Ban corporations from owning residential properties. Outlaw rent as a form of slavery. Every person currently renting residential property becomes the owner of the property they’re renting. The 14,000,000 empty residential properties in the USA which are mostly corporate owned get confiscated and distributed based on the needs and skills of the families that need them. Empty 6 bedroom farmhouse on 40 acres of land goes to a family with 5 kids that is willing to farm. One bedroom condominium in the city goes to a single person or a couple. Housing is a human right. Fuck corporations. Tax the wealthy the way they did 80 years ago and use the money to pay for universal health care and free college. Tax robotic labor and AI administrative labor to pay for universal basic income. Let the robots do the work, just give us all our fair share. Nationalize all fossil fuels as a step to phasing them out. When the money from selling oil all goes to the public good rather than corporate profits, it will be much easier to switch to renewables. With free housing, UBI, free college, and universal healthcare in place, lots of people will be interested in having children.
You can have practically free housing. Just buy this for 18500 euros.
https://www.rumah123.com/properti/batam/hos19254242/?price-unit-type=metersquare
Or do you want… free stuff while also having people invest capital in your area?
I don’t think it works that way.
Best we can do is tax your labour and redistribute it.
You don’t think if people owned the houses and condominiums they live in and had UBI that they would invest in their own home upkeep? My great grandfather cut down some trees and built a house. I’m not suggesting corporations shouldn’t be able to build houses, they just shouldn’t own them. Let corporations own commercial and industrial properties.
Your great grandfather lived in a place worse than the house I showed you. Batam in Indonesia is a pretty nice place. Been there, liked it quite a lot.
It’s not really housing material that is expensive. It’s labour, taxes and the land to build on.
The building land in my and my brother’s portfolio is valued at 400k euros. Just a piece of land. Good investment right? Belgium’s economy could have gone to utter shit the past few decades and it would be a worthless piece of land.
Can you force us to sell it? Perhaps. It’s used as a garden.
Imagine we put an apartment on it and have economic immigrants rent in it. Then randomly these economic immigrants would own the place?
Well, aight. Then I go to Switzerland and go rent a place and own it as well. I don’t think it will work out well. Basically it would halt globalisation and migration would no longer be viable.
Which sucks, because nobody here wants to have kids anymore.
You’re saying extremist things so you need to think them through.
Aight. Renting is outlawed. You can’t speculate on building land anymore. What happens now?
Developments halt because these people have a lower amount of capital. Lower amount of capital means lower economies of scale. Lower quality buildings. Worse for energy usage. Bad usage of space.
It costs $40k/year for daycare. Start handing out $5k to moms, daycare now costs $45k/year.
They already hand out 3k a year for kids, up to 6k, as well as up to 5k in credits available based on how much you spend and your income level. And I live in Jersey, where everything is expensive, and we were ranked fifth most expensive place to have kids in daycare, and even with two kids in I didn’t pay 40k. Not sure we even cracked 30k, but it was probably close.
EDIT: Info is dated, good thing I have an accountant. Looks like it’s 2k per kid, and the 3/6k is for dependent care credits, which applies from 35% to 20% based on your tax bracket (goes down the more you make).
It blows my mind that so many people don’t understand this concept.
Maybe if the world people were raising their kids in didn’t look so fucking gloomy thanks to some fascist fucks, they’d want to have more kids.
People are not having kids because the middle class cannot afford it. Assuming your household has the average American household income of 80k. This would give the household something like 40k at most after the kid’s associated expenses, which means that each parent would have a whopping 20k to themselves. This is positively fucked because they would have to have a quality of life similar to someone who is eligible for food stamps, but they would not be themselves. Kids are for those who already benefit from government programs, or those who can afford a very expensive pet for a minimum of 15 years.
All this will do is increase the number of children born into poverty, which already accounts for the majority of children born in America.
You want an actual solution? Give parents food stamps up to a yearly income of 120k
I also find the implication that a human life is worth $5,000 disgusting.
It was clear to me that when the gov’t went after reproductive rights, it was because declining birthrates are detrimental to capitalism. The money cannot stop; the money cannot slow down. Capitalism REQUIRES exponential growth in every regard.
Any “moral” reason given by a politician against abortion is a thinly veiled disguise to ensure that the machine always has enough cogs to keep running and growing.
How are you going to say a fetus is priceless and then say a live infant is worth $5,000? Fucking disgusting.
I don’t see a clear association in saying a baby is worth $5,000 when existing tax law says a baby is worth $2,000 off your taxes. It’s an incentive, not a bill of sale.
Drops back down to $1000 for 2025 unless the increase is extended. A $5000 payout is actually less of a payout than just extending the current CTC.
There’s literally been bipartisan efforts to expand the child tax credit ($1000 per year baseline, expanded to $2000 for 2018-2025 and expiring this year, plus COVID era provisions or up to $3000 or $3600 for 2021), and the bills to do so keep dying without a vote.
