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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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!”
This runs into trouble when the older people rely on the younger ones to pay for their retirement and government services. Having fewer children means fewer people to pay taxes, so while a lower birth rate might address environmental and automation/AI challenges, it creates significant headaches elsewhere and requires a society-wide shift in expectations and responsibilities.
social welfare in almost any nation (excl. energy rich countries) is not sustaniable long term. maybe we can start with ack. that fact? Sure retired people can get some amounts and free food but bigger amounts in budget just don't make sense? I mean calculate and see it. Countries literally pay these with DEBT. How hard it is for avg people to get this? It is such a simple thing to calculate too. When debt gets too big for so many countries, entire thing collapses? we know that already
I dont support right, just search for countries by gdp/debt %. It's been just incresing for decades, that is not sustanaible + welfare + any govern. service that relies on that debt.
More simple , it's not sustainable because new workers dont earn much, people live longer and % from the state budget just keeps growing.
Think of it as income growth getting slower and liabilities growing just bigger with more old people in terms of %. how can you or we fix that?
I’m in my 40s and have never believed retirement would be a thing for me unless I make a whole lot of money.
Retirement for all was an artifact of rapidly growing populations and shorter life spans. Back 50-100 years ago you had each young person supporting maybe 0.1 to 0.25 retired people, and a retirement age in the 60s meant you’d get a few years before now easily treatable heart conditions would kill you. (Everyone smoked too, which “helped” clear the retirement rolls.)
In a world with even a stable population (let alone a declining one) retirement isn’t viable. Or at the very least the age will be raised a lot. I could see 80 as a retirement age in 2050.
Honestly an institutionalized retirement age in the 60s today is unfair and exploitative toward young people. It’s generational economic cannibalism, stopping young people from establishing themselves to fund the old.
> What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?
Well, lower birth rates are the perpetual excuse for more immigration. Even Trump made a U-turn on H1B and he's now OK with more immigration. Low birth rates and high immigration give credence to the various "replacement" theories and become a political force that can bring nationalists to power.
Next, lower birth rates could be "rational" if they led to higher standard of living and better quality of life, but that's not the case now, in fact we are seeing the opposite because less children make the work force cheaper thus increasing profits. Increased profits go towards increased power and influence which make the trend irreversible.
> During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.
Nonsensical in the current environment of birth rates below replacement level and falling.
> In the 1970s people predicted
Not people - the mass media. They are just noise and BS which should not be considered in a serious conversation - one way or the other.
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.
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.
I have no dog in this fight, but your intent matters less than what it signifies: The comment is patronizing in the abstract, because it’s out-of-touch.
That’s the best interpretation, and the response still fits if less harshly worded.
My comment was neither patronizing nor out of touch. In fact it acknowledges that this is a "tough question".
Social issues can't be tackled without facing the tough questions head on.
My point is that I think that the best way to actually help families and children is to incentivise and teach not to have children you can't afford in the first place instead of infantilising people and to tell them that anything goes and the state will pick up the tab.
No-one, no-one replied to my comments on the point. Only intellectually lazy outrage.
> the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford
It’s out of touch because it’s not merely a “tough” question.
It’s not a well-defined question and it may not be quantifiable.
It’s a terrible lens to view through, but financially speaking creating or extending your family is a major risk.
The easy questions: What does it even mean to say one has more children than one can afford? What standard is being used to decide when someone has gone past affordability?
The harder or impossible questions, and these are critically important: What factors play into the financial risk of having or extending a family? And can each factor be quantified?
I suspect the answer is no, because few or no private insurer is in business guaranteeing long-term employment terms.
Finally: Even if the probabilities can be accurately quantified, what risk threshold can we establish as responsible vs irresponsible?
And the burden is on the
claim maker to establish that it’s possible, because as far as I know life in a market economy is a bit too messy to forecast in this manner.
If this inspires you or someone else to try, I wish you all the best and with my blessing.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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]
> we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases..
No, we don’t know that, you’re talking from a point of pure prejudice. Unless you have some actual evidence to back up what you’re saying, I would hold back on those types of blanket statements about people in poverty.
I’m not sure who hurt you but I find this outburst a little unnecessary, especially as I’m exploring arguments rather than making assertions on one side or other.
> we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases...
I’d love to see your evidence on that.
