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The title was edited for some reason, the actual one is: "Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty" And indeed this is a

The title was edited for some reason, the actual one is: "Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty" And indeed this is an article against the 2-child benefit cap. This is obviously full of warm feelings but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. The article interviews a family with 4 young children and apparently no money, for example... Regarding poverty in general, I think the main issue in the UK is that there has been no economic growth since the financial crisis and GDP per capita is decreasing, i.e. people are getting poorer, which bites those on low/no income first and most.

wood_spirit 11mo ago
People made the decision to have each child at least 9 months before the child was born. And in the subsequent years and 9 months anything could have happened, eg illness or losing a job. So even careful planners might be unlucky enough to need food banks?
- mytailorisrich 11mo ago
  This can of course happen but it is obviously disingenuous to imply that this is what usually happens in response to my comment.
  - Loughla 11mo ago
    I don't think that's what they're implying. They're simply saying that careful planning isn't necessarily always what's needed. Consider carefully your sentences before making deep moral judgements about people and situations you might not be familiar with. That, I think, was their implied point.
  - solumunus 11mo ago
    I think the point is that you can’t easily isolate these issues. Are you suggesting that someone should wade through the cases and determine who should get benefits for every child, or are you saying that you find the collateral damage to the “truly deserving” worth it?
- meheleventyone 11mo ago
  Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well. This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!
  - mindslight 11mo ago
    Not to mention that children are their own people that we hope will grow up into being fully functioning adults. Mitigating their suffering due to their parents' failings is a worthy goal. There is a lot of suffering we just have to agree to disagree about (eg many religions), but lack of food is basically an unequivocal [0] evil. And are our western societies not wealthy enough to provide basic sustenance to everyone ? [0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.
  - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
    > Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well. This sounds like a reason not to have them though. It's like saying the probability of X is high if I do Y. I do not want X to happen, but I will still do X even if I have no obligation to do so. Your decision might make sense to you but the way your comment reads it doesn't sound like a logical argument supporting your decision
    - meheleventyone 11mo ago
      It’s hardly illogical to not know what might happen in the future and my family is fine despite any setbacks! In some senses having children at all isn’t that logical and is a choice lots of people aren’t making more often hence declining birth rates and worry over the impact of that in a global economy requiring growth.
Loughla 11mo ago
That's a very morality based argument. In general, those types of arguments aren't great and don't really serve a purpose outside of letting the individual take the moral high ground for whatever reason. I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family. For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help. What should we have done differently?
- solumunus 11mo ago
  I can’t understand what you think their argument is. This response doesn’t seem relevant to theirs.
  - nobodyandproud 11mo ago
    I’m pretty sure the retort was aimed at the patronizing bit here: > but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. Which seems quite relevant. The only fool-proof plan for anyone is to have zero kids, which is ridiculous. My wife and I live beneath ours means, save as much as possible, live debt free, and we instead try to afford as much as possible for the kids. A job loss or major accident/medical problem where we survive is terrifying from a financial PoV.
    - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
      Nothing patronising in my comment... it's common sense. Unfortunately it almost customary here that any comments be interpreted in the most negative way possible for some reason. Perhaps to avoid discussion or, indeed, the tough, uncomfortable questions.
      - jabberwhookie 11mo ago
        Your comment is completely patronizing. Every child who needs help has parents who should know better and let's make them suffer.. Not because it is rational or even meets the objectives of the community but because we should be a community that is mean spirited.
Nursie 11mo ago
The problem with that view is that it’s not the children’s fault, and the cap punishes them and messes with their life chances because of decisions made by someone else. If there are kids going hungry, that’s somewhere you usually want the government to step in and take the strain. It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life. So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties? I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
- mytailorisrich 11mo ago
  Are those against the 2-child cap in favour of campaigns and incentives to make poorer families stop at 2 children? Indeed, that'd be the best way to help children...
  - Nursie 11mo ago
    I honestly don’t know, perhaps find some to ask. To me that looks far too much like government overreach and interference. Not that government overreach or interference is anything but fashionable these days. As others have said as well - people’s lives take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Jobs are lost, economies change and make whole sectors irrelevant. You can’t just assume everyone with more than two kids needing support has always been in that situation or always will be.
    - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
      If suggesting that perhaps people should live within their means is government overeach and interference then surely the government should then stay out of it and not provide any children benefits at all... I think you've shown exactly how this debate and complaints against the 2-child cap is one-sided and refuses to consider the issue of family planning and living within one's means. As I replied before, the argument that "life takes all sorts of unexpected turns" is completely disingenuous because we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases... so again an odd refusal to face reality and the key, tough questions. Edit: why such bad faith in the replies? Most larger families that are poor and on benefits started that way, they are not victims of a sudden life accident. It is totally neutral to state this, I am not passing judgement. But apparently it is wrong to state it and wrong to suggest that people should start by living within their means. This is madness! Edit 2: I'll leave this here (census 2021): "In 2021, 1.2 million households contained three or more dependent children; when compared with households with one or two dependent children they were more likely to contain no employed adults" [1] [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/childreninfamiliesinenglandandwales/census2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
blfr 11mo ago
What is the point of having a civilization if we can't afford kids? Sure, if it was this or that couple, maybe it could be mere irresponsibility, but now the entire west (and plenty of non-western countries) is below replacement.
- bluescrn 11mo ago
  > What is the point of having a civilization if we can't afford kids? It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic. Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
  - blfr 11mo ago
    Which cultures still have kids? India is now below replacement as well. SE Asia is doing worse than the west. There's Africa, sure, and maybe Mongolia. But it's not clear that it will hold or that they have any secret sauce beyond just not having been yet hit with the full blown modernity.
    - api 11mo ago
      African birth rates are falling faster than projected.
  - api 11mo ago
    I’m just going to throw this out there. What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational? On the employment side, we have rapidly advancing automation and AI that are dramatically reducing the work force required to maintain society. On the ecological side we have a combination of climate change, soil depletion, and many other factors that at least threaten to impose a bottleneck on us. We are smart and adaptive but adapting takes time and energy. During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations. Put those things together and… are we, in fact, doing the rational thing here? Keep in mind that no trend is forever. In the 1970s people predicted global Malthusian collapse in part by extrapolating past birth rates infinitely far into the future. Seems to me that population collapse alarmists are doing the same thing. “If this trend continues forever there will be nobody left!”
louthy 11mo ago
When I was 8 years old my father got ill. He lost his ability to work, lost his business, and eventually we lost our house and ended up in social housing. Then three years later, when I was 11 years old, my father died leaving my mother with 3 kids to raise and no income. If the two child benefit cap was in place then, we would have been in food poverty in one of the richest nations on earth. Not every situation is as mind numbingly simple as you paint it. Most people don’t have additional children in an attempt to game the system. That’s a moronic point of view.
- adammarples 11mo ago
  Your situation is obviously tragic and very rare. I don't think anybody claimed that gaming of the system was at work.
GeoAtreides 11mo ago
>the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford quite the juicy implication there, chief

