New Post has been published on Mad World Radio
New Post has been published on http://www.madworldradio.com/expanding-thought-tax-incentives-kids/
Expanding A Thought: Tax Incentives To NOT Have Kids.
Warning, this is a purely logical and rational post. This isn’t an attack on any person(s) or group(s). Simply an idea and nothing more.
I had posted on Facebook an idea that crossed my mind. It has floated through the chaos that is my consciousness before, but I decided to share it publicly via social media last night in order to see the response. The idea is this, what if there was a tax incentive to NOT have kids, every year you don’t reproduce you get an extra $1000 in your tax returns. Single or married.
If we look at humans as nothing more than a product (which we are, whether it be for ourselves or someone else) we see a direct conflict with the supply and demand ideals. Too many of something and it becomes devalued, which the human race certainly has in a lot of ways, but none more so than those following the Western ways….(I.E. The American Dream)
The American Dream: get a good paying job, get married, buy a house and start having babies. This dream is designed in every way to put you into debt. Some debt is unavoidable, you’d need clothing and conveyance for maintaining gainful employment, but getting married and the things that follow are the beginning of the draining of a person’s full potential. Who’s dream is this? Who coined the phrase? Who gains from it’s promotion?
Speculation suggests it grew into part of the mystique regarding frontier life. As the Royal Governor of Virginia was quoted in 1774, the Americans “for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled”. He later added that if they found Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.
Of course since then, many have used the phrase and twisted the meaning. You can see though that the ideal of consumption is present even in our early settling. It’s funny that they’re called settlers since it seems like nothing was going to ever be good enough. FAST FORWARD
It’s now the 1950′s, Americans have come back or gone off to wars. The hell of war was always quelled with the idea of making it home in one piece, finding a girl and starting a family. Of course if you sat in the mud being fired at or crammed in a tube with nothing but men hundreds of feet under water…ya know, every single day? You’d probably dream of a better life too. The American Dream helped fuel those men to fight for their country and the pride to make it worth fighting for when they got back. Since we had lost so many from the wars, a population boom brought forth a virtual army of future citizens. During this time a new “enemy” was rising, but we didn’t see it’s motives until it was too late.
When I posted this initial idea on my Facebook wall. I had a friend who expressed sadness at the idea since they and their spouse had been trying to have a child for some time now. It’s not my intention to make anyone feel bad with this idea. It’s not an opinion, so I don’t 100% believe in this. I am simply putting out there what popped into my head. When this person said this though, it started my brain churning on the question of…. Why do we feel the NEED to reproduce? I can understand the want for a child, the want for that experience in our scrapbook of life. I just don’t see the need for it to be a genetic makeup of the two people.
I use to think it was low level narcissism, you know the idea that we are so perfect we need to create a copy of ourselves? I am not sure I believe that anymore as it seems we are pushed further and further in the consumerism lifestyle with each passing decade. Another friend commented that the incentive to have kids (earned income credit) is greater than the $1000 idea to not have kids.
Kids are expensive, massively so. That return you get back for having them isn’t enough to cover what gets spent out for them during the year. So you’re still in the hole, in fact and hole would be a good place to dump that money in the first place. Since your return has about the same guarantee. When you factor in religious influences on having multiple children or those who chemically alter themselves for invetro and wind up with 5 newborns at once, you can pretty much kiss you’re entire “dream” goodbye.
When kids are involved a responsible person devotes their lives to providing for their offspring. You’ll work yourself to death at a job you hate, burying yourself in debt with a mortgage, dental bills, school clothes and all other manners of debt associated with raising a child. Your spending, and living another day to continue doing so.
We’re fed this preconceived notion of our worth being measured by our brood and our material possessions. When our worth should be measured by our intelligence and contributions to society as a whole rather than our own selfish microcosm. What if we’ve been brainwashed into flooding the market place with people, to devalue the collective worth making it no longer a work to live mindset in which we are free to purse higher education and potential. Do we really want to live to work?
Again this is all just an idea. I am not saying it’s right or wrong. There is nothing wrong with pursuing a thought construct to it’s furthest possibility. Making no claims of truth, or opinion. Just taking a handful of facts and looking at them a new way. This entry is in no way meant to offend, nor is it a full on condemnation of anyone’s way of life. In the nature of full disclosure, I have a son and wouldn’t trade him in for anything. I just don’t get hung up on emotion and feelings so bad that I am ignorant to the fact that life would be less financial critical without him. That we could live even simpler and pursue or goals better if we hadn’t had a child.
If you feel the need to comment, be respectful. I was when I wrote this.
