So the plan is to make the cost of living even more expensive for people without kids?
Do they understand the problem in the first place? Many people can't afford to have kids.
Do they understand the problem in the first place? Many people can't afford to have kids.
I know that the economics don't actually work like this, but this is the social contract.
If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously break down...
Productivity gains on the other hand get easily eaten up by increased consumption/expectations, or are overstated to begin with: producing 5 times more TVs/ipads does not make the plumber cheaper (nor a house), and unaffected professions actually suffer (=> baumol effect).
Is that because higher earners make higher contributions to the pension plan?
Retirees then get paid based on how many points they have.
Both the worth and the "cost" of those points scales with average income every year.
This basically autocompensates for inflation and rising wage levels, but decreases in population size are problematic.
But the social contract does not care about that.
Except the farmer demands you grow while stomping all over you, and then reserves the fertilizer for the dying crops.
Wrong. Poor people have 0 problems having kids.
People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
The general income tax brackets break down in Germany is as follows:
- Up to €12,348: 0% (Tax-free allowance)
- €12,349 – €69,878: 14% to 42% (Progressive increase)
- €69,879 – €277,825: 42% (Proportional rate)
- Over €277,826: 45% (Reichensteuer or "rich tax")
Source: https://www.expatrio.com/about-germany/german-tax-system
IMO: that doesn't look "super low".
A better tax system is the one used by Estonia: a flat tax rate of 22%
Source: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/estonia/individual/taxes-on-per...
People could feed kids, but they can't afford to give their child a lifestyle similar to their own childhood.
A simply WILD statement given the rates of children raised in poverty with all the trauma and issues that gives, who then oftentimes grow up to be their parents doing the exact same thing.
> People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
Previous generations didn't have to, ours does. So if people don't want to make that compromise, they won't.
Maybe if we made it systemically a bit less awful to be parents more people would do it.
Like, again, still beats the shit out of America's system, but it's far from perfect too.
i have been there, and i disagree. it's of course about attitude. and yes, sure we didn't get expensive clothes, but that wasn't an issue not in the school i went to. things might have changed, but i am sorry, it's not the problem of a welfare system to account for materialism. i was a boy scout and i got all my clothes from army surplus stores because that's what we were into. not the army style, but the sturdy hiking stuff. i was able to save up for an expensive leather school bag, not the cheap stuff everyone else in school had. i could do that because we were thrifty and didn't waste money on other unneeded luxuries. fun foods, treats? why? i am a lot healthier now because we didn't get that, and, most importantly, there was never any desire for that either. so no stress at all. as a child i never once felt that we didn't have enough money. i was proud of the way we lived.
i raise my kids the same way now. money is not the issue here. our toys were almost exclusively lego. lego is expensive, but only if it is new and if you insist on expensive presents every year. it also lasts a lifetime. you don't need to spend a lot every year to have enough to play with. and nowadays there are alternative brands that are a lot cheaper and just as good. oh, we also had comic books. lots of them. we bought and traded them on flea markets. why would they have to be new, when you could get them used at a fraction of the cost?
that's assuming the parent is devoted and caring
in your scenario the parents already failed. again, it is not the job of the welfare system to account for bad spending habits. but i get it. that argument is not new. i heard it already when i was young. and i just didn't get it. i was able to afford everything that i wanted, and i never felt i was missing anything just because our money was limited. i didn't feel that the money was limited. i didn't know that i was poor. my classmates in school didn't know that i was poor. i didn't notice that some other kids in my class were rich either. even those who actually were. at worst i saw some kids spending money on things that i would never waste my money on, but i didn't envy them. i was able to participate in every scout camp and trip that our group was doing. i was a member of a sailing club and made my sailing license. i was able to travel to various countries in europe and even to america. by the time i finished school i had done more traveling than any of my peers.
sure, i had financial support for that airplane flight, but that's the point. these things are available to everyone, regardless of income. anyone who doesn't take advantage of what is offered is either blind, ignorant or stupid.
to summarize: money is not the issue. what matters is a society where people care for each other and make efforts to ensure that everyone is included, regardless of their income. the problem is, that people don't see that. they argue that the money is not enough, when in reality the problem is lack of education (how to spend your money wisely), the wrong values, false pride that prevents people from accepting help, envy, selfishness, i don't know...
