Should poor people have kids?
(or, what started as a question about restricting family size for poor people but ended as a rant against an economic system that doesn't value human life at all)
Should poor
people have kids?
To me, the answer seems obvious: Yes, if they’d like to
be parents.
But there are a slew of people who don’t think poor
people should have kids. Or that they
should only be allowed to have one child.
(It worked so well in China.)
Let me backtrack real quick. Yesterday this article was floating around a
bit on Facebook. One of my friends
posted it and naturally, a discussion started.
And a few people felt pretty strongly that poor people needed to be more
responsible when it comes to child-bearing.
A few “solutions” to this “problem” were suggested, but I’m
also including things I’ve heard on TV or read elsewhere.
1. Job requirements:
Poor people need to be working if they want to get government aid.
2. Job and life training:
The government should provide job training for poor people, along with
lifestyle training, such as hygiene related stuff.
3. Maximum time: Poor people should only be allowed to
receive assistance for a certain amount of months yearly.
4. Limits and cut-offs:
If a child is conceived while a family is on assistance, they are no
longer eligible for assistance OR that child will not get assistance (so they
will still receive the same amount of assistance regardless of the fact that
there’s another family member now).
5. Home visits: Check to see that the family is
maintaining certain standards.
Okay. So, those
are the main ideas I’ve heard from people in that conversation and in the
national conversation.
As someone who grew up poor, my initial reaction is
something along the lines of: Kiss my ass.
For starters, people should be allowed to have kids. As many as they want. That’s an intensely personal choice between
parents and families, NOT the government.
Second, and this is kind of critical: poor people are
poor because our economy is structured to KEEP people where they are. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that
out. We’re the richest country in the
world and have the resources to make sure everyone has a decent living. It’s not as though poor people are refusing
well-paying jobs left and right. They
aren’t offered jobs with decent wages because hi, capitalism, let’s keep making
the rich richer. 9 times out of 10, poverty isn't a choice, so it's really unfair to tell someone they can't have a family because they were born into shitty circumstances.
But to address each of those proposed solutions without
rambling too much:
1. Job requirements.
This is kind of funny to me, because anyone who is poor, knows the poor,
or attempts to understand the poor is aware of the fact that there are no good jobs for us to get. The minimum wage is $7.25 (just over $2 if
you’re in a position where you get tipped) which is absolutely not a living
wage. In New York, for example, the living wage for one adult is $11.50/an
hour. And that’s a low number. The (laughable) federal poverty level is
under $12,000. Working for one year on
minimum wage will give you a little over $15,000. I don’t know one person who has bills and
living expenses that add up to less than $15,000.
My point is that even if a poor person is offered a full
time job at minimum wage, it’s not enough to support a family. If I had to take care of kids and I needed to
choose between a minimum wage job and government housing and food stamps, I’d
go with the latter. Because the former
cannot keep kids fed.
(It’s worth mentioning that people usually aren’t offered full time work, because
employers have to pay less in benefits for part time workers.)
If you want to require that anyone needing assistance has
a job, fine. But only when there ARE
jobs. What’s a way to do that? Well, instead of giving enormous tax cuts to
the wealthiest people and agreeing to expensive contracts, the government could
tax the ultra-rich at a fair rate which could fund public work programs. But hey, that’s just me.
2. Job training.
See above.
People suggest lifestyle training because they think poor
people are dirty, unhealthy, and don’t dress properly. That’s often true – because they’re poor. It’s
nearly impossible to eat healthy food while poor. What’s more, poor people work long hours,
which means when you get home, you want to make a dinner that is quick and
easy. If folks were given fair work
hours and more money, those issues would disappear. As for the clothes, I get really angry when
people criticize the clothes that poor people wear. “They don’t fit properly.” “They’re dirty.” “They’re inappropriate, the men don’t even
keep their pants pulled up.” One, people
can’t afford new clothes that fit perfectly or don’t have any stains on
them. Two, there are tons of studies on
the image of men in poverty. Go read
them. Looking like a gangster is a way
of survival.
Almost inevitably, someone will respond with, “Well, they
should still have dignity. They don’t
have to act poor.” To which I say:
Until you’ve lived in poverty and felt the crippling
depression it leads to, your argument has no validity to me.
3. Maximum time.
Yeah, sorry, but this is America, land of the free if you’re wealthy and
caged if you’re not. Poverty here isn’t
a short-term thing. It’s a cycle and it’s
manufactured and it doesn’t go away. The
vast majority of people who are born into poverty die in poverty. Taking away food and housing for three months
a year isn’t going to help that.
4. Limits and cut-offs.
First, it’s just morally wrong to let a person starve. To withhold aid for any babies born while a
family is receiving assistance is reprehensible. And once again, it ignores the fact that
poverty is something that doesn’t go away for most people. If this were a socialist country where
poverty didn’t exist and aid was only there for emergencies like sickness or
loss of a job, some of these ideas might
make some sense. But it’s not. People aren’t on assistance until they get
back on their feet. They’re on
assistance forever, because there is zero social mobility.
