Just Have As Many As Your Womb Can Pump Out! Someone Else Will Pay
Tanya Gold, who, from time to time, pops up in a link below some story I'm reading, reminds me almost every time that she has all the sense of a bent thumbtack.
This time, she's squawking in The Guardian about a recommendation to limit welfare payments to two children per family (or two per single mother getting knocked up by any old bloke at the bar):
This week Iain Duncan Smith, who deports himself with the grave charity of Jane Eyre's Mr Brocklehurst doing harm to do good, suggested limiting child benefit to the first two children if the parents are unemployed. If you work, his idea goes, you are helped; if you don't, you are punished, even as hundreds chase every job. To support this dull demonisation of poverty, he conjured the usual monsters, so voters might forget he is actually attacking them. Out came the nightmare visions of millions of feckless parents having children out of spite, which entirely ignores the truth that the poor, when in work, work harder than anyone, for fewer rewards....The details, of course, are vague. I would be surprised if a woman pregnant with triplets was encouraged to abort the third, with Jeremy Hunt and his 12-week fantasies sitting primly at the Department of Health. Will a woman who is employed when she conceives keep her benefits if she is fired before she gives birth? Full-time jobs are rare and shrinking - where will they draw the line? Almost all new jobs are part-time and insecure - what will happen? Does it even matter? Children, like criminals, don't vote.
The aim here is surely not to starve children, and although the direct aim is apparently to save money, not paying people to have children they can't support might stop more than a few of them from doing it.
Granted she is talking about England, but doing it in the U.S. would probably help as well.
I would say there would need to be some exceptions -- a newly widowed parent with multiple children, etc. But octomom would be out on her ass.
Jim P. at October 28, 2012 6:05 AM
Also, take Octomom's case, which I suspect is more about a need for international attention than the need to have a litter of children: That many children cannot be well-cared-for by a single mother. It's even a challenge with two parents. My neighbors have three kids and that's a challenge. And they are married and devoted parents.
The neighborwife just told me she has to tell the neighborhusband that she needs a few hours off once a week to just be a person. (She had a baby last December and really hasn't done much since that isn't baby related. And that's one new baby they have, not a litter.)
Amy Alkon at October 28, 2012 7:22 AM
"Squawking"
Yep, Amy, this is why you are the professional writer - your choice of words in spot on - she is "squawking." Like a dumb chicken running after scattered free corn. (anyone who has ever raised chickens knows the sound that I am referring to - they do squawk!)
Charles at October 28, 2012 7:53 AM
The inability to control the number of children you had was the reason so many stayed poor in the past. You really had no choice, but now even basic methods of birth control are safe, reliable, and despite what Sandra Fluke says, cheap. Therefore, there is no excuse for people without the means to support children to go around having more of them on our dime. I don't mind limiting the amount of support you can receive from the gov't. Let her squawk all she wants. Adults are people who take responsibility for their lives. You can't be an adult and a ward of the state at the same time.
Sheep mommy at October 28, 2012 11:06 AM
Bbbbbut... Children are MAGIC and nobody knows how or why they show up!
this is the basic supposition, because... kids. As if no-one thinks that if you rely on the govt for stuff, they can't dictate how you get it.
SwissArmyD at October 28, 2012 11:49 AM
I don't know if we would really implement something like that in the US, because they seem eager to give it away. A friend of mine has a low-paying job and a disabled husband. Some government representative told her that she could get more money by having a baby. My friend can't have kids, and she's not dumb enough to believe that children can make money rather than drain it.
Sosij at October 28, 2012 12:45 PM
Also, take Octomom's case, which I suspect is more about a need for international attention than the need to have a litter of children: That many children cannot be well-cared-for by a single mother.
On the other hand, let's not make policy decisions based on outliers. Octomom is a freak.
MonicaP at October 28, 2012 1:45 PM
> Children are MAGIC and nobody knows
> how or why they show up!
How dare you! How dare you!
The Oracle knows...
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 28, 2012 4:26 PM
> let's not make policy decisions based on
> outliers. Octomom is a freak.
☑
Crid [CridComment at gmail] at October 28, 2012 4:27 PM
Oh I agree. But the basic policy that if you have three children (or two and one on the way) and your spouse is killed in a car accident you get support for three children. If you squeeze out a fourth a year later, you don't get extra money for it.