(Your restating it in your edit, still absent any evidence, doesn’t make it any more compelling. This is not bad faith, you are making factual assertions. Are they true? How do we know?
What is bad faith is saying that other people’s ideas are “disingenuous” or demonstrative of a failure to consider other viewpoints.
Your second edit tells us that 19.8% of families with three or more kids had no employed adult, in 2021, vs 11.9% in smaller families. It’s an interesting stat but it doesn’t give a full picture or confirm for us that the “vast majority” of those affected by the cap are long-term benefit recipients. Perhaps they are, even then it doesn’t address the root concern that the cap punishes children for their parents’ life decisions.
I don’t know what the right answer is. It may be there is no good one. As I implied before I’m not necessarily on the other side of this, I think it’s complex.)
This reads like either the author believes all the propaganda they read or they are willing participants in it.
> political willpower is not enough
That the economy is in terrible shape shouldn't get in the way of the rich getting richer. No one knows where all that money is coming from but people are also miraculously to poor to buy, build or rent a home. With all that nice scarcity in the market, whatever units are left make a lovely investment opportunity to put all that extra money into which again feeds into the scarcity. So much winning it's tiring!
For the last 50+ years, Western governments have largely acted to funnel wealth from the poor to to the wealthy. Each economic crisis seerms to have ushered in a big jump in inequality. The OPEC oil crisis, 1987, recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, the dot-com bubble, the GFC and Covid.
Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.
You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.
Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.
In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.
All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY. That just immediately follows from inflation.
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
> > tax revenues are higher than ever, government spending is higher than ever, social programs and social spending is higher than ever
> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY
It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:
I believe your statement can be 100% true without affecting the truth of the parents statement. It's possible for a government to charge high taxes and have high social spending while also funneling larger and larger amounts from the poor to the rich through regulations and government agencies that favor and act for the interests of the rich.
There's just no ability to get anything done. Whether it's big projects (HS2) or the basics (emptying bins, fixing potholes), nothing seems to work any more. And it feels like most of our tax is being converted directly into private profits while getting very little done.
> 24 million people receiving benefits (aka cash) in uk
It looks like most of those people are claiming State Pension / Pension Credit. Which doesn't make it not true, but it's maybe not what most people will think of first when you talk about benefit claimants.
Spending is paid for out of tax and all those people will have paid tax. Paying less tax than someone else doesn't make a free rider. Deliberately opting out of an obligation while taking from the group makes a free rider.
It will only get worse whilst costs are not regulated of essentials such as housing, food, utilities, and public transport. The rich need to be taxed on all UK based assets and income no matter where you live and we need to restrict profit and pricing accordingly. We can't keep being held hostage by those who wish to increase their bank balance year on year. Now we have no incentive right now as those who are in government make far too much from the status quo. We need to remove this current governmental style by removing the option to have multiple jobs and remove the ability to be given cash or any benefits from private companies whilst working for the public. Capitalism is failing the vast majority and we need to realise that.
Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
It's not capitalism, but corruption. Subsequent governments have been shovelling billions to tax avoiding multi national corporations without checks and balances. "Taxing the rich" is a distraction. Correct action is investigate corruption and cut spending. For instance NHS reliance on agencies - they pay agency for a nurse £2,500 a day, nurse gets £500 from agency if lucky, £2k goes offshore. That's how our money is sucked out of the economy. Multiple that by every local authority to government departments and you'll see billions are going to waste. But current government is too corrupt to do something about it.
Soon they'll claim we have best food banks in the world and support for working people... whilst corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.
Capital is power in a 'free market'/liberalist world. I like the idea of free markets, but capital accumulation makes the capital owners able to decide more and more on policies that allow them to accumulate even more capital/power. in any case, most of it isn't corruption, it's only people seeking more capital for themselves and their families.
The rot is in the state: procurement rackets, sweetheart deals, and policy capture by corporations who get access no ordinary voter ever will. When a government sits down with giant asset managers, then magically “discovers” Digital ID is its national priority, that’s not the invisible hand at work. That’s the very visible hand of influence bypassing democratic process.
People love saying “it’s just capital seeking returns” as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. Accumulating money isn’t the issue. Being able to buy policy outcomes is the issue. Once private interests can tilt regulation, spending, and national infrastructure in their favour, you no longer have a market problem. You have a governance problem.