5. Home visits.
No.
It kills me when people blame everything on poor
people. When they throw around things
like, “they’re having babies on the backs of taxpayers.” (Also, from here on out I’m not calling them ‘taxpayers,’
I’m calling them the middle class. Because
poor people pay taxes too. Not to
mention they die due to things like unsafe working conditions or preventable
chronic health issues while people with money get to go to the doctor.)
The middle class pisses me off sometimes. The “expense” of taking care of poor people
is miniscule when compared to the expense of taking care of rich people. Their tax rates are horrendously low, they’re
got tax loopholes galore, and the companies they own get contracts with the
government all the time. You know how
expensive the wars are – and it’s the wealthy that are making money off of it
(while those hand-out-taking losers bury their “spawn”). It costs a ton of money to keep the rich
happy.
Honestly, it’s about time that the middle class opens
their eyes. You’re in the same boat as
the working class, you’re just in better seats.
And if the rich for one second thought they’d benefit from it, they’d
sink the entire boat in an instant without giving thought to your precious
American dreams. What makes me mad is
the resistance of the middle class to any sort of understanding, nonetheless to
solidarity. I hear middle class people
complain about things all the time – can’t afford college, house going into
foreclosure, can’t afford more than two kids.
Well, guess what. That is because the rich are obsessed with
getting richer. As things have gotten
harder for the middle class, poor people haven’t benefitted. The rich have, though. The gap is widening. The 84
richest people in the world own half of the world’s money, and you want to
blame the poor people for your decline?
Or for your taxes going up? If it
was really the poor people stealing from you or causing your pain, they would
have increased their wealth or at the very least maintained it. But that’s not the case. The poor are getting poorer, just like the
middle class. They’re going without
water and food and shelter.
If a poor person wants five kids, it is NO ONE else’s
business. For you to think that those
babies are what’s costing this country so much money you’d have to flatly
ignore all the statistics about the wealth in this country. It’s going to the rich, not the poor. And more than one person has made the
argument to me that they can’t afford
to have more babies, and they’re not on assistance! So how come poor people should get to have
babies that the government supports?!
Hi. The very fact
that you can’t afford to have as many children as you want is proof that you’re
actually very much with the lower class.
You don’t see rich people preventing pregnancies because of economic
restraints.
There’s nothing random about it:
First, the lower class can at least afford to eat and the
middle class can own homes and cars. The
rich are wealthy.
Then, the rich want more.
So the lower class can’t afford to eat without assistance. The middle class can still afford a home and
a car, but they can’t afford to put quite as much money away for their kids’
college funds. They’re getting
nervous. The rich are wealthier than
before.
Next, the rich are like, “hey, there’s still some money
we’ve yet to grab.” And now the lower
class can afford nothing, the middle class can eat and pay most bills but their
kids need to take out higher loans for school.
And they can’t have big houses anymore, only small ones. Which means less kids. Feeding them is too expensive. And they become so scared and outraged
(rightfully so), that they start looking for someone to blame. The rich people have now amassed so much
wealth that it’s super easy to consolidate news sources and convince the people
who consume that news – the middle class – that poor people are the
problem.
And the sad part is that the middle class believes
it. So now they’re demanding and
lobbying for restrictions on the lives of the poor – restrictions on family
size – because they think it’ll keep them financially safe. They don’t want to pay a bunch of taxes to
support “unnecessary” children (there's no such thing as an unnecessary human being, by the way). So now
we’ve got a society where poor people are not allowed to have as many kids as
they want. The kicker is that the middle class is allowed to have as many kids as they want, but they can’t. They can’t because they’ve wrongly identified
the poor as the enemy and done what they can to keep them down, all while it
was the rich who were manipulating the system and getting richer. So now their goal of economic freedom is even
harder to achieve, they still don’t have freedom of choice when it comes to
growing a family, and they’ve burnt the lower class. So now they’re kind of screwed. (The poor are screwed too, but we’re also
used to fighting.) Luckily, there’s
still hope. Because, as statistics of
the widening gap and shrinking middle class shows, the middle class is going to
realize that they have much more in common with the poor. And at that point, we’ll join together to
fight the system that’s put all of us down.
Moral of the story – there’s no justification for an
economic system that doesn’t value human life.
An economic systems that exploits people, disposes of people, and takes
away the option for people to bring more life into the world is an economic
system that needs to be smashed.
*People tend to say things like, “I know a person who
grew up poor and made it out. They have
a house and a family now.” There are
exceptions, of course. But pointing them
out does no good. Focusing on the lucky
few just helps us ignore the fact that the majority of people are restricted
and/or oppressed.
__
Charlotte
Charlotte
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