It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
Old people vote. Old people vote in midterms and odd timed elections. Therefore, old people decide the candidates. Any politician would be smart to court them as a voting bloc.
As for the benefits for the wealthy; that's just the same old bullshit in a new protectionist wrapper. Get my friends and family as much benefit as I can while I have the ability sort of thing.
I think both are occurring. Young white men went GOP, why is that? Anti vaxx leftists went with Kennedy, why is that? Why do anti-immigration and pro-economics claim the top two republican policy slots, when they’re firmly opposed in their effects on the economy? This is the contradictory trend of delusion and cult of personality.
If the BBB just passed is an indication, I think overall we are more on the deluded side, most of these deluded non-rich white folks are more anti-immigrant than pro-economics.
Of course I do not believe GOP economic policies are better than the alternative, I’m not the one who voted for that policy regime however!
Pro-economics? This admin can’t tell supply from demand. Anti-immigration, definitely.
The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.
Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.
The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
Because Biden was much better at doing than talking about what was done, and in an absence of words any words dominate.
The Democratic party needs to stop looking at election results as mistakes by underinformed voters, and start looking at them as feedback on engagement.
Hold on -- the regime recently welcomed refugees from Africa! If only we could understand why that group, versus the ones they're actively deporting. If only there was some pattern, a clue or hint as to what matters to them...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/12/trump-administratio...
I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.
Expecting other societies less egalitarian and less rich than them is pie in the sky thinking.
As this thread happening in a post about machinations by the current regime, the likelihood of it being solved (let alone correctly) borders on near impossible. The only thing that they'll do that will affect this is take away reproductive rights and that will lead to more unplanned births.
Solved meaning achieving replacement rate total fertility rate, not just people having the amount of kids they say they want.