Food banks didn’t explode because Jeff Bezos has too many zeroes in his account. They exploded because governments funnel public money into offshore middlemen, contractors billing ten times the real cost, multinationals avoiding scrutiny, and regulators pretending this is all fine. That’s not the “cycle of capital”. That’s a parasitic state captured by rent-seekers.
Oh, yeah. Regulating the food prices is the trick here. That went really well in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China... just to name a couple of examples.
It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"
Food production is heavily supported by the government in China in order to keep food affordable. Food price is also incredibly low in China. If that's failing that the Western world is in hell now.
Per AI, comparative food production subsidies are the same in US and China. China spends a 2x total but they have more people so per farmer support is more or less the same.
So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.
US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.
But the premise of your comment is just wrong.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.
Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])
If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.
Certainly, but it's officially communist, which is at least as true as western countries being capitalist free market democracy where every citizen is equal.
At what point will it get worse, a planned economy or a free economy based on greed? Life is getting more unaffordable with each passing day. Corporations need to be put in their place given that politicians dont even have backbones anymore as soon as they smell corpo money.
In long term, corporations can buy everyone, unfortunately.
This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)
If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…
A planned economy will always, always get worse. All historical examples show us that.
But you are free to give us an example of a planned economy that worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens. Just one single example will suffice.
P.S. I see the downvotes, but I don't see a single example. Just one...
I'm curious. What is an example of any economy that has only worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens and has never ever gotten worse?
We have oligarchic corporatism, not democratic capitalism, though I guess that is what is meant by the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’. The problem is that we already have regulatory capture, a more powerful regulatory system leaves us with fewer ways to escape the oligarchs control.
The problem isn’t the number of regulators or how muscular they are. It’s that there’s no functioning enforcement. You can design the neatest regulatory framework in the world, but if the people meant to uphold it look the other way, you may as well print it on kitchen roll.
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.
To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.
I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.
There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
Blaming capitalism for government failures while stating the solution is more and bigger government seems to be a misunderstanding of what the root cause is.
unfortunately a growing segment of people see food banks as a place where you can grab goodies for free, a-la 'you'd be stupid not to!'. i think they had a similar problem in Canada.
ultimately its a very politically difficult situation since you're entering the quagmire of what constitutes being poor. that's a discourse where political careers go never to return - easier to just throw your hands up in the air and just give everyone as much free food as they want.
ofcourse this then leads to the discussion of "wait... why don't we just do that anyway? arne't we a first world country?" but then you wind up with a whole enterprise of getting food for free (or steep discount) only to sell it to another community that doesn't have access to it and taking a profit. i think a similar problem (?) exists in the US, with SNAP food rations being (re?)-sold to latin americans.
Strange to see an article about UK food banks on the Hacker News homepage. At the same intersection as my work...
https://www.givefood.org.uk/
https://www.givefood.org.uk/api/
This is a good read on why the UK is producing less than it did before.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-britain-doesnt-build/
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.
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?
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!
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.
This can of course happen but it is obviously disingenuous to imply that this is what usually happens in response to my comment.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
African birth rates are falling faster than projected.
> constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism
Or perhaps, and I know this is a wild idea, we could attempt to address these problems instead of complaining about the "messaging" ?
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!”
This runs into trouble when the older people rely on the younger ones to pay for their retirement and government services. Having fewer children means fewer people to pay taxes, so while a lower birth rate might address environmental and automation/AI challenges, it creates significant headaches elsewhere and requires a society-wide shift in expectations and responsibilities.
Young people can't pay for their own retirements, as they're effectively funding their parents retirements.
social welfare in almost any nation (excl. energy rich countries) is not sustaniable long term. maybe we can start with ack. that fact? Sure retired people can get some amounts and free food but bigger amounts in budget just don't make sense? I mean calculate and see it. Countries literally pay these with DEBT. How hard it is for avg people to get this? It is such a simple thing to calculate too. When debt gets too big for so many countries, entire thing collapses? we know that already
This has been a refrain of the political right for several decades now, particularly in the US, and appears to be ideological rather than factual.
I dont support right, just search for countries by gdp/debt %. It's been just incresing for decades, that is not sustanaible + welfare + any govern. service that relies on that debt.
More simple , it's not sustainable because new workers dont earn much, people live longer and % from the state budget just keeps growing.
