4 ms·

What "anti-natalist" policy are you referring to?

• cheez 8y ago
  You can't deny that there is a reduction in birth rates. Many policies combine to make this the case: 1. Supplementing housing prices or guaranteeing mortgages makes them unaffordable. People cannot afford to have kids 2. The severity of the divorce process makes people unlikely to want to marry. Marriage rates have declined. Less marriages, less kids. 3. Helicopter money keeps real wages down. Cannot afford to have kids. You may say these are not explicitly "anti-natalist" but in effect they are.
  • ecwilson 8y ago
    I don't think it's a bad thing that the birthrate in the US has gone down. In general, it means women have more opportunities, and that's a good thing. More access to birth control. More women choosing to start a career. They didn't used to have that choice -- they were dependent on marrying a man for financial security.
    • deogeo 8y ago
      More opportunities to work, fewer to start a family.
    • cheez 8y ago
      At least as of 2009, female happiness has been in steady decline. Not a surprise, you could have asked any man if he would prefer to play with his kids than work and 75% of them would tell you they would rather not work.
  • DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Someone who was some years older than me and had been a hippy once told me something like "TV went off at 9pm. There wasn't much to do after 9pm other than sex and drugs." We now have the internet available 24/7. You can have live conversation with people around the world at any time of the day or night. You can get a lot of your sexual and emotional needs met through some means other than a relationship in meat space. Historically, the default assumption was you got married and presumably the result would be children. We had a lot of cultural norms, like shot gun weddings, to deal with the reality that birth control mostly wasn't a thing and there were consequences to getting your needs met. This was part of why we generally insisted on standards like no sex before marriage. A lot has changed over the years. For good and for bad.
    • cheez 8y ago
      Sure, the above are not the only reasons.
• redahs 8y ago
  The shift of the state and local tax burden off of real estate held by wealthy savers and on to sales and purchases of household expenditures, the shift of the federal tax burden off of property income (most 'capital' gains are land value gains) and on to payroll earned by younger workers. All of these changes to the tax code have increased the rent which wealthy property owners can extract from younger workers without having to work themselves, at the cost of increasing the tax burden on younger working families, so that they cannot afford to have as many children as early in life.
• scottlocklin 8y ago
  I am hard pressed to think of any policy enacted by the US government in the last 100 years which wasn't explicitly (and probably purposefully -people used to worry about over population) anti-natalist.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > I am hard pressed to think of any policy enacted by the US government in the last 100 years which wasn't explicitly (and probably purposefully -people used to worry about over population) anti-natalist. For US federal policies that are explicitly pro-natalist (and not merely not explicitly anti-natalist), consider the Child Tax Cred, Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, Family and Medical Leave Act, mandatory maternity coverage in the Affordable Care Act, among others.