If they were serious about this they’d expand the 2021 program to where parents were getting $300 checks every month, and make that permanent and indexed to inflation.
So much of the Trump presidency is announcing a new program that sounds good, but isn’t even enough to make up for a program that he already killed.
300$ a month is already way below index.
Yeah but it’s fucking something man. At this point I’ll take anything. That’s a good grocery haul right there every single month.
Well we already lost that in 2022, when it dropped back down to a $2000 annual credit you get when you do your taxes the year after, and after this year it’ll drop again to $1000 unless the law is changed.
Still waiting for healthcare to be “fixed”. Definitely going to be any day now…
Longest two weeks of my life.
Maybe they should improve the quality of life for working families to get them to be confident enough to have more babies naturally?
…nah, it’s obviously the queers fault!
“What could a childcare cost, ten dollars?”
In Canada, yes.
As of February 2025, eight provinces and territories are delivering regulated early learning and child care for an average of $10-a-day or less, and all other jurisdictions have reduced parent fees by at least 50%.l
Wow way to rub THAT in XD
Just kidding, I love that for y’all. Every parent should have that (or better!)
That’s the goal. Maybe I’m in an exceptional area, but I’m not aware of any parents who are effectively paying $10/day unless their income is low enough to trigger additional benefits.
Still HUGE improvement over the last few years though. I think we had an option for 18$/day if we packed our kid a lunch. Our daycare would feed them for an additional 3$/day. I think overall average care costs have practically halved in the last few years so even if it’s not perfectly universal and perfectly $10, it’s HELLA better. Strong improvement. Honestly a MAJOR factor in trying to figure out the feasibility of having more kids for us.
My friends are paying $1400 a month, I don’t think this is working in Ontario.
Ontario has been extremely stingy on paying out their share of the fees (Program is part funded by federal, rest by provincial), leading to most daycare centres still not registering for the full reduction to $10/day. But most are still reducing their prices from what they were at previously.
Oh there will be a boom of… abandoned babies for the fostercare system.
See: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania
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lol at one point I was paying more for daycare than my mortgage.
5k, these people are 🤡
y’all understand why they want conservative christians to have a ton of babies, right? the only reason that american conservatives have become as atrocious as they are is that they have the big, dumb numbers. they need another generation of idiots - forcefully uneducated - to continue their legacy of shit.
The irony is that these conservatives often can’t afford large families without welfare, the exact things Republicans are cutting. Those give a lot more than onetime 5k payments.
They have to ensure that the large families are also poor, thus flooding the armed forces with young people in need of a paycheck with no alternatives.
That’s why they’re getting rid of child labor laws. Make them kids earn their way!
and of course to be wage slaves
sure, if you need to throw some 4chan jaron into the jumbo that’s fine.
Yes, we’re aware. But they can’t even do that right. They’re still too greedy to properly implement their own plans
Japan has an aging population and tried a lot, with not much success…
Prosperity = less kids, so we shouldn’t be surprised what Trump is going to try…
Do we get to choose how it’s distributed? Here are some fun options I came up with.
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$13.69 per day for a year. (Nice). About $419/month. Maybe they could round up to $420 because they stale internet meme culture is hip
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$0.76 per day for 18 years. A guaranteed $22.80 per month for an entire childhood
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$5000 lump sum. I can’t find any widely accepted figures for average out of pocket cost of prenatal care, child birth, and infant health visits. I’ll wild ass guess it a at covering 20-75% of those visits for people who have insurance. For people without insurance, looks like an uncomplicated vaginal birth averages $14k. But again huge variations in price
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In Germany the parents (and later, the children themselves) receive a little over 250€ per month until the child is 25 or finished an apprenticeship or uni.
Germany has a very low birth rate.
Edit: copy of a text where I laid out the benefits we get in a similar discussion:
In Germany we have protection of pregnant people from when their doctor deems them unfit for work until delivery – continued payment of full wages. Two months after delivery with 70% wages and 12 months to split between both parents, which can be taken together and stretched by taking half the money for twice as long. Until your child is six you may (with some exceptions) take unpaid leave for parenting. Your employer has to keep your position for you. Childcare from 1 till school is affordable (ca. 250€/M). Healthcare is paid as a percentage from your income (ca. 15%) and has very little extra cost. You get 250€ per child per month just for having a child. Tax credits. If you are still struggling: Assistance for rent, school materials, clothing and more.
We have (compared to the US) pretty solid workers protection laws. We have a (not great but you won’t starve) state pension. We have unemployment benefits, that don’t run out (conditions apply). We don’t have the weird Japanese shut-in young men on a scale that’s worth a mention.
We also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Yes, the oppressiveness of a capitalist society is a factor – Germany is far from free of that, and getting worse. But compared to the US we should be popping out babies like crazy. But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education, that afaik are the most decisive influences of a low birth rate.