Think of it as income growth getting slower and liabilities growing just bigger with more old people in terms of %. how can you or we fix that?
I’m in my 40s and have never believed retirement would be a thing for me unless I make a whole lot of money.
Retirement for all was an artifact of rapidly growing populations and shorter life spans. Back 50-100 years ago you had each young person supporting maybe 0.1 to 0.25 retired people, and a retirement age in the 60s meant you’d get a few years before now easily treatable heart conditions would kill you. (Everyone smoked too, which “helped” clear the retirement rolls.)
In a world with even a stable population (let alone a declining one) retirement isn’t viable. Or at the very least the age will be raised a lot. I could see 80 as a retirement age in 2050.
Honestly an institutionalized retirement age in the 60s today is unfair and exploitative toward young people. It’s generational economic cannibalism, stopping young people from establishing themselves to fund the old.
> What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?
Well, lower birth rates are the perpetual excuse for more immigration. Even Trump made a U-turn on H1B and he's now OK with more immigration. Low birth rates and high immigration give credence to the various "replacement" theories and become a political force that can bring nationalists to power.
Next, lower birth rates could be "rational" if they led to higher standard of living and better quality of life, but that's not the case now, in fact we are seeing the opposite because less children make the work force cheaper thus increasing profits. Increased profits go towards increased power and influence which make the trend irreversible.
> During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.
Nonsensical in the current environment of birth rates below replacement level and falling.
> In the 1970s people predicted
Not people - the mass media. They are just noise and BS which should not be considered in a serious conversation - one way or the other.
> What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?
If rational people stop reproducing, all we'll have left is irrational people.
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?
I can’t understand what you think their argument is. This response doesn’t seem relevant to theirs.
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.
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.
I have no dog in this fight, but your intent matters less than what it signifies: The comment is patronizing in the abstract, because it’s out-of-touch.
That’s the best interpretation, and the response still fits if less harshly worded.
My comment was neither patronizing nor out of touch. In fact it acknowledges that this is a "tough question".
Social issues can't be tackled without facing the tough questions head on.
My point is that I think that the best way to actually help families and children is to incentivise and teach not to have children you can't afford in the first place instead of infantilising people and to tell them that anything goes and the state will pick up the tab.
No-one, no-one replied to my comments on the point. Only intellectually lazy outrage.
> the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford
It’s out of touch because it’s not merely a “tough” question.
It’s not a well-defined question and it may not be quantifiable.
It’s a terrible lens to view through, but financially speaking creating or extending your family is a major risk.
The easy questions: What does it even mean to say one has more children than one can afford? What standard is being used to decide when someone has gone past affordability?
The harder or impossible questions, and these are critically important: What factors play into the financial risk of having or extending a family? And can each factor be quantified?
I suspect the answer is no, because few or no private insurer is in business guaranteeing long-term employment terms.
Finally: Even if the probabilities can be accurately quantified, what risk threshold can we establish as responsible vs irresponsible?
And the burden is on the claim maker to establish that it’s possible, because as far as I know life in a market economy is a bit too messy to forecast in this manner.
If this inspires you or someone else to try, I wish you all the best and with my blessing.
No idea what you're on about but good luck to you...
Appealing to common sense is insufficient for creating a sound policy or even a sound personal financial policy.
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.
no, the other posters are right, your comment was not only patronising but terrifying in its implications.
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.
Your situation is obviously tragic and very rare. I don't think anybody claimed that gaming of the system was at work.
>the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford
quite the juicy implication there, chief
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.
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...
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.
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/birthsde...
> we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases..
No, we don’t know that, you’re talking from a point of pure prejudice. Unless you have some actual evidence to back up what you’re saying, I would hold back on those types of blanket statements about people in poverty.
I’m not sure who hurt you but I find this outburst a little unnecessary, especially as I’m exploring arguments rather than making assertions on one side or other.
> we all know that this is not what happens in the vast majority of cases...
I’d love to see your evidence on that.
(Your restating it in your edit, still absent any evidence, doesn’t make it any more compelling. This is not bad faith, you are making factual assertions. Are they true? How do we know?
What is bad faith is saying that other people’s ideas are “disingenuous” or demonstrative of a failure to consider other viewpoints.
