, U.S. birthrate declines

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39 pointssaguntum57 comments

Anecdotally, the problem is much worse among those that contribute more in taxes than consume in public benefits. This is the real problem. Low-skill high-fertility immigration will not solve it. Child tax credits will not solve it. Welfare programs will not solve it. These problems all exacerbate the problem by growing the population below the net-income line. You may say that these people are more necessary or useful than those above, but that is a different debate.

Net-income-positive Americans are choosing not to be parents because the law is openly hostile to it. Some examples:

Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k, that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo. The only way to survive here on that is in your car. (I have done this. Not a career enhancer.) Meanwhile, nobody needs $4000/mo extra to raise a child, unless they are paying somebody else to do it. This is why women have a hard time finding mates. The only men that are willing to take that risk of relationship breakup are those with nothing to lose. It’s horribly dysgenic, and frankly awful for the kids it is trying to protect, because now they end up with a working mother and a deadbeat father, by design. And by the way, this is not a gendered issue. The first I became aware of it was by a woman that was forced to both give up her kids and pay her ex.

Child care: The licensing, certification, and insurance requirements have turned this into a human farming business. When I was growing up, kids just sort of roamed, and then the police started notifying parents that they had to send them to certified daycare, so my mom got the certification until some professional daycare moved in and started calling the inspectors any time we went outside to play in the woods. Now it’s much worse; daycare costs more than most jobs pay, and those with nothing to lose just ignore the law anyway.

The only way it makes legal sense to have children is if both parents are either on welfare, or part of an immigrant community that operates outside of the rules. My recommendation to my children will be to move out of the country immediately after graduation to a place that is more financially and legally family-friendly, then start finding a partner and having children right away. The opportunities for this decline much faster than any goals other than professional athletics.

I have been recently picturing a dystopia (utopia?) wherein women sell their eggs to some kind of govt. agency which in turn hires women who are willing to carry babies to term.

These babies are then raised in child group homes by state employees all the way from infancy. Meanwhile the state pays for their education until they either graduate or until some kind of arbitrary deadline.

Thus the problem could become cost effective due to economies of scale thereby partially mitigating the cost problem.

However, it is still unclear whether to then make childbirth opt-in or something along those lines.

If we are going to farm kids, then why not do it properly?

That would probably result in 99% of the population effectively being genocided. If the government is farming kids they'd probably only want eggs/sperm from the people most likely to produce high earners who can pay lots of tax. Healthy, tall, high IQ etc. 99% of men and women wouldn't qualify and their genes would go extinct.

Logic says one thing but experience says another. Clearly they are currently providing reproduction incentives for the opposite.

I think there is a common delusion that government is some kind of unified thoughtful entity with logic and foresight. In fact, it’s really just a very short-sighted fight over budget dollars, votes, and campaign contributions.

So in reality, they would probably just replicate more of their most loyal voters. And then there are the agencies. SSA would try to increase the numbers of disabled so they can increase their budget. The FBI would try to increase the number of criminals. Senators would take contributions from industry to produce humans with specialized features like tiny hands and high tolerance for boredom. DOD…who knows. You get the point.

> hires women who are willing to carry babies to term.

We could probably use pigs as surrogates within the next 10 years if we really wanted to. We'd probably also be too squeamish to do it, though.

Yeah, there is simply just too much risk involved in marriage and children these days if you aren't above a certain financial line. In our current environment, where you can't afford a house and rent rapidly increases each year, the prospect of losing 50% or more of your income is simply too much to bear.

I'd guess that in the next 10 years, these problems come to a head, and we end up with significant deregulation of some of these anachronistic policies. But it will get a lot more dire before this happens.

Actually my point is the opposite. That the risk is greater if you are above that line. I know many many people that are quite happy raising very large families with no job at all.

Your numbers do not check out.

>Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible.

Where are you getting the 33% figure from? Using the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_raising_a_child, see that for the $59,410 to $102,870 before tax income group (Average = $79,940), the average spent per year is 13,050, or 16.3% pre-tax. The percentages for the Less than $59,410 and More than $102,870 groups are 24.7% and 12.0% respectively, which suggests that as your income goes up, the percentage devoted to rasing a child goes down.

> US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k,

How are you getting 55%? According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator, at $150k salary, your effective rate is 32.3% and your marginal rate is 34.75%. This includes FICA. Playing around with the numbers, even a salary of $500k, your marginal rate is only 48.65%.

>that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo.

