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When Progressives Try to Solve Fertility Collapse their Answers Are Idiotic
Malcolm and Simone react to a progressive writer's absurd proposal to address declining birth rates - punitive taxes if both spouses work! They explain how this would just discourage marriage and responsibility, worsening societal outcomes. Instead, tax incentives align better with reality, especially if focused on people having kids younger. Pets as child substitutes comes up again too.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children. he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up
You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: Wild. And I remember, have you heard of Zilogon Wild? I love Zilogon Wild, it's fantastic. Made me remember the house on Batman Road, which you like seriously thought about buying. That like Yes! Like it was a cult, but it had all these like It was a mansion! It was a mansion,
Malcolm Collins: it had a bunch of It was a super cheap mansion, because it looked insane.
And it was on a place called [00:01:00] Batman Road. Yeah,
Simone Collins: and you were like so ready to buy it. You're like, it's a fixer upper. And I'm like, this was clearly owned by a cult before. Why do you want this house? And I wonder, you know, like if, if we bought that house, would it have shaped us? Do the homes that people live in shape people?
Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I know that I love the house we got. We definitely got ahead on this cottagecore trend here. Right. You know, I see, I don't think I would
Simone Collins: be wearing a medieval corset. You know, a chamise, you'd be wearing what? Like in the house on Batman Road? I would probably have to be wearing a beige jumpsuit because that was the vibe.
You know,
Malcolm Collins: that was the vibe. I love it. Hey, I don't know. That could work for us as well.
Simone Collins: So,
Malcolm Collins: anyway, we've got to get into our topic today. Oh, yeah. So, we read an article by somebody being like, look, progressives are finally waking up to fertility rates. You know, and they are, and I, I see this [00:02:00] repeatedly in progressive pieces, you know, the New York Times did a front page piece on this recently, but the crazy thing is, is I thought as progressives woke up to this, right?
They would more and more, and I've always, you know, taken this position. But they've used it to try to give handouts and so creatively, you know, I point out and I'm going to put up on the screen the graph that shows that if you sort studies by how large their margin of error is, what you will see is all of the studies that shows this matter and have a huge margin of error and all of the studies that show this doesn't help at all have a very small margin of error.
If you look at something like the program that was in Hungary, where they spent literally 5 percent of their GDP on this last year. So the year before Alaska, we just passed the New Year's.
They got their fertility reset by like 1. 6%. Considering that, like, it's falling like 13 percent this year in Korea, like you're getting double digits declines in a lot of places. It's irrelevant. It's not going to fix anything. And so it's like, well, they're going to, Try to use it to support those programs.
[00:03:00] And it's, it's, it's stupid and it's not going to work, but you kno
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago