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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.

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Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.

Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.

Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.

You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.

If you're at a certain income, additional kids is additional income as more and more gets taken care of.

And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.

eg: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/badgercareplus/fpl.htm

Yup. And it tends to cluster around rural and sectarian lines.

When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.

We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.

Were they Catholic? Contraception was a sin back then.

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