PrintSeptember 19, 2010
The Selfishness of the Intentionally Childless
While liberals are constantly talking about government "investments," they neglect and even denigrate the single biggest investment of the American people: our children. According to the government, it takes roughly $222,000 to raise a child to age 17, and if you include college costs, this number can go up a lot.
Given that the population of the United States is roughly 300,000,000, that means that Americans with children will spend on the order of $66 trillion to raise the next generation of Americans. That makes even Obama's porkulus project look small.
Yet liberals constantly disparage large families, i.e. those with more than two children, and give no credit to the hardworking families who make their children their number-one priority. You'd think that liberals would like all the economic activity that parents engage in to raise their children.
Of course, in general, liberals tend to view children more as a problem than a blessing. Sure, they love their own kids, but they worry about the environmental impact of those "other" kids on global warming and global poverty. That's why the first type of aid liberals send overseas is funding for birth control and abortion. Instead of liberty, capitalism, and economic growth, liberals seem to think that the way to solve the third world's problems is through reducing the number of brown babies born. That's why they're so fond of China's one-baby policy even though it results in forced abortions -- no choice there -- and the selective slaughter of female babies.
Liberals live out their beliefs on children since, according to at least one study, the very liberal have 45% fewer children than the very conservative. As a result, liberals aren't really investing in America the way conservatives are. A conservative family with three children will invest over half a million dollars more than a liberal family with one child when you throw in the cost of college. That means that liberals have a lot more money to spend on themselves and their political causes than conservatives. But conservatism isn't about envy, so why should we care?
The reason we need to care is that liberals' lack of investment actually forces an extra burden on the rest of America. In order to keep the population constant, each American woman needs to have roughly 2.05 babies during her lifetime. The extra 0.05 comes from the need to compensate for women who don't have children. If a lot of women have fewer than two children, the population will drop. We've seen the serious social and economic impacts of a declining population in Europe and Japan. The modern welfare state is simply unsustainable if ratio of seasoned citizens to the young is too large. Medicare and Social Security are unaffordable if there are too many people receiving benefits.
There are two options going forward: either conservatives will make up the liberal birth dearth, or they won't. If conservatives step up to the plate, they will have to spend a huge amount of money to raise those extra children. Think of it as a hidden tax to support those liberals who use the money they save by not having children -- and not investing in America's future -- to buy luxuries for themselves. If conservatives don't increase the number of children they have, then the population will go down. But a declining population results in serious social and economic problems as well as suffering for both the young and the old.
In a declining population, both the elderly and the young suffer. The elderly don't have people to take care of them, and they have a lower quality of living. The young have to pay much higher taxes as well as spend much more time taking care of the elderly.
Another problem with a declining population is the loss of a country's identity. Europe is on the way to becoming Muslim because Muslims have kids while Europeans seem to have opted for short-term financial gain instead.
It's important to note that women who don't have children through no fault of their own -- they're infertile or they don't find the right man -- are not selfish. It's selfish, though, to eschew children, enjoy the benefits of the money you're saving, and then still get government benefits paid for by other people's children.
How did we get here? Historically, children were viewed not only as a wonderful blessing from God, but also as an investment in the future. In American of the past, as in present-day China, children were viewed as insurance that elderly parents will be taken care of. The expansion of the nanny state, starting with Social Security, changed that. Essentially, big-government liberals have said that the families aren't responsible for taking care of their own. Instead, the government will take care of all of us.
But in order to do that, the government has to put a huge tax burden on everyone. People who were selfish and deliberately chose to not have children benefit from the tax dollars of people whose parents weren't selfish. But that means the people who invested in America's future through the love they have for their children are deprived of support from those children because those children have to pay huge amounts of taxes.
In extolling the wonders of the nanny state, liberals have essentially voided the fundamental social contract between people and society. For the entire history of humankind, people realized that they had to have children -- when possible -- in order to ensure that the society whose benefits they enjoyed would be around in the future. Modern liberals feel that there's no problem with dropping their responsibility to the future. Unfortunately, by the time they, and the rest of us, suffer the consequences of their decisions, it will be too late to recover.
