Off Topic Politics Thread

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San Tejón said:
On child care costs, I recently saw a quote from a junior doctor, who has 4 children, saying that her monthly child care costs were £4000, but her monthly salary is only £3000.
I’ve always wondered (if it isn’t already happening in some places) why hospitals don’t incorporate a crèche/childcare facility into the building, with costs being set at a level that is affordable to their staff and subsidise the pay of the child care staff.
Similarly I wonder if schools could do this too, with schools local to each other banding together.
With the need for so many parents to work, in order to survive, it would be good if a government could come up with a proper plan to help them to do this, so parents don’t need to consider giving up work as a direct result of high child care costs.
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When I hear parents say they have problems with child care costs and not enough child benefits for their large family, I just wonder why they had a large family. We had two children because that was what we could afford to have. Similarly people complain about not being able to afford to live in the South. I can’t afford to live in the South, so I don’t.
 
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oldstocktonsaint said:
When I hear parents say they have problems with child care costs and not enough child benefits for their large family, I just wonder why they had a large family. We had two children because that was what we could afford to have. Similarly people complain about not being able to afford to live in the South. I can’t afford to live in the South, so I don’t.
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I don’t think everyone mass moving north is going to help the actual problems though, do you?

I agree with you that people shouldn’t have more kids than they afford. There’s definitely a cultural thing with large families, too, where religiously it is seen as a duty and money isn’t something to consider.

We also have 2 and the cost for their childcare is absolutely insane. My wife is a top band NHS clinician and it almost doesn’t make sense for her to work. The benefit system doesn’t need to be increased, necessarily, just changed to ensure key workers are encouraged to actually stay in a job post kids.

We wouldn’t have another for the reasons you’ve stated but there’s a balance to strike. Not having kids is not a positive solution, look at what has been happening in Japan and South Korea over the last 3 years with falling birth rates.
 
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Very true. We always need another cohort of tax payers to fund the retired so who is going to have the kids if only people who could fund it themselves did so?
It might seem unfair to some, but producing kids is essential for a economy to function so why shouldn't the state provide some of the cost?
 
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The kids thing is a funny one. We had the one, bit of money involved and a bit of not wanting more.

An ex colleague of mine hasn't worked for now 9 years (nor has her husband) and in that time she has had 7 children. Yep 7. And she is considering an eighth. She is only 34 too. No chance of her working again anytime soon.

These are the types of people that ruin it for anyone, and I am not saying this is the norm.
 
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People are putting back having their kids later and later. I believe in the UK first time mothers are now 31-32 on average. People aren’t generally being irresponsible- they know they can’t afford to live out that strong biological need because the world is too expensive.
That is mental to me.
 
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thereisonlyoneno7 said:
The kids thing is a funny one. We had the one, bit of money involved and a bit of not wanting more.

An ex colleague of mine hasn't worked for now 9 years (nor has her husband) and in that time she has had 7 children. Yep 7. And she is considering an eighth. She is only 34 too. No chance of her working again anytime soon.

These are the types of people that ruin it for anyone, and I am not saying this is the norm.
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One of those kids is replacing the one you didn't have in terms of replacing you and your wife as tax payers to then try and fund elderly costs.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who only had one child, or no children so the 'spare' 5 children that your colleague has are not excess at all.

My current wife and I only had one, for cost reasons. She wishes now, 20 years later that we'd had another one.

As long as the birth rate keeps falling, and the population keeps rising, then we are looking at difficult times ahead.

On a personal note, I could never have had a large family because even if it somehow meant that I didn't need to work, the lifestyle that it would involve would never have satisfied me. I can't imagine how constricting it must be to do nothing but parent for a living
 
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In recent years, the Conservative Political Action Conference -- which is the biggest get-together of conservative interest groups and politicians in the US, and is generally a bellwether for the future of the right both in the US and abroad -- has had a bit of a problem with card-carrying members of neo-Nazi groups showing up. This year, they finally solved that: by giving them official passes and welcoming them in.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...ntisemitic-conspiracy-theories-fin-rcna140335

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening a group of Nazis, who openly identified as national socialists, mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed race science and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

Another, Ryan Sanchez, who was previously part of the Nazi Rise Above Movement, took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with Fuentes.

Other attendees with Sanchez openly used the N-word.

[...]In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, Conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan 6 insurrection.
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thereisonlyoneno7 said:
The kids thing is a funny one. We had the one, bit of money involved and a bit of not wanting more.

An ex colleague of mine hasn't worked for now 9 years (nor has her husband) and in that time she has had 7 children. Yep 7. And she is considering an eighth. She is only 34 too. No chance of her working again anytime soon.

These are the types of people that ruin it for anyone, and I am not saying this is the norm.
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Heh, I'm the youngest of 7 myself. My dad worked though, and my mum was a housekeeper (she definitely worked though!) I think she did ad hoc market research jobs for extra money. We weren't dependent on benefits though, though we got disability living allowance for me and carers allowance for my mum. My siblings when they got old enough to work paid housekeeping and then moved out fairly young and because there's quite a big age gap between all of my siblings, I don't think there was any time when all 7 of us lived at home together. Not even sure there was much time when 6 of us did. By the time I was old enough to work, it was just my mum and I. Obviously it's quite different when it's 7 kids with a 7 or 8 year age difference between them all. Which seems crazy, wouldn't you want a break from babies after that amount of time.

Coincidentally none of my siblings have big families, one has no kids, one has three and the rest two, except for me with none yet (and not likely any time soon)
 
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A call for the government to go after those who don’t pay as much tax as they should, for a variety of reasons.
Last year the gap between what HMRC expected to receive and did actually receive rose to £36 billion, yet they aren’t going after this missing money with the same gusto as they are when chasing benefit claimers. Sickening.

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...JQGVHxZye5jEf-Zcxr-dwFbvPUcognHU1-tMxSwU3jmH4
 
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