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No, you’re conflating two things: subsidizing the poor (eg food stamps) and subsidizing education. We don’t subsidize the education of children for just the po
by sneak 2y ago
No, you’re conflating two things: subsidizing the poor (eg food stamps) and subsidizing education.
We don’t subsidize the education of children for just the poor - we subsidize the education of children for EVERYONE, including families that can afford to pay for their own luxury choices like having children.
This isn’t about letting children go without. This is about who out of two families, one with kids and one without, both of whom can afford what is needed, pays for the choices of the family that opted to have children.
It’s all too easy to obscure the moral issue here, which is that people who don’t have or want children are being forced to pay for the education of the children of parents who very well can pay for their own children. That’s like making everyone in a city, regardless of car ownership, pay into a public automobile insurance fund that covers anyone with a car (including luxury cars).
- vidarh 2y agoI'm not conflating anything. We subsidize the education of everyone because it is important to society and to the children to ensure that all children are educated. Because society then mandates it because an educated workforce is essential to the functioning of society that you too depend on, it is natural that society also shares the burden of paying for it. That you want to opt out of participating in meeting a critical need in society is indeed a moral issue. You should be free to opt out. But then society should be equally free to deny you access to use all resources funded by society, like public roads, and anything else tax funded. Letting you pick and choose would be equally morally fraught as denying you an out. But you have an out: You can move somewhere with different policies.
- sneak 2y agoIt is important to society that cars be insured and that buildings be built to safety standards, also. We don’t subsidize those things, we make the people driving the cars and building the buildings pay for it. Everyone in society benefits from those requirements. Your arguments here as to why the childfree must pay for the education of children they did not produce doesn’t really hold water. I benefit from the hotel I’m in being built to fire code, yet it doesn’t make sense to build private hotels with tax money. Why does it make sense for children to be educated with tax money? Children need food, too, and we don’t buy their food with tax money. Why education?