wood_spirit 11mo ago

People made the decision to have each child at least 9 months before the child was born. And in the subsequent years and 9 months anything could have happened, eg illness or losing a job. So even careful planners might be unlucky enough to need food banks?

mytailorisrich 11mo ago
This can of course happen but it is obviously disingenuous to imply that this is what usually happens in response to my comment.
- Loughla 11mo ago
  I don't think that's what they're implying. They're simply saying that careful planning isn't necessarily always what's needed. Consider carefully your sentences before making deep moral judgements about people and situations you might not be familiar with. That, I think, was their implied point.
- solumunus 11mo ago
  I think the point is that you can’t easily isolate these issues. Are you suggesting that someone should wade through the cases and determine who should get benefits for every child, or are you saying that you find the collateral damage to the “truly deserving” worth it?
meheleventyone 11mo ago
Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well. This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!
- mindslight 11mo ago
  Not to mention that children are their own people that we hope will grow up into being fully functioning adults. Mitigating their suffering due to their parents' failings is a worthy goal. There is a lot of suffering we just have to agree to disagree about (eg many religions), but lack of food is basically an unequivocal [0] evil. And are our western societies not wealthy enough to provide basic sustenance to everyone ? [0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.
- bossyTeacher 11mo ago
  > Not to mention that children are a multi-decade commitment. My kids are nine and twelve. In that time I’ve been laid off twice and had a serious medical emergency. Things on that timescale are just not realistic to plan for as if there are guarantees. The less well of you are the more precarious everything is as well. This sounds like a reason not to have them though. It's like saying the probability of X is high if I do Y. I do not want X to happen, but I will still do X even if I have no obligation to do so. Your decision might make sense to you but the way your comment reads it doesn't sound like a logical argument supporting your decision
  - meheleventyone 11mo ago
    It’s hardly illogical to not know what might happen in the future and my family is fine despite any setbacks! In some senses having children at all isn’t that logical and is a choice lots of people aren’t making more often hence declining birth rates and worry over the impact of that in a global economy requiring growth.