Using the numbers from the sources I've mentioned, you actually have a budget of $6287, and that's with 2 children.

gross income: $150,000

take home (includes federal, FICA, state): $101,545

cost of 2 children: (234,900 / 18) * 2 = 26100

remaining: $75,445/yr, or $6287/month

That’s my point actually. Court-ordered child support payment minimums are massively greater than actual costs.

Any by the way, even those USDA costs are ridiculously inflated. It’s based on survey data, not actual expenditures, and the people they ask have every reason to inflate the numbers (child support, welfare, tax credits, deductions, etc.). It’s mostly childcare and housing costs, but even the other categories are ridiculous, like hundreds a month per child on clothing and books. Come on. So far, I’ve gotten almost everything second-hand for almost nothing, and my son does just fine in a garage apartment with me.

Regarding your first rebuttal: you're agree with the person you're responding to that it costs far less than 33% of a middle- or upper-middle-class salary to raise a child. The argument is that the courts demand child support payments from non-custodial parents far in excess of the actual cost of raising the child.

Strong agreement here. For the net-contributor class, it's absolutely brutal.

1) Incomes are lower than they used to be in the US and Europe than they used to be. Lots of talk about Europe's social saftey net, but less about the lack of well paying jobs (especially compared to the US).

2) Instability of work- our generation does not expect to have one job their whole life. We face being laid off without warning even from very well paying jobs. Unless you are financially independent, this makes it scary to plan for the future.

3) Living far away from parents + family that provide free childcare.

4) Several massive recessions that have severely damaged the professional prospects of the younger generations, to the point where they have significantly less wealth than previous generations did at the same age.

> The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible. US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%.

This is flat out wrong. California child support payments are done out of "disposable income", not total income. So you would pay 15% in child support and be left with 30% of your income (actually you would pay less as California allows you to deduct things like health insurance and other necessary expenses in addition to deducting taxes).

>Low-skill high-fertility

Are coming the to US with the hope of parents everywhere: that their children will live a better life than they had the chance to do. Most of those immigrants dream is to see their children graduate university and to be safely middle class.

>>Low-skill high-fertility >Are coming the to US with the hope of parents everywhere: that their children will live a better life than they had the chance to do.

(In their native country)

> Most of those immigrants dream is to see their children graduate university and to be safely middle class.

Versus US parents, who obviously don’t believe this is realistic with a large family.

Same ‘dreams’, different standards. Frankly, the data show that there is not a lot of space at the top.

The world is expected to have ~11B people by the year 2100. There are plenty of people even if some countries have declining birth rates. [1] Better immigration policies solve any problems that nations with declining birth rates might have but that requires having politicians that are willing to put aside xenophobic concerns to implement sensible immigration policies.

1: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth

1. North America has less of a "problem" than nearly everywhere else, since (overall) it has traditionally tolerated extremely high immigration rates, and potential migrants see it as a desirable destination.

Politicians reflect their voters' views. In most countries immigration rates are at least an order of magnitude too low to compensate for low fertility and will stay that way.

2. Most of the projected increase in global population is due to an expected increase in lifespan, meaning a greater number of old people. They don't have kids.

The big reservoirs of working-age people are in sub-Saharan Africa and rural India. Not many of them have the skills and funds to enable intercontinental migration. Yet.

Not sure why declining birth rate is a problem, though. Maybe we'll get around to automating some of the things.

Good points. I'll elaborate what I meant by sensible immigration policies. Sensible immigration policies includes a better social safety net and education programs to allow people to immigrate even if at the moment they don't have the right skills or funds.

That is sensible only to you. I love how policies are designated as 'common sense' to try to promote acceptance. Let me decide what is common sense.

What exactly in what I said is not sensible?

There is substantial untapped and underutilized potential already within the country. Using tax money to support immigration of those that possess neither skills nor funds, is frankly a slap in the face to all tax payers, and a signal to Americans that we are giving up on them.

But of course one powerful group needs cheap labor, and the other powerful group needs more voters. Thus, with collaboration of the media apparatus, what you suggest will continue to be branded as sensible.

I really don't get how you inferred all that from what I said. A social safety net and better education programs are better for everyone, including the people in whatever country happens to be implementing those programs and policies.

The issue with media bias is another matter entirely and is unrelated to what I was saying but I recommend you stop viewing everything with a conspiratorial lens. It is not helpful for having a productive discussion.

Perhaps people who think like you, and that would include me, should pool our time and money and sponser immigrants. I wonder if we could. I think doing so would make the world a better place.

But I believe it is wrong to force people who disagree to participate via taxes. I believe it's wrong to impose on other people like that.

Do you suppose we could pool enough money to start a community college? Or do you suppose it would be better to utilize existing public school infrastructure and make it better at addressing the educational needs of potential immigrants?

