In the US, immigrants often do pay taxes, and use up fewer benefits[1]. Moreover, our social security relies on perpetual growth to sustain itself. So if we can't grow our population via children, we must grow it via immigrants, to remain solvent.
I certainly support efforts to shape US society into one where people might want children. Universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, free education, etc. Not to mention one where land is used in a conscientious way to build community, with walkable spaces, public third spaces, and strong public transit.
> Universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, free education, etc.
No such thing as free anything. Somebody's gotta work to pay for it. Those somebodies are the children and young healthy adults who are economically active. They are the ones who will pay the taxes which in turn fund services for everyone else.
So it's impossible to create a welfare system in order to encourage families. People need to have children first so that they can be made to pay for it.
== So it's impossible to create a welfare system in order to encourage families. People need to have children first so that they can be made to pay for it.==
This ignores some important facts. First, lots of immigrants already pay taxes and don’t receive government benefits. Second, we already run a continuous deficit. Third, we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending.
It would cost about 1/3 of our military budget to pay for universal pre-K 3/4.
Immigrants function as imported children in this context. People wouldn't have the children that would grow into economically active adults, so the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children.
> we already run a continuous deficit
Which is unsustainable.
> we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending
Absolutely. Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion.
== the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children==
Those people chose to come the US for the opportunity as they have throughout history, even when birth rates were high.
== Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion==
So you agree that we don’t need to wait for more people to have kids to pay for the policy because we could just adjust our spending priorities. Glad we are on the same page.
> In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.
What's their healthcare like? If something bad happens, do they need to rely on savings to pull through, or does their society have stronger social safety nets that allow them to spend their money with less concern?
You know people who regularly say on a weekend evening "Sorry, I can't come, I need to put the $34 I'd have spent into my HSA" ?
It's not really about safety nets since most people don't discount (or account) for them (they're in the future). It's about disposable income, and for huge numbers of Americans, that's in short supply due to the exorbitant cost of housing, college education and health insurance & care.
That's precisely what I meant about disposable income.
Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves.
Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff.
Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save.
Lots of people will not go to dinner because they've already had to pay for (... you name it ...)
The overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance which (at least theoretically) covers most of their health care costs.
Way too many (many millions) have no insurance or inadequate insurance, but that's a problem we need to fix, not a description of the country as a whole.
The problem for most Americans is that what is not covered by insurance is still too expensive for them, but that's a subtly different problem than "no socialized healthcare => everyone has to pay out of pocket for any healthcare they receive"
"Choose" is perhaps technically true, but misleading. Women are generally pressured out of lucrative careers.
Remember that programming started as a woman-dominated field (due to perceived proximity to typing as the fundamental skill), which is how so many pioneers and influential figures ended up being women (Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton). Women were ultimately pushed out as the field gained perceived prestige.
> Women were ultimately pushed out as the field gained perceived prestige.
They weren't pushed out so much as the nature of the market for programming changed from office work and military projects to personal computers and applications in the 1970s.
This doesn't match what I experienced growing up in the 90's. What I saw saw was girls not wanting to involve themselves with computing because it was seen as nerdy and boring and for weird people. Only when people started realizing how much FAANG's paid and how nice the benefits were did they start feeling they wanted to get in on that. Those are just my personal observations though.
True enough for the 90's, but the 90's came long after they were pushed out in the 60's & 70's. That's an entire generation of seperation. It's en entirely different world.
The military selected early pilots based on how close they were to average dimensions. They measured dozens of attributes and designed airplanes around the median of each attribute, assuming it would be easy to find people that fit into that design. It turned out that it's really easy to find people that fit into one or two median measurements, but effectively impossible to find someone that fits into even half a dozen median measurements.
Also, averages change over time, as the environment we are raised in changes, so what was designed around an average height in the 1920's required shorter than average pilots by the 1940's.
My university required a swim test to graduate, and also required 10 minutes of treading water in order to access sailboats. Many of my classmates talked about this being difficult, but both were trivial for me.
Some body fat is absolutely helpful in protecting from drowning [1]. You see a similar curve when mapping life expectancy and mortality risk against BMI—the optimum is a bit thicker than our guidance suggests. (Saying this as someone who has to fight to keep weight on.)
> the optimum is a bit thicker than our guidance suggests
That's probably confounded. Anything over a BMI of 23 better be an increasing proportion of muscle, and even then there's a point that the stress on the heart isn't worth it.
Almost every physical and mental heath condition does bad things to nutrition and internal energy stores, even if only at a diet level.
It's hard to see since so many people are overweight or obese to start with, but the overall correlation goes that way enough to cause confounding.
From what I see, power/wealth in the US is still disproportionately held by white men. The balance may be shifting, but a slight reduction in privilege towards the average is not the same as becoming outgroup.
The shift parent is concerned with is perceived at the lower-middle, not at the top. People like Barbara Ehrenreich have noted the “fear of falling” in America for generations. Attitudes like this are what is seen when the fall actually happens.
> I don’t get why left is so afraid of pissing radical feminists off. It’s not like they will begin to vote right wing.
They're not. Embracing trans people runs completely counter to radical feminism. The left currently subscribes to liberal feminism, not radical feminism.
> They're not. Embracing trans people runs completely counter to radical feminism.
Trans exclusionary radical feminists are a radfem niche; they’re not necessarily the radical feminist mainstream. Note that most people identified by the media as ‘TERFs’ are not; they’re transphobes who may claim to be some sort of feminist, but few subscribe to radical feminism as an ideology (there are a handful of _actual_ TERFs left in the broader modern transphobic movement, though many of them, unsurprisingly, have difficulty with that movement’s dubious bedfellows.)
Given the amount of men who can't masturbate using their imaginations, masturbation has absolutely become cheaper and easier.