Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I am too lazy to elaborate, but I just want to say that in broad, general terms, I agree with E. Rigby.
And I can't rep her so showing support here.
Gee, thanks (to you & other responsible humans on this forum & worldwide. Btw, where have you been, wabbit; you don't stop by this forum too much? Hope you had Feliz Navidad yesterday)
When people have multiple children that they can't afford to raise, we working taxpayers end up paying for the cost of raising these children.
Not more than we pay Wall Street execs after they crash the economy and leave their companies with golden parachutes funded by tax payer bail outs. Look at the budget numbers.
I am simply advocating for people to be responsible before they decide to have children
What if your biological clock is ticking and you are still financially struggling? You think and hope things will improve but you don't have a guarantee. Is one supposed to give up a basic right to procreate because of the unknown? Financial fortunes can ebb and flow, even with the most conscientious human beings who do everything right. Spit happens.
A child is neither a Porsche nor a commodity of any kind but rather a person whose care is the right and responsibility of each couple and then more broadly of society. Taxpayers are asked to fund everything from nuclear weapons to street paint to animal shelters, because that's how any functioning human society works. And, frankly, from education to health departments you're already "paying for" other people to have kids. The entire "don't make me pay for your kids" meme is an empty soapbox because not only are you already paying for a billion things less important than children but you're actually already paying for children, too
The majority of our taxes go to things that support the lifestyle and assets of the 1%. The entire military complex (which is most of our budget in you include the deficits they created) supports the 1% in their wars of choice over their profits that have nothing to do with us. We just gave Trump $738 billion dollars for the DOD. 71.5 billion of that is for things like Afghanistan that we shouldn't have been in, in the first place, and for the past 18 years. Who does it benefit? Not us. 11.2 billion to buy new toys for the airforce but really to enrichen the executives at Lockhead Martin. And that is not the only money going to flying machines. A bunch more on helicopters and fighter jets. (We already spend 10 times more than the biggest 10 countries combined.) Goes on an on. Only 3.1% of that is going toward a raise for our troops, the only legit spending in this whole budget.
. My chief way around it was an early semi-retirement, ie, instead of working 100% time and paying 50% of my income in taxes (I was in a high tax bracket), I simply cut down on the amount of work to less than half a year, traveled around the world for fun, and reduced my taxes to 25%.
.voted to extort money from you people who earn money, and you can't do anything about it, nanananananaaaaa". Actually, we can - the simplest thing is, for those of us who have earned enough, to simply stop working, and therefore stop paying taxes to support those who spend more than they can earn.
Taxes are not extortion. it's the cost in living in a society that supports you to have a high income bracket to begin with. It's pretty expensive to have your own private island where you have to pay the cost to deliver everything and pay your own security force to protect you from thieves, and I am sure would far exceed your "50%" income.
A household of 75k probably pays little or no income taxes if you have multiple kids. Deduct 24,000 for married filing joint. Put enough in retirement accounts to bring down ago a little more. Child tax credits, earned income credit, savers credit
Definitely NOT true. Don't you know anyone in that donut hole between $50-$100K. Not true at all.
Gee, thanks (to you & other responsible humans on this forum & worldwide. Btw, where have you been, wabbit; you don't stop by this forum too much? Hope you had Feliz Navidad yesterday)
That's a subjective point of view. A lot of your views I think are highly IRRESPONSIBLE and loses sight of the big picture. It's often based on cynical points of view that aren't even accurate when tested with real data.
What if your biological clock is ticking and you are still financially struggling? You think and hope things will improve but you don't have a guarantee. Is one supposed to give up a basic right to procreate because of the unknown?
Taxes are not extortion. it's the cost in living in a society that supports you to have a high income bracket to begin with. It's pretty expensive to have your own private island where you have to pay the cost to deliver everything and pay your own security force to protect you from thieves, and I am sure would far exceed your "50%" income.
I paid in taxes what I said I paid, ie, around 50%. When I worked full-time, my tax bracket was 35%. You were never self employed (like me), so you don't even know what taxes your employer pays for you. Self-employed people pay federal SE tax which you don't pay (added to regular tax which was up to 35%), ie, they pay the full amount of FICA taxes (Soc Security and Medicare) rather tham 1/2 that you pay (and your employer pays the other half for you, plus my total earnings subject to FICA were I believe larger than yours - unless you make close or equal to the maximum FICA-taxable amount). Additionally, I paid MAT (minimum alternative tax) in the years I worked full-time. I worked nationwide, and in the years when I worked mostly or entirely in California, I was in 11% state tax bracket in CA. All of that taken together, my taxes for several years were about 47% of my gross earnings. You are "talking authoritatively" about things about which you have no slightest clue. You are so remote from anybody who does any real work, or even more remote from big business enterprises that float up this country, that you can't even begin to understand the depths of your cluelessness, so you have to make up disparaging fiction about people without whom you would live the way people live in Cuba.
I don't have a problem at all with people and kids when people support their own kids. But 800,000 New Yorkers (I mean in NYC only) who live in welfare housing, 33% of the population of New York State on Medicaid, and 7,800,000,000 or so people who have destroyed their own place to live in the universe attest that there are waaaay too many people and kids for the well-being of each individual member of human race.
If there were only 1,000,000,000 people in the world, and only 50,000,000 people in the US, nobody in New York would be living in welfare housing or be on Medicaid, and everyone would be doing something useful and earning enough to have a desk, a grill, a pipe, a Porsche, and a heart to... wait, do we actually know each other in real life outside of this forum??? :-) Something tells me that there would also be much less need for nuclear missiles and other forms of aggression/ defense/ competition if resources were larger than needs, rather than needs being way larger than resources (as it is now). When a population of wolves exceeds the supply of food in an area, wolves start killing their own puppies (many animals do some form of that) to prevent starvation of the entire herd. Humans fortunately don't have to do that because there are IUDs that are nowadays extremely close to being 100% effective all the time and in everyone who uses them.
I am not arguing that nobody should have kids, and there should be no humans on this planet. I am just arguing that people should limit their number of kids to what they realistically can support without imposing on other people.
PS- incidentally, I am a woman, and of European origin (ie, not, say, Navajo)... what made you conclude that I smoke a pipe, just wondering? I actually don't :-). I don't smoke, never did.
Pipe; as in plumbing under the sink...
Yes, overpopulation is obviously a problem, but you know, ever since Matlhus brought the subject up, it has never stopped. I don't think the planet can't handle more people. I do, however think that humans are incorrigible, that they won't stand the test of time, simply because the more sophisticated nations are incapable of steering said humans in their midst toward a logical "lifestyle", to use an abused, hyper propagandistic word. The richer nations are depleting not only their territorial assets, but all the other ones as well at breakneck speed. I actually think that the only good thing about the last 60 years is that the super rich are paying lower taxes, and that the middle class is strapped just enough to keep their spending in check. If the lower classes had more sway, more spending power than they already have, it would be an order of magnitude worse. More motor homes, secondary and tertiary residences, quadruple-car garaged Mcmansions, speedboats, snowmobiles, home gyms, home cinemas, indoor pools, etc... All the necessities of the wannabe lifestyle that when multiplied, afford us little chance of survival, and alienates us further from the trees and the bees.
As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, it doesn't matter what the population numbers are, humans have a death wish, collectively speaking, guided by ever malevolent leaders willing to take up the matter by ever increasing levels of spending in hi-tech warfare. It has always been and always will be. It is just a matter of time.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
