41–50 of 54 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation. Citation needed.
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year." I invite anyone to try to dismiss the fact that 3.1 million children starve to death each year.
I'm not sure why government taxes should care whether someone has kids or not, it is your choice. If you can't afford to have kids, you probably shouldn't have kids. It's easy to be in a painful situation and come to a conclusion "Things should work this way because that would benefit me". There are other things the government should do, such as tax breaks for students, and people with student loans - fostering growt…
"I'm not sure why government taxes should care whether someone has kids or not, it is your choice. If you can't afford to have kids, you probably shouldn't have kids." Because having kids benefits everyone. It's an integral societal good with a staggeringly high individual cost. There's a reason western European countries give such generous benefits to parents like lengthy maternity/paternity leaves.
Yeah, great idea. The single most important world problem we face is overpopulation. Why not make it easier to have children than it already is? Why not tax those who made the right choice and give the money to those who made the wrong one? The Chinese have the right idea -- they encourage one child per family (an idea that works better in cities than in the countryside), against substantial public ignorance and resi…
Can we say two? Would still lead to a population decrease over time, and given the risks my brothers and I took growing up I'd want some redundancy...
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Also, wouldn't this unfairly punish those in gay marriages? Adoption is of course an option, but I'd speculate there's a much higher rate of childlessness in gay vs. straight marriages.
Adoption and surrogates/donors are both options in gay marriages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats Quote: "Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five - 3.1 million children each year." I invite anyone to try to dismiss the fact that 3.1 million children starve to death each year.
For the most part, the present problem is not due to a global shortage of food: http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes 100 billion seems like it would be a challenge.
"842 million people in the world do not have enough to eat. This number has fallen by 17 percent since 1990."
We have 1.9 billion more people today than we had in 1990, and we are failing to feed fewer individuals. We're not just feeding more people. We're not even just leaving a smaller percentage starving. We have many more people, and fewer people are starving. "There are too many people, relative to how much food we can produce" is not the dominant effect here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'm not sure why government taxes should care whether someone has kids or not, it is your choice. If you can't afford to have kids, you probably shouldn't have kids." Because having kids benefits everyone. It's an integral societal good with a staggeringly high individual cost. There's a reason western European countries give such generous benefits to parents like lengthy maternity/paternity leaves.
Whether or not it is an "integral societal good" depends on the child's upbringing and its eventual contribution to society, neither of which are guaranteed to be positive. In fact, by doing this, you would be encouraging more people (including ones who are ill suited) to raise children merely to pay less taxes, and consequently have more numbers, but less utility.
Genius. I can't think of a better idea than incentivising people to reproduce more and as soon as possible. This is exactly what the world needs. Some people might say that this is a puritanical and unacceptable meddling of the state in deeply personal choices, but I say fuck them! If we play our cards right we can evolve into being social insects in less than one century.
And for those who can't...? Just keep penalising them to teach them a lesson?
For 30 years I had no intimate or sexual relations with anyone. Not my choice by any means, but this proposal would have financially punished me because no-one else wanted to have a relationship with me. Thanks! A double-whammy of unhappiness.
And what about the gay community?
What about sterile people?
I am in a relationship now, with children, but strongly oppose this idea.