I was in a benefits meeting the other day at work. A co-worker was asking whether he had to take health insurance because he's covered by his wife, who's going to retire in 2013. The response was "Yes, because that is a voluntary life event."
The idea if you're on Medicaid, you should have access to birth control. If you decide to fuck around without birth control you made a decision; a voluntary life event.
Octomom made a decision to have the eggs implanted. She shouldn't see a dime of my money, or yours.
The first child for a 17 or 18 year old can be excused as stupidity. The second even, but after that why should they have any more excuses? It's not like there are that many spontaneous conceptions. Why should they get more money? Does your company give you more money because you have no children or ten? Do you think the company should? So you get extra money because you have three kids, I have none and the joker in HR has one?
Jim P. at October 28, 2012 6:32 PM
In my city, the local rag is doing a month-long series on the increased number of children living in poverty in the state.
From what I can gather, most of these people were not responsible folks who were in fine financial shape when they had kids, but slipped out of the middle class due to the recession. No, the increase in the number of children in poverty is mainly because (surprise, surprise) when people who are already in poverty have kids, there are more kids in poverty! But hey, why should they let that slow them down.
I have an idea, though. The FSA (Free Shit Army) seems to respond well to financial incentives. They'll do pretty much anything the taxpayers pay them to do, so instead of paying them to have more kids, why not pay them to NOT have kids? Keep forking over the same benefits to the same deadbeats, but on the condition that they NOT reproduce. Some of them may spend their entire lives on the dole, which they are already doing now, but at least they wouldn't be adding to the problem. Or they might decide to go out and earn some money if they want kids badly enough.
Pirate Jo at October 29, 2012 7:51 AM
"even as hundreds chase every job"
When did the unemployment rate hit 99.99%?
"Full-time jobs are rare and shrinking"
Yes, but that's because they're spending money on welfare instead of production e.g. factories. Shutting down more factories to pay for even more children on welfare isn't going to help bring jobs back.
It's funny that people are bringing up Octomom, because not only does she seem to be doing better for herself lately, but she has actually earned it fairly, in the private sector:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2224408/Octomoms-new-sprawling-home--paid-profits-adult-film-starred-in.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
"Take a tour through Octomom's new sprawling home...which she paid for with profits of adult film she starred in .... due to a huge pay-out from her recent adult film Octomom: Home Alone, the single mother, real name Nadya Suleman, has now moved into a six bedroom, 5,000 square foot properly in Palmdale, California"
Lobster at October 29, 2012 9:46 AM
If you are on welfare BC should be mandatory.
If you are on medicade/care and having periods bith control should be mandatory.
For guys(until such time as BC beyond condoms becomes avalible) if on welfare or medi-whatever and it turns up you had a kid while on the dole you should be cut off and banned for life.
Quite frankly I'd like tosee less goverment subsidy of welfare and more government subsidies of tubal ligation and vasectomies.
I ran across an article that said one line of drugs for male BC was abandoned as it cause permenat infetility in 20% of test subjects.
If they could make that 100% I'm sure a lot of men would gladly go sterile that way over a knife to the groin
lujlp at October 29, 2012 1:21 PM
I'd love to see incentives for women on long-term birth control (Depo, IUD). Short term bc is too easy to screw up and too easy to fake.
But we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. As of the last numbers I saw on this, the average number of kids in a home getting TANF (which is what people usually mean by "welfare") was 1.9. The extra amount of money a women gets for an extra child is trivial -- certainly not enough to provide a financial incentive to have more children. Probably not even enough to cover diapers. Check out this chart for an idea of just how trivial:
http://www.hhsc.state.tx.us/help/financial/temporary-assistance.shtml
Since welfare queens with 8 kids aren't the norm anyway and the extra money people get per kid is so small, limiting payments to two kids probably won't impact very many people. But since it won't help people in poverty, and it won't help taxpayers, as the percentage of our budget dedicated to TANF is tiny (about 0.7 percent of the federal budget), I don't see a lot of point in getting hung up on it except as a way to ease middle class angst.
We're looking under the wrong rock. The problem isn't providing cash incentives to have children, because there simply isn't enough money being tossed around to do that. The bigger problem is single motherhood, which is enough to drag a family into poverty even with only 1 or 2 kids.
MonicaP at October 29, 2012 2:45 PM
"But we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist."
The article is about the UK. I don't know what the facts and figures are for the UK but the UK have a much larger and more entrenched welfare system.
Lobster at October 30, 2012 1:30 AM
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