Your second edit tells us that 19.8% of families with three or more kids had no employed adult, in 2021, vs 11.9% in smaller families. It’s an interesting stat but it doesn’t give a full picture or confirm for us that the “vast majority” of those affected by the cap are long-term benefit recipients. Perhaps they are, even then it doesn’t address the root concern that the cap punishes children for their parents’ life decisions.
I don’t know what the right answer is. It may be there is no good one. As I implied before I’m not necessarily on the other side of this, I think it’s complex.)
This reads like either the author believes all the propaganda they read or they are willing participants in it.
> political willpower is not enough
That the economy is in terrible shape shouldn't get in the way of the rich getting richer. No one knows where all that money is coming from but people are also miraculously to poor to buy, build or rent a home. With all that nice scarcity in the market, whatever units are left make a lovely investment opportunity to put all that extra money into which again feeds into the scarcity. So much winning it's tiring!
For the last 50+ years, Western governments have largely acted to funnel wealth from the poor to to the wealthy. Each economic crisis seerms to have ushered in a big jump in inequality. The OPEC oil crisis, 1987, recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, the dot-com bubble, the GFC and Covid.
Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.
You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.
Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.
In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.
All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
tax revenues are higher than ever, government spending is higher than ever, social programs and social spending is higher than ever
also self entitlement, reliance on the government is at the highest, individual autonomy is at the lowest ever
Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY. That just immediately follows from inflation.
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/298478/public-sector-expe...
no, I speak in relative values to GDP
only during WW2 was spending higher.
on top of it UK does no longer spend on military or infrastructure, it goes overwhelmingly to consumption of dependent population
> > tax revenues are higher than ever, government spending is higher than ever, social programs and social spending is higher than ever
> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY
It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-data-item/uk-government-spe...
I believe your statement can be 100% true without affecting the truth of the parents statement. It's possible for a government to charge high taxes and have high social spending while also funneling larger and larger amounts from the poor to the rich through regulations and government agencies that favor and act for the interests of the rich.
what are the rich anyway. UK average citizen is in the top 95 percentile in global wealth.
there are no poor in UK, just wasted opportunities.
if you want to listen how massive inequality is created in UK, start by looking at immigration
You will find inequality growing in Japan and South Korea where there’s very low immigration. How do you explain this?
The same scapegoat of immigrants in the UK, obviously.
Government competence seems lower than ever.
There's just no ability to get anything done. Whether it's big projects (HS2) or the basics (emptying bins, fixing potholes), nothing seems to work any more. And it feels like most of our tax is being converted directly into private profits while getting very little done.
But the covid enquiry just cost £200 million, proving that we have world beating enquiries. No, it's not finished yet.
i assume you left the uk - out of curiosity, where did you move to?
Source?
24 million people receiving benefits (aka cash) in uk
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statis...
in addition to the usual free everything
free health care free roads free housing (often) free education
free riding and on top of it you get to complain about the rich!
> 24 million people receiving benefits (aka cash) in uk
It looks like most of those people are claiming State Pension / Pension Credit. Which doesn't make it not true, but it's maybe not what most people will think of first when you talk about benefit claimants.
That source doesn't cover the claims you made.
Spending is paid for out of tax and all those people will have paid tax. Paying less tax than someone else doesn't make a free rider. Deliberately opting out of an obligation while taking from the group makes a free rider.
It will only get worse whilst costs are not regulated of essentials such as housing, food, utilities, and public transport. The rich need to be taxed on all UK based assets and income no matter where you live and we need to restrict profit and pricing accordingly. We can't keep being held hostage by those who wish to increase their bank balance year on year. Now we have no incentive right now as those who are in government make far too much from the status quo. We need to remove this current governmental style by removing the option to have multiple jobs and remove the ability to be given cash or any benefits from private companies whilst working for the public. Capitalism is failing the vast majority and we need to realise that.
the government spends 50% of GDP, as much as everyone else combined
If you still don't have enough, it's out of sheer incompetence and greed
I am pretty skeptical of rent-control like policies, but if is being proposed for somewhere else I completely support it.
Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?
>Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?
Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
Regulation is one of few solutions. Issue to solve is not make the rich more rich.
But as housing has been commoditized, it will be very tough fight to change it. Even people in governments can be land lords…
All other branches are commoditized as well and owned by big players who own markets.
