121–130 of 540 posts
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
We would be even better off subsidizing parents staying home with their own children. Unfortunately most subsidies have proven ineffective at nudging up birth rates.
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They would need to be building tanks and airplanes.
Why? We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues.
We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending.
It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key for continued economic resiliency:
- pay down the debt so it doesn't spiral out of control (lots of strategies here, some good, some bad: higher taxes, lower spending, wanton imperialism, inflation, etc.)
- remain competitive in key industries, including some catch-up: robotics, batteries, solar, chip manufacture
- if we're going for a multipolar world / self-sufficiency play, we need to rebuild the supply chain by onshoring and friendshoring. This means the boring stuff too, like plastics and pharmaceutical inputs.
- lots of energy expansion and infrastructure
My current theory is that we've basically gotten addicted to importing the world's smartest kids so we have been unwilling to invest in our own children.
All for it, but free birth control should also be provided.
;)
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Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?
I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits. With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It should cover everyone. No body goes to the doctor because they want to. I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented. Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you. This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's ano…
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.36756
There are certain preventive care procedures that are proven to be effective based on reliable evidence. Everyone should get those, and for anyone with health insurance they're covered at zero out of pocket cost.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic conditions caused primarily by lifestyle factors such as substance abuse, over eating, poor sleep, and lack of exercise. The healthcare system can't deal effectively with lifestyle problems. Those are more in the domain of public health, social work, and economic policy.
What if a federal law is passed to make this illegal?
All for it, but free birth control should also be provided.
I guess you can make a malthusian argument that the poors will just replicate indefinitely as resources are made available, but I don't think that's believable at all. You should be focused on making sure those future citizens are properly educated and socialized.
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Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
I wonder how many people would start businesses if we had UBI and free health care as a safety net.