Big families

[ActionA]

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I DON'T think only rich people should be allowed to have big families. In my ideal world, benefits would be more generous, there would be a massive SH building programme, rents would be capped etc. etc. I think the austerity rhetoric is bollocks and believe this ideal world is actually possible.

However. We sadly don't live in this ideal world at the moment and I'm surprised at the amount of threads by people complaining that they can't afford to get by and yet are still planning on having a 3rd, 4th, 5th DC. Again, I understand that sometimes the unforseen happens and a family that was previously doing well hits hard times. But that isn't the case in a lot of scenarios: the family has been struggling for a long time and continues to do so. I'm wondering what makes those families carry on having DCs. They know there isn't much help out there, and know that they are going to have trouble supporting those DCs. So why do it?

I'll repeat again before the people who don't like reading what's actually been said chip in: in my opinion there should be MORE help that makes it possible for the less well off to have big families if they choose. But that help just ISN'T there, so why insist on having a big family when you can't support them? Seems a rather selfish way of making the point that everybody should be able to have a big family...

cocoa they are not good for the environment!!
(Probably better than masses of children!!) but bad cocoa, bad,bad cocoa

How about a tax rebate then? Eh? How about that?

People who don't want to have children will get to have a better quality of life, unimpeded by the cost and sheer graft of bringing up children. And when they get old and infirm, they will be able to revel in the knowledge that their nursing care and their old age pension will be funded from the tax revenues paid by those children they never wanted to exist in the first place

hetty People who have children (who lets be honest didn't know what they were getting themselves into) need danger money

Stubborn, or from the tax revenues they have paid into their whole working lives?

Haha stubborn hilarious

Oh, come off it. I am here, right now, posting on the internet, because a couple last century, or possibly the end of the 19th century, had 14 children. 14! All survived. They also adopted a couple of children. And most of those had around eight children. Now, the descendants are having between 0 and 4 each.

UK birthrate is 1.8 children per woman now.

hester I'm not sure that's how it works

How what works rufus? Am I missing something? I thought Stubborn was suggesting that people who choose not to have children live the life of riley without the responsibility and graft than parenthood entails, but then expect to be kept by the state in their old age, because their offspring aren't paying taxes on their behalf. Am I just being thick? Am I missing some irony?

I think it depends on how you define struggling, can't afford to get by.
I think that most people have children out of love, some think about costs, career, childcare, pensions, mortgage, etc. and others don't consider a number of those factors.
If you are a sahp receiving tax credits and cb, another child isn't going to ruin you.
If your are the former then you may not be able to afford more dc.
At the end of the day its down to choice, although obviously accidents/surprises happen too.
I can't see it being difficult to understand.

We pay the for the care of the elderly nowadays. They paid for the care of the elderly of the previous generation when they were working. Our care when we are elderly will be paid for by people who are children nowadays. There is no magic "pot" that the money you pay into sits in until it's your "turn" to take out of it.

You could have no children, get Alzheimer's and have to spend 20 years in a high need care home (being fed pureed food by other peoples' children). You could have 8 children and drop dead a year short of your pension age (probably statistically more likely if you have 8 kids!)

You could have no children, but have suffered a serious childhood illness yourself, costing the NHS a tidy sum. You could raise 8 completely healthy children on benefits, all of whom grow up to be social workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, other useful things (like politicians perhaps ).

It's a big old cycle of life and interdependence, and nobody knows who's going to come out in credit and who in debit at the end of their lives. But i know that point scoring, especially in a political climate dominated by the opinions and votes of an older generation who have done very well thank you and would prefer to conserve their wealth at the expense of younger generations, is not terribly helpful.

Welfare spending is already far too high, why would you want benefits to be anymore than they currently are. If you want a big family, provided you can provide for them without needing welfare then good luck to you.

What stubborn just said in her first paragraph

I didn't say I agreed, it's just that people paying taxes now are paying for other peoples care and pensions now. As stubborn said it's not a savings scheme. That's the bit I was referring to

But it doesn't work like that does it? Because the people who are high earners and have no children, and therefore don't need to use education services, who generally use far less health services (in their youth and middle age at least), who don't claim child benefit or family tax credits and all the rest of it....they still have to pay the same tax, even though they are not currently using nearly as much as the family who have chosen to have seven children. It balances out, surely, if people are paid enough to pay their share of tax.

But it doesn't go into a private pot marked Hester's Alzheimer's fund.

And there are a reasonable number of children who would like to have a child or two, but are not able to. Though that's an aside....

Actually I think we're agreeing

And I know you know that, before you say anything. It's just stubborns original post I was referring to

Yes I think we are

Welfare spending is already far too high

Is it? How much is spent on welfare? How much should be spent? Looking forward to your answers because I don't have a clue on the figures, but clearly you do.

The world is overpopulated. I'm always shocked that there's people who would argue that the need to support pensioners in their old age should trump water supplies, for example.

I don't care whether you can afford a big family or not, it's irresponsible.

Overpopulation is subjective. There's too many people to make a 'it's not a meal without meat" (I always want to shut the people who say this in an empty room for three days with nothing except water- we'll see if they stick their nose up at baked potatoes and beans afterwards) lifestyle possible for everyone. And so people right now are going hungry.

If you make calculations based on the majority of people eating a mainly vegetarian diet, projections of the earth's carrying capacity go up to between 10 billion and 12 billion (depending on your source).

Less scientifically, I personally think the world is over-populated with arses. I would rather have 5 intelligent, compassionate women (like our own MrsDeVere) with large families than 3 snooty UKIP voting sets of arses with two kids each.

Actually subjective is completely the wrong word. That sentence should have had "depends on what kind of lifestyle you think should be a minimum standard of living for the world population".

Whether you think they're nice or not doesn't figure into it. It's just math. Exponential growth can't go unchecked.

You may suggest, let's all be vegetarian and live in smaller houses but that baseline would have to be radically recalibrated every five to ten years in order to accommodate growth. And I don't particularly want five children so why should I have to live in cramped quarters so other people can. And so on.

Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%.

So it's increasing but the increase has already tailed off so growth has already been checked.

population growth rate will fall to zero in about 2080. Population will peak and begin declining thereafter
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth

In 2012 the average global birth rate was 19.15 births per 1,000 total population,[8] compared to 20.09 per 1,000 total population in 2007

The global birth rate has already decreased but it goes hand in hand with childhood survival rates, access to contraception and the amount of the population in fertile childbearing years and other social stuff like access to pensions and female rights. Most western economics have birth rates well below replacement figures and have for a few decades.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate

It also ignores part of the reason the world population is so high is that people are living longer. Also that we haven't had any global epidemics like black plague or Spanish flu recently, thankfully.

I don't see why someone having 5 DC in UK would impact on anyone else having to live in cramped conditions.

In UK many family sized houses are occupied by older couples or single older people as younger people most likely to have families can't afford the larger properties.

Are people confusing population growth rate with birth rate?

Why would the baseline have to be recalibrated every five to ten years? We're at 6 billion now. That's a way off from even 10 billion. And of course, if we weren't using vast tracts of land to grow grain to feed to cattle, which occupy another bit of land, which we then eat the nice bits of, that might have a positive impact on how cramped the world feels!