It's not capitalism, but corruption. Subsequent governments have been shovelling billions to tax avoiding multi national corporations without checks and balances. "Taxing the rich" is a distraction. Correct action is investigate corruption and cut spending. For instance NHS reliance on agencies - they pay agency for a nurse £2,500 a day, nurse gets £500 from agency if lucky, £2k goes offshore. That's how our money is sucked out of the economy. Multiple that by every local authority to government departments and you'll see billions are going to waste. But current government is too corrupt to do something about it. Soon they'll claim we have best food banks in the world and support for working people... whilst corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.
Capital is power in a 'free market'/liberalist world. I like the idea of free markets, but capital accumulation makes the capital owners able to decide more and more on policies that allow them to accumulate even more capital/power. in any case, most of it isn't corruption, it's only people seeking more capital for themselves and their families.
The rot is in the state: procurement rackets, sweetheart deals, and policy capture by corporations who get access no ordinary voter ever will. When a government sits down with giant asset managers, then magically “discovers” Digital ID is its national priority, that’s not the invisible hand at work. That’s the very visible hand of influence bypassing democratic process.
People love saying “it’s just capital seeking returns” as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. Accumulating money isn’t the issue. Being able to buy policy outcomes is the issue. Once private interests can tilt regulation, spending, and national infrastructure in their favour, you no longer have a market problem. You have a governance problem.
Food banks didn’t explode because Jeff Bezos has too many zeroes in his account. They exploded because governments funnel public money into offshore middlemen, contractors billing ten times the real cost, multinationals avoiding scrutiny, and regulators pretending this is all fine. That’s not the “cycle of capital”. That’s a parasitic state captured by rent-seekers.
Oh, yeah. Regulating the food prices is the trick here. That went really well in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China... just to name a couple of examples.
It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"
Food production is heavily supported by the government in China in order to keep food affordable. Food price is also incredibly low in China. If that's failing that the Western world is in hell now.
Per AI, comparative food production subsidies are the same in US and China. China spends a 2x total but they have more people so per farmer support is more or less the same.
So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.
US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.
But the premise of your comment is just wrong.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.
Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])
If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.
Today's China isn't Mao's China.
Certainly, but it's officially communist, which is at least as true as western countries being capitalist free market democracy where every citizen is equal.
At what point will it get worse, a planned economy or a free economy based on greed? Life is getting more unaffordable with each passing day. Corporations need to be put in their place given that politicians dont even have backbones anymore as soon as they smell corpo money.
So much money flows through the government that I would say it is already a planned economy
In long term, corporations can buy everyone, unfortunately.
This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)
If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…
Are you trying to excuse politicians for being corrupt due to being vulnerable?
Of course, I don’t excuse them. But I see news about corruption all around so I think that it is very tough society mental issue to solve.
A planned economy will always, always get worse. All historical examples show us that.
But you are free to give us an example of a planned economy that worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens. Just one single example will suffice.
P.S. I see the downvotes, but I don't see a single example. Just one...
I'm curious. What is an example of any economy that has only worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens and has never ever gotten worse?
So you are blind to the current economies, gotcha
We have oligarchic corporatism, not democratic capitalism, though I guess that is what is meant by the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’. The problem is that we already have regulatory capture, a more powerful regulatory system leaves us with fewer ways to escape the oligarchs control.
The problem isn’t the number of regulators or how muscular they are. It’s that there’s no functioning enforcement. You can design the neatest regulatory framework in the world, but if the people meant to uphold it look the other way, you may as well print it on kitchen roll.
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.
To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.
I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.
There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
Blaming capitalism for government failures while stating the solution is more and bigger government seems to be a misunderstanding of what the root cause is.
unfortunately a growing segment of people see food banks as a place where you can grab goodies for free, a-la 'you'd be stupid not to!'. i think they had a similar problem in Canada.
ultimately its a very politically difficult situation since you're entering the quagmire of what constitutes being poor. that's a discourse where political careers go never to return - easier to just throw your hands up in the air and just give everyone as much free food as they want.
ofcourse this then leads to the discussion of "wait... why don't we just do that anyway? arne't we a first world country?" but then you wind up with a whole enterprise of getting food for free (or steep discount) only to sell it to another community that doesn't have access to it and taking a profit. i think a similar problem (?) exists in the US, with SNAP food rations being (re?)-sold to latin americans.