Unpaid work. If that work were paid enough through tax incentives and state aid, people would have been having children. But it's not. If they have children, they will be working intensely at their day job in an economic environment that expects ever-increasing productivity from everyone, and then doing more work when they get home. Japan did that. People started collapsing where they worked or stopped having children. Now they are trying to reduce workload, increase financial security and increase wages.
Germany set itself on the road to depopulation.
Money is like violence. If it didn't work you didn't use enough.
> why not to punish the culprits out of spite?
Is there a difference between penalizing the (by choice) childless and lavishing money on those who have children? Seems about the same to me.
That was in the earlier decades when there actually was a social contract. Now the entire society is a profit extraction machine that has people working until they drop.
> monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective
On the contrary. Monetary incentives made immigrant families raise numerous kids. The problem was that natives of Germany weren't doing it. Or, maybe very few from the very low income segments were doing it.
why though? if you feel that way then in my opinion there is something wrong on your expectation of your lifestyle. or rather, on what our society projects what our lifestyle should be like.
but in my opinion we are also doing it wrong. we delay having children for to long, and we spend our 20s either working to hard or enjoying our freedom, and then we have children in our 30s and 40s and then in our 50s we are to old to enjoy the rest of our life. if we had children in the early 20s then they would be grown up in our 40s and we would be able to enjoy our freedom then. get the hard stuff, including raising children out of the way first.
of course, in order to do that, we need a society that values and supports that. and that's what we messed up in the west. in china it is much more normal to have children early, and people are more supportive and tolerant.
sure, having children means that my freedom to do something else is limited. but i don't see that as a burden. it's a choice. and i don't regret that choice one bit. i wanted this experience, even if it went differently than expected. in that sense, expecting that you won't have time for something else is good. but make it a positive choice, not something that you only begrudgingly accept because you feel you have to. if your children feel that you felt forced to have children they will resent you for it. it diminishes your love for them, at least in their eyes.
children can be a challenge, they can demand sacrifice, but every minute i spend with them also enriches my life, and when they are grown up and have children on their own i will look at them as a challenge that i have mastered, not a burden that i took on to fulfill a social contract.
"This perception, however, is false. In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...
Well yeah, if they are falling across all income levels then not being able to afford children can’t be the reason.
I've heard it many many times from many different people, and not once has it been the actual reason.
They have no vision for the future and no idea how to bring Germany forward other that taxing the poor.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...
While wealth disparity is also a problem, solving it would NOT solve this one: In Germany, completely disowning (!) the richest 10% (!!) would not even pay for a decade of pensions.
Society would be very dull with that many old people. But other than that the reasons aren't obvious to me. Let's say the worker ratio was 4:1 80 years ago, which was sustainable. If 1:1 is unsustainable, that means each worker today doesn't produce 4x as much as a worker 80 years ago.
But that's not true! In fact in the US, labor productivity is 6 times what it was 80 years ago. [1] A worker today is equal to 6 from 1947, in terms of the value they create. So ask yourself: why isn't the math working out?
Pensions have to not rise with wages for this to be useful. Which simply isnt happening in practice (yet?)
Also no meaningful increase in housebuilding, nursing, plumbing, childcare productivity; even worse, rise in general productivity increases costs (Baumol effect).
I'm very confident that we can make the math work out one way or another, but this might involve sacrifices that people dont even want to contemplate (yet!).
The actual monetary cost of a child is high, for sure. But many people put that number higher due to lifestyle choices, not need. Social media certainly doesn't help.
The snarky nonsense is not helpful, or appropriate, for this forum. Do better.
Computers also became ridiculously cheap in real dollars over the years, in the meanwhile education, healthcare, housing all shot up faster than overall inflation.
It.... literally isn't? the cost of computers are lower today (in today's dollars) than they were in the 1980s and 1990s?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/09/20/cost-of-a-computer...
Obviously it's not about just computers. The point is we spend more on this stuff than we did in 1980. That is a fact.
Items like smartphones are dramatically cheaper than the tech people bought in the 1990s. It replaced your home phone, video camera, answering machine, alarm clock, clock, etc. You are not correct at all, the things that have gone up in price are housing, education, health expenses, etc. Not electronics.
The point is that people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's absolutely not because of the cost of computers or cell phones.
Most people I know with kids can’t afford them and still have them. And most people I know with money don’t have them. In a way it seems wealth is inversely correlated to having kids. It’s not about money, it’s about having interesting stuff to do with your life, and having the education to know what a terrible economic decision it is to have kids.
This is the conclusion I came to as well. I do have kids.
So I wholly agree with the sibling comment "compromise on lifestyle"