• Bwaz@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    May barely cover the hospital bill for those many without health insurance. But of course the proposed bonus is intended for middle class white babies

  • Sibshops@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I wonder how much woke stuff we can get for the purpose of making babies.

    Mandated paid maternity leave?

    Child tax credit?

    Maybe some universal medical coverage for the mothers and children?

  • crystalmerchant@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Lmao anyone who thinks this is a lot of money has clearly never raised a child in the recent past. (Let’s say 10-15 years? idk)

    $5k is gone, like that

  • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    That tracks. I’m paying about $15k for pre-k/daycare throughout the year, which really only covers about 7-8mo, then there’s camps, babysitters, etc. I easily spend $25k on each kid and I’m not in New York or somewhere.

  • booly@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 months ago

    There’s literally been bipartisan efforts to expand the child tax credit ($1000 per year baseline, expanded to $2000 for 2018-2025 and expiring this year, plus COVID era provisions or up to $3000 or $3600 for 2021), and the bills to do so keep dying without a vote.

    If they were serious about this they’d expand the 2021 program to where parents were getting $300 checks every month, and make that permanent and indexed to inflation.

    So much of the Trump presidency is announcing a new program that sounds good, but isn’t even enough to make up for a program that he already killed.

      • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yeah but it’s fucking something man. At this point I’ll take anything. That’s a good grocery haul right there every single month.

      • booly@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        2 months ago

        Well we already lost that in 2022, when it dropped back down to a $2000 annual credit you get when you do your taxes the year after, and after this year it’ll drop again to $1000 unless the law is changed.

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      That’s absolutely what this is for. Uneducated people have more kids; trump lives the uneducated. Those kids grow up to lick their oppressors boot, or end up in the prison system. Either way it’s a win for conservatives.

  • Lasherz@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Giving everyone 5k would more meaningfully improve birth rates than asking educated young people worried about their future childrens’ standard of living to take a leap for the cost of one small medical emergency.

    • littlebrother@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I can’t tell if sarcasm or not. But no this won’t do anything.

      Russia/Asian countries do this already it has barely any effect at all. Again it comes down to both money and culture. Can’t throw money at a problem without changing the culture you’re just half assing it.

  • lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Japan has an aging population and tried a lot, with not much success…

    Prosperity = less kids, so we shouldn’t be surprised what Trump is going to try…

  • valkyrieangela@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Maybe they should improve the quality of life for working families to get them to be confident enough to have more babies naturally?

    …nah, it’s obviously the queers fault!

  • bluesheep@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    40k a year? So at least 3200 a month for daycare? Who on gods dying earth can pay for that? That’s more than 3 times my rent and my landlord is bleeding me like a stuck pig, what the fuck

    • PolarKraken@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      2 months ago

      People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.

      I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.

      It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).

      • Draces@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        I mean yes? I feel like there’s an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and that’s just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. There’s absurdly wealthy people here and there’s, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean they’re living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.

        • PolarKraken@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          2 months ago

          Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.

          And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.

          • Draces@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 months ago

            I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment

            By avoiding COL?

            it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt

            And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? You’re talking about “ugly things” too. You’re stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I don’t see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesn’t seem ugly to me?

            We go through these versions of life and think they are normal

            I genuinely don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesn’t make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like you’re doing the opposite of comforting the commenter’s feelings, it seems you’re trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?

            • PolarKraken@sh.itjust.works
              0·
              2 months ago

              I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!

              I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over issues sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).

              I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.

              1. It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.

              2. Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.

              3. That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.

              At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.

              But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.

      • Tiger666@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 months ago

        Oh, it’s easy to fix, just very painful. Nobody wants to fix this because it means dismantling capitalism and bringing those responsible to justice. This is why there is so much support for fascism. They run from the boogeyman they know into the arms of the ones that promise a return to normalcy.

        • PolarKraken@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          2 months ago

          The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any “simple fix” to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.

          Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That’s bad, elephant gets bigger…

  • Teppichbrand@feddit.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    After we had our first child we went to some institutions to fill required papers. In the waiting area, there were informational posters everywhere to inform (poor young) people to not get pregnant too early. One read:

    A child costs you 160.000€ until it's 18th birthday