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We as a society already penalize people without families: 1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions 2. Higher workplace performance expectations 3. Higher costs in
by darth_avocado 1y ago
We as a society already penalize people without families:
1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions
2. Higher workplace performance expectations
3. Higher costs in every aspect of life
4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc.
This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
- nemomarx 1y agohow are there less options for people without families to eat out? I'm not following that part
- darth_avocado 1y agoYou can’t eat out alone everywhere
- chrisweekly 1y ago"Table for one" is nearly always accommodated. Bringing a family of 4 or 5 out, and you're much more likely to be denied, or to suffer a long wait.
- ghaff 1y agoAnd, in fact, if there's a bar where they serve food that makes it even easier.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 1y agoI mean, you almost always can? During COVID, there was a certain degree of reservations required--min 2 people. But it's pretty darned rare. And I say this as someone who has eaten out solo many hundreds of times. (And tend to eat at fairly decent restaurants.)
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThis is extremely uncommon in my experience, to the point where I've really only heard of it happening secondhand. I've seen people eating alone everywhere from fast food to Michelin star restaurants and done it myself many times. Where have you seen it?
- brandall10 1y agoNicer restaurants often won't accept reservations for solo diners, leaving them to come at off-hours or eat at the bar. Obviously that's a pure economic thing you can't get mad at as tables are designed for 2+ and you're trying to get in during a high traffic time.
- SamBam 1y ago> Higher costs in every aspect of life ...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.
- account42 1y agoThat argument only makes sense if you see no inherent value in the child.
- IshKebab 1y agoYeah I used to think that until I had a family. In reality it's more like: 1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children. 2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers. 3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat. 4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like). The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination. I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.
- hypeatei 1y ago> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children. It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
- dlisboa 1y agoFor a society it's not philosophical. If it wishes to exist past a few decades then it needs children, simple as that. Therefore societies are (and should) be skewed towards that.
- layer8 1y ago“No children” and “single” isn’t the same, as evidenced by DINKs. That set aside, you’re just confirming that singles are (or should be) penalized.
- al_borland 1y agoI went to buy tickets to a comedy show last year and they wouldn’t let me buy a single ticket. I had to buy 2. It quite literally doubled the cost, and then a seat went empty. If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
- ghaff 1y agoI've never run into such a thing across many years. I buy single tickets to Broadway/West End shows a lot of the time and I often land great tickets.
- al_borland 1y agoI've seen it twice now, both times within the past couple years. I'm not sure if it is the venue of the performer that imposes it, but it's really bad. To get single tickets, people are basically left to sit and wait for all the other seats to be bought, then hope there are single person gaps they can fill.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoOTOH when you retire those other people's kids will be powering the economy that will be financing your pension.
- neutronicus 1y agoIt's not even retirement. When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better. Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.
- tuckerman 1y agoIs it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it. I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
- tshaddox 1y agoI think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the tax advantages slightly lessen the expensive."
- tuckerman 1y agoThis has been my experience as well, childcare alone is a pretty big part of my budget. I am definitely not better off financially by having a toddler :D I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
- account42 1y agoIncentivizing doesn't have to mean that the incentive alone makes it worth to have children. It just means that it makes it a better deal than it would have been without the incentives.
- authorfly 1y agoSingle also differs from being in a childless couple e.g. in your early 20s. To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.
- account42 1y agoThis makes sense because a healthy society needs families, especially young ones who can still make healthy children.