Loughla 11mo ago

That's a very morality based argument. In general, those types of arguments aren't great and don't really serve a purpose outside of letting the individual take the moral high ground for whatever reason. I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family. For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help. What should we have done differently?

solumunus 11mo ago
I can’t understand what you think their argument is. This response doesn’t seem relevant to theirs.
- nobodyandproud 11mo ago
  I’m pretty sure the retort was aimed at the patronizing bit here: > but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. Which seems quite relevant. The only fool-proof plan for anyone is to have zero kids, which is ridiculous. My wife and I live beneath ours means, save as much as possible, live debt free, and we instead try to afford as much as possible for the kids. A job loss or major accident/medical problem where we survive is terrifying from a financial PoV.
  - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
    Nothing patronising in my comment... it's common sense. Unfortunately it almost customary here that any comments be interpreted in the most negative way possible for some reason. Perhaps to avoid discussion or, indeed, the tough, uncomfortable questions.
    - jabberwhookie 11mo ago
      Your comment is completely patronizing. Every child who needs help has parents who should know better and let's make them suffer.. Not because it is rational or even meets the objectives of the community but because we should be a community that is mean spirited.

Nursie 11mo ago

The problem with that view is that it’s not the children’s fault, and the cap punishes them and messes with their life chances because of decisions made by someone else. If there are kids going hungry, that’s somewhere you usually want the government to step in and take the strain. It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life. So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties? I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.

mytailorisrich 11mo ago
Are those against the 2-child cap in favour of campaigns and incentives to make poorer families stop at 2 children? Indeed, that'd be the best way to help children...
- Nursie 11mo ago
  I honestly don’t know, perhaps find some to ask. To me that looks far too much like government overreach and interference. Not that government overreach or interference is anything but fashionable these days. As others have said as well - people’s lives take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Jobs are lost, economies change and make whole sectors irrelevant. You can’t just assume everyone with more than two kids needing support has always been in that situation or always will be.
  - mytailorisrich 11mo ago
    If suggesting that perhaps people should live within their means is government overeach and interference then surely the government should then stay out of it and not provide any children benefits at all... I think you've shown exactly how this debate and complaints against the 2-child cap is one-sided and refuses to consider the issue of family planning and living within one's means. As I replied before, the argument that "life takes all sorts of unexpected turns" is completely disingenuous because we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases... so again an odd refusal to face reality and the key, tough questions. Edit: why such bad faith in the replies? Most larger families that are poor and on benefits started that way, they are not victims of a sudden life accident. It is totally neutral to state this, I am not passing judgement. But apparently it is wrong to state it and wrong to suggest that people should start by living within their means. This is madness! Edit 2: I'll leave this here (census 2021): "In 2021, 1.2 million households contained three or more dependent children; when compared with households with one or two dependent children they were more likely to contain no employed adults" [1] [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/childreninfamiliesinenglandandwales/census2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

blfr 11mo ago

What is the point of having a civilization if we can't afford kids? Sure, if it was this or that couple, maybe it could be mere irresponsibility, but now the entire west (and plenty of non-western countries) is below replacement.

bluescrn 11mo ago
> What is the point of having a civilization if we can't afford kids? It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic. Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
- blfr 11mo ago
  Which cultures still have kids? India is now below replacement as well. SE Asia is doing worse than the west. There's Africa, sure, and maybe Mongolia. But it's not clear that it will hold or that they have any secret sauce beyond just not having been yet hit with the full blown modernity.
  - api 11mo ago
    African birth rates are falling faster than projected.
- api 11mo ago
  I’m just going to throw this out there. What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational? On the employment side, we have rapidly advancing automation and AI that are dramatically reducing the work force required to maintain society. On the ecological side we have a combination of climate change, soil depletion, and many other factors that at least threaten to impose a bottleneck on us. We are smart and adaptive but adapting takes time and energy. During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations. Put those things together and… are we, in fact, doing the rational thing here? Keep in mind that no trend is forever. In the 1970s people predicted global Malthusian collapse in part by extrapolating past birth rates infinitely far into the future. Seems to me that population collapse alarmists are doing the same thing. “If this trend continues forever there will be nobody left!”

louthy 11mo ago

When I was 8 years old my father got ill. He lost his ability to work, lost his business, and eventually we lost our house and ended up in social housing. Then three years later, when I was 11 years old, my father died leaving my mother with 3 kids to raise and no income. If the two child benefit cap was in place then, we would have been in food poverty in one of the richest nations on earth. Not every situation is as mind numbingly simple as you paint it. Most people don’t have additional children in an attempt to game the system. That’s a moronic point of view.

adammarples 11mo ago
Your situation is obviously tragic and very rare. I don't think anybody claimed that gaming of the system was at work.

GeoAtreides 11mo ago

>the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford quite the juicy implication there, chief