Posted on 07/15/2007 9:22:26 AM PDT by marthemaria
Maybe. But more likely is the cost vs. rewards of having children. Just speaking financial not spiritual here.
Costs: decreased earnings, decreased free time, increased costs, increased liability. Vastly lower standard of living.
Rewards: Someone to take care of you when you get sick or old.
Things have changed. The cost side is still the same but sometime in the 1900’s the reward side got changed. The government has taken over the job of taking care of the sick and elderly. You don’t need your kids to take personal care of you.
In fact you have to share the money your kids pay for your elder care with all the other old people in the country because the government takes money from their paychecks to pay for it.
You pay for the entire cost of raising the kids but you have to share their profits with others who don’t have kids. From a financial standpoint, it is a poor investment.
Econ 101: People are rational.
The problem 50 years ago was overpopulation. Now it is underpopulation. Then it was the coming Ice Age. Now it is Global Warming. I won’t be climbing on any of these showboats.
Europe needs to import several hundred thousand manly MEN from the United States...not liberal queers...to do the work Europe’s wimpy, craven, semi-homo girly men won’t...
I think you’ve nailed it here. For a majority of us, it is stupid to have kids. There’s no point in it especially since we are paying the Social Security system in place to take care of us as we age. So it is no longer an economic asset to bear children.
Replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman, which is about the current birth rate in the U.S.. The birth rate in the “Less Developed Regions “(U.N.term) has fallen from 6.16 children per woman in 1950 to 2.92 in 2005. Wattenburg sees this trend as continuing-mainly due to migration from rural poverty to cities:”where fertility and family size are invariably lower.”
By the late 1980s the birth rate in the “Developed Regions” had sunk to 1.8 children per woman, or below replacement rate. In Europe the fertility rate has declined from 2.66 in the 1950s to the current 1.38. In the same time period the Japanese fertility rate has declined from 2.75 to 1.32.With a current fertility rate of 1.14 and high death rates from vodka and AIDS Russia is a disaster. It is losing population at a rate of 800,000 per year
While Muslim birth rates have declined,they have not declined nearly as fast as European birth rates. That problem is a central theme of Mark Steyn's important book "America Alone" Ben Wattenberg adds:"Western civvilization'of which America is now the point of the lance, is up against a ferocious enemy:Islamists who seek to destroy the modern and mostly beneficial American values that have shaped the modern world
In the last chapter of Fewer, Wattenberg points out that activist environmentalists still believe that the problem is too many people ,especially wealthy types with big houses and SUVs. But the facts seem to play out differently. The developed countries have less polution, not more. The enviros aren't satisfied with lower pollution and a slowly declining population. I think the most rabid of them would really like to kill off everyone except about a half million enviros.
‘Europe needs to import several hundred thousand manly MEN from the United States...not liberal queers...to do the work Europe’s wimpy, craven, semi-homo girly men won’t...’
Judging by the results of your recent elections, you don’t have many to spare. . . .
“It’s ironic how the fruits of feminism will bring women right back into slavery under Islam.”
Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark.
well you pay for everything unless you work the system and have all the people not having kids pay for yours.
They've got their Bush blinders on and somehow don't notice or care. They screech about neocons and the coming Bush theocracy, all the while the most barbaric and vicious theocratic takeover is on a very aggressive march through the West and they have nothing to say about it.
Welcome!
With attitudes toward sex and babies like that, who would WANT to make a baby with them?
Actually, that IS the belief of the European intelligentsia. They bought big time into that white guilt AND the envirowacko idea of humans being some sort of virus on the planet.
Part of a regional film festival waiting-to-happen. Or a local/neighborhood movie-night series.
At least none that vote :(
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