Quote:
Originally Posted by basilsands
Very good point. Many societies today are reaping the penalty for not cultivating a culture where having many children is considered wise. In America the Social Security system is broken because there are not enough people under 60 to pay the pensions of their elders who decided that one or no children was plenty. Part of that points out the problem that legal abortion brings with it, ie 1/2 the children who would've been born in the US and would have been tax paying adults now (nearly 50 million) are not here to pay taxes.
More children / free market / lower taxes = future economic growth and national strength.
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It's not a question of cultivating a culture where having many children is considered wise.
Having many children tends to occur in lesser-developed cultures, where labor is primarily manual, child-mortality is high, and you have a lot of kids to insure there will be enough hands to get the work done.
In developed nations, the mitigating factor against having lots of kids is two-fold. The first issue is economics. Kids are
expensive. The question is usually not how many you
want, but how many you can
afford. The second issue is that the level of development offers options. The career path of a woman is not limited to wife and mother. Some women choose not to have kids at all. Others try to balance kids and a career, and more children make that more difficult.
The US Social Security system was never intended for the role it is now filling, and is badly designed for it. In practical terms, it's the world's largest unfunded pension liability. Even if you assume a sufficient supply of new people is produced to grow up to be taxpayers and contribute, a "pay as you go" system is a disaster waiting to happen. Corporate pension funds
invest contributions to generate the income to fund the pension payments they must make. Even that is not totally sufficient. General Motors, for example, now has two retired workers collecting pensions for each one working and contributing, and the UAW is facing hard decisions as the money simply isn't there to pay for things they've grown accustomed to having.
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Dennis