But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education
Hey, so, funny story about what MAGA is working hard to eliminate…
Sociatal factors suppressing birth rate in Germany may be high rents, inability to find places big enough for a child considering today’s standards, and bad outlook. Also work life balance is skewed for some.
I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.
Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.
Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.
Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.
I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.
I don’t think you need to own your own place to call it a home. Having grown up in East Germany, most kids I went to school with didn’t grow up in a house their parents owned. It’s different in the countryside, but in the city I grew up in easily >90% rented.
It would be nicer though, for sure. For me it’s also not on my financial horizon to ever own a house or flat.
I’m with you on everything else. The question remains: leave for where? Everywhere is going to shit.
I apologize, I think we’re getting tripped up on terminology.
Where ever you live, you are correct in believing you should strive to make that a home. Make a community, make a place of comfort and security and artistic energy etc. But that’s not what I mean.
Owning your place allows you the freedom to make your home better in a way that renting it doesn’t. How many people with they could add AC to their flat but can’t because the landlord doesn’t want them to? How many people wish they could add solar panels to their roof but can’t because the landlord doesn’t pay the electricity bill and therefore doesn’t care if it’s inefficient? How many people want to renovate a bathroom, tear down a wall, install permanent fixtures or shelves, etc etc but can’t because they don’t have permission or the rights to the place they live in?
The relationship between landlord and renter is one whose major purpose is to drain money from the poor to the wealthy. I don’t really wanna turn this into a rant against landlords, but they should be outlawed or taxed out of existence. Landlords are deincentivized to improve their properties, they are deincentivized to help you make your house a home, they are deincentivized to charge you the cost of that housing. The system should be abolished.
Going back to your ancedote, relativity is not a good measurement of objective truth. The fact that most people didn’t own their homes where you grew up doesn’t change the fact that that meant they were losing money every year, that they weren’t building wealth every year. Things should be improved based on and towards objective truths/metrics - not comparatively to bad examples. The US has worse public transit - does that means we shouldn’t strive for better train networks and services? It’s illegal to be a homosexual in Singapore - does that mean we should allowed gay rights to worsen simply because they’ll still have it better than other countries?
I make this point because this argument of relativity often hinders progress. Humans are creatures of relativity and if we allow our systems to be judged relative to others we will make progress slower than is possible (and arguably necessary).
You should be able to own a home. You should be able to own a home within the first 5 years of working at least and it shouldn’t cost you a loan that’ll last a lifetime. Housing shouldn’t be an ever growing cost. We can make this the reality if we vote correctly and hold our politicians accountable (and our neighbors).
If the CDU/SPD/AFD remain in power there will be plenty of countries that are at a similar quality of life and that are improving or worsening at a slower rate. Some country will eventually crack the code of taxing the wealthy and banning landlords and focusing on the working class (the 99%). It’s only a matter of time. The goal is just to avoid needing a WW to get us there.
40k a year? So at least 3200 a month for daycare? Who on gods dying earth can pay for that? That’s more than 3 times my rent and my landlord is bleeding me like a stuck pig, what the fuck
People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.
I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.
It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).
Oh, it’s simple
easyto fix, just very painful. Nobody wants to fix this because it means dismantling capitalism and bringing those responsible to justice. This is why there is so much support for fascism. They run from the boogeyman they know into the arms of the ones that promise a return to normalcy.The elephant in the room is the huge violence required to bring any “simple fix” to fruition. The fascists are doing some of the violence for their own simple fixes, now, openly. They of course intend the further violence, too.
Some of us see the elephant. Most of us (almost all of us, myself included!) are just tryna get from one day to the next. That’s bad, elephant gets bigger…
I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.
You are right, and my French is showing.
I mean yes? I feel like there’s an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and that’s just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. There’s absurdly wealthy people here and there’s, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean they’re living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment
By avoiding COL?
it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? You’re talking about “ugly things” too. You’re stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I don’t see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesn’t seem ugly to me?
We go through these versions of life and think they are normal
I genuinely don’t know what point you’re trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesn’t make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like you’re doing the opposite of comforting the commenter’s feelings, it seems you’re trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -
(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, I’m just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. I’ma post it, it’s Lemmy, why not)
The idea about “versions of life we go through, thinking they’re normal” -
That’s important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, it’s actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just don’t see.
The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the “…thinking it’s normal” I meant.
One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that “lane”, that “version”, and we die in the way the people in our “versions” die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.
The barrier I’m describing as strange is that way because it’s often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about one’s lived “version”, and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.
We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish we’d all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.
I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!
I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.
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It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
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Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.
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That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.
Edit: minor phrasing
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When you have 3+ kids that are young.
Bay area and I’m sure NYC
May barely cover the hospital bill for those many without health insurance. But of course the proposed bonus is intended for middle class white babies
Average cost for an uninsured birth is 19,000.