I wish you success

A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

Or maybe adopt them into a house, with people who have time to help them acclimate, while they take immigrant/english classes? Doesn't need to be a big production. Don't volunteers already do things like this?

They do, I have friends that are hosts for people/immigrants from Afghanistan.

I was just trying to gauge your commitment and sincerity to what you were saying.

I'm in a state of flux for the next few months, on the road a lot. But this is a great reminder, something I've thought of getting involved with in the past. Nothing beats people helping people. I wish all of us had more time to do such things.

Also not sure why declining population is a problem. The sheer number of human beings on the planet, however, is the root cause of many problems, climate change, habitat loss, water shortages, on and on.

When I imagine less traffic, less air pollution, more clean drinking water, grazing and farmland, per person; I see a better world, not a worse one.

Declining birth rate is a symptom, not a disease. Immigration may be a workaround but not a fix.

The key reason why young Americans don’t want to have children is because the cost of living including raising a child has been exploding for last 20yrs. Housing, healthcare, insurance, student loans and cost of education- all have gone up exponentially when the actual wages have not gone up.

Immigration is a workaround but it has inevitable side effects. Including dilution of labor, assimilation and not to say many Of the core issues mentioned above affect immigrants alike.

Then it's better to address those problems directly instead of scare monger about declining birth rates because the world has plenty of people and will continue to have more for the foreseeable future.

How do you square this with the fact that the birth rate is also low in European countries with reasonable cost of living and robust safety nets.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Maybe people just don’t want kids when they’re educated.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...

It's also still expensive to do have kids in Europe anyway. Safety nets aside. They purchasing power per capita is lower than in America.

Cost of living has been rising across the EU, as well. You can see it most obviously in the international cities.

Finally one of these surveys that even allows for the answer that people just aren't interested.

It is always hilarious how this sociology field only attracts people that think children are the most fulfilling thing they ever did and everyone else must want that so there must therefore be some other problem like economics.

Turns out the onion satire article was spot on

https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying...

I can't read that article, because I don't have a WaPo login, but previous evidence indicates that people are having fewer children than they'd like to.

See here:

* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

Matthew Yglesias also touches on this in this interview about his book, One Billion Americans, which argues (in part) for more pronatalist policies:

* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-on...

It turns out that it's really difficult and expensive to raise children and more people will want to do it if you make it less so.

Its a funnel which hasn't been considering the subset that just doesn't want them. It doesn't quantify the size of that subset. It takes the answer with the most externalities (economy, debt, cultural ability to provide) and elevates that as the answer.

The New York Times recently published this which I feel explains why a lot of my peers don’t want to have children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-clim...

I'm not having kids because kids suck and I'm doing my part to prevent climate change. I can look beyond the preprogrammed brain chemistry that tells you having kids was "the best thing that has happened to you in your life" as you lose 10 years off of your life in stress and all of your friends.

> as you lose 10 years off of your life in stress and all of your friends.

In fact, people with children live longer and have more social interactions, on average.

See: https://www.mpg.de/14064449/children-influence-parents-life-...

And: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-kids-live-longer-20...

I think what we are witnessing is an evolutionary paradigm shift.

For most of human history, contraceptives didn't exist, so evolution just made us want sex and the reproduction part followed automatically.

Now that contraceptives stopped that trick from working, only the people who genuinely want kids will be selected for, while the people who merely want sex will die off.

On the one hand, you do you. Also, others do what they do. Everyone has their own circumstances.

For me, your "look beyond preprogrammed brain chemistry" comment smacked of elitism. As though people with kids are somehow bound by rules you have transcended. Seems arrogant to assume the reasons others do what they do and boil it down to something as trite as that.

Will I say that my kid is "the best thing in my life" on my deathbed? Maybe. Is my kid worth it to me in a purely selfish personal happiness sense? Right now, I would do it again no question.

I’m surprised to see so few responses of the state of the world and climate change. huh.

Also, whats up with Pew’s sample? ~9,700 people 18+ in the sample and only ~3,900 are 18-49. Surely that should be the bulk based on demographics… or at least more than 40%?

Good, the world doesn't need more people.

Adoption is always a great option if you want a child to raise.

This article isn't about the world, it's about America. If America has less people and the world has more, that's bad for Americans.

And good for the world. Americans are the highest consumers per capita of any nation on the planet, less of us it a great thing for the environment.

Globalism, folks.

> Adoption is always a great option if you want a child to raise

Where do you think adopted kids come from? Someone still has to have biological kids.

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