To think WTAF at ‘Bonk for Britain?’

[Upthebracket22]

Anyone seen this? It’s apparently based on a policy from (far right) Hungary where the media were saying that too many women were going to university and thus wouldn’t be having kids!

www.thesun.co.uk/news/20048496/women-tax-cuts-have-children/amp/

Firstly, please don't presume you speak for all women. If you go back to pre-enlightened days, many women went bananas staying at home.

But they aren't actually helping women to stay at home, are they? Free childcare from 1-4 years, wrap-around childcare for those at school and paid parental leave up to a year old would do that.

Not tax breaks.

And it's incentivising women and only women, not parents. This is a step backwards for women's rights.

Good post.

Pre-enlightened times? Lol. So we're living in enlightened times, are we? Okay...

I do agree that a tax break isn't enough. Lots more needs to be done to incentivise and support family life.

‘While Europe/UK/USA etc can mitigate population loss through immigration, can you really hope to retain cultural cohesion in a society where a 1/4 or even a 1/3 of the population are first generation immigrants with very few ties to their host country and little in cultural similarities. And I'm not talking about race, but culture.’

Well people have to make a choice. Does culture matter more than being able to age with dignity? Would it be more important to freeze in line at the food bank in your 80s and receive no care for your ailments as long as everyone around you liked the same kind of food and music and celebrated the same holidays? Culture changes, we’re not the same country we were 100 years ago, we’ll adapt. The historic buildings and weather will still be there.

Not if they're caring for dependents. If they just can't be arsed to work more than the minimum then yes it does.

On another note, I can't say I've met many women with 4+ children that work full time. I'm not sure how much of an incentive this will be for them to work FT given the cost of childcare.

The planet doesn't care whose children are using up the resources or who looks after the elderly. At some point we'll be past the point of no return and that will be that (and no doubt many women will still be arguing their right to have kids).

Either we roll it back or we accept that our family lines will eventually end in a horrible irreversible nightmare which might have been avoided.

What's the difference between benefits topping up part time workers who earn under the tax threshold (so they can raise their children) and tax breaks for women to have more children? Is the first one more palatable than the second?

So everyone should stop having children then? We should just let the human race die out so we can save the planet?

Just when I thought this thread couldn't get any more ridiculous.

Yes that seems to sum it up.

Because the latter can see a woman with an income of £100k+ a year paying no tax whilst a low earner still has to.

Reducing massive overpopulation isn't exactly the same as letting the planet die out. We could reduce the human population by 50% without ending humanity.

Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years and its only in the last few hundred that the population has doubled many times over. See below graph.

Which 50% of the population should be wiped out, I wonder?

Humans have actually been around for 6 millions of years (bit more than "tens of thousands" @Galaktoboureko ) Does make me wonder what other basic facts you've got wrong.

We need more babies, not fewer. We have a rapidly ageing population and we need economically active citizens. We are already in trouble and it's going to get a lot worse - there need to be massive incentives to have children, not just tax breaks.

@beastlyslumber modern humans have been around for approximately 200,000 years, not 6 million.
The "need" for more babies is a purely selfish human thing; it will be catastrophic for the planet for the human population to increase.

Not if they're under the tax threshold, and claiming top up benefits they don't. And there's vastly more women who do this then women earning at the other end of the scale.

Modern humans have only been around for 200k years, but the human species has been in existence between 5m - 7m years.

No. Scientists believe we only separated from chimps between 4-7 million years ago. 😂 Humans as we know them (homosapiens) have only been around for a few hundred thousand years. I actually meant human civilisation has only been around for tens of thousands of years.

The problem is then you’ll have to keep feeding the pyramid, literally and figuratively. The human race cannot increase exponentially.

The inverse pyramid is a problem, but so is pushing people to have children in order to prop it up. Tax breaks like the proposed one would not be workable. How can the UK be expected to provide services AND cut off a significant proportion of revenue, when the aforementioned services are already underfunded and overburdened?

The "need" for more babies is a purely selfish human thing; it will be catastrophic for the planet for the human population to increase.

The need to have babies is the same for every species, not just humans! The whole point of life is to reproduce and survive. The fact that people are now saying this is somehow morally wrong is a really, seriously worrying trend.

We need people - the more the better. When there are large populations, that when we see huge progress economically. Cities are built when population surges. We need people to be economically active in order for society to prosper. Societies full of ageing people are dying societies.

Doesn't change my point.

I already said I have no issue with women doing low paid but jobs receiving help, especially as many of these jobs are important. However, it makes no sense giving tax breaks to incredibly high earners and expecting single people to pick up the slack. If it happens I'll just start taking payment in cash, which I could easily do but don't for moral reasons.

If we want to rely less on immigration (are we sure we want to?) we should cut down on employers that exploit their immigrant workers. I have worked with people from Poland in a manual labour job. They worked all the hours they could without overtime pay and in poor conditions, but they chose to because it was worth the hard graft for a few months/ year to then take back to their families at home in Poland. I also did this job for a while (born in UK) but loads of my friends wouldn't have dreamed of it, because basically they thought it was rubbish. Employers should treat their employees better, and people born in the UK could maybe get used to doing more hard graft as well? Not think that it's beneath them?

People who want to have 4+ children should be allowed. But many don't, and partly this is because of worries about the global population. Is it selfish for us to ignore the global problem because it would help out the UK? (and i don't think it would because of the reasons above)

Maybe that’s your point of life, but it’s never been one that appealed to me. That’s what is problematic imo - deciding for others what their point in life is, like that isn’t determined by the individual. It’s not for anyone to decide for a woman that her point in life is to mindlessly breed.

More is not better. All things in proportion and all that. Do we not, as humans, pride ourselves (and separate ourselves from other animals) on our ability to reason and not exist solely on instinct?

No one is saying that people should stop having babies, but the human population is already too high to be sustainable, so fewer babies would be better. Population growth in the scale we've seen in the last century or so can't continue. Society can't prosper if the planet is fucked.

And whilst the genus "Homo" has been around for 2+ million years, the term "human" refers only to the extent species, i.e. modern humans, who've been around for 200,000+ years.

Agree