Instead of cash payments having considerable services like in home care, free goods like formula and diapers, parenting support and education, childcare, etc. would go a long way to making parenthood easier for people of all classes.
100% agree. "Tax credits", cash payments, and the like are all wrong imo. Free public education (aka free daycare) got us to where we are. Let's extend this and make free public education go as low as 6mo old or even include newborn care (might as well).
Universal health care would also be a huge boon, the costs of providing health care are quite high.
In the past our society seemed a lot more inclined to share and pool resources to raise the next generation... now it feels like society will only do the bare minimum to prevent kids from dying, but other than that isn't eager to take on a communal parenting role, instead forcing the entire burden on parents.
That’s a serious citation needed: if you think there are lavish social payments which reward poor people for having kids, the 80s called and want Reagan’s campaign mythology back. The United States makes parenting expensive but the richer you are the easier time you’ll have dealing with it.
The rich are just fine, it's the middle class that's getting squeezed out. We used to pass programs to make it easier for the middle class to have kids. But the liberation of Black people in America has caused so much racial resentment that the rich were able to exploit it to make us think we were fighting over scarce resources in the richest nation in history... meanwhile we have billionaires quietly and not so quietly tilting the playing field in their favor. As racism towards Black people declined somewhat, we're being sold another racist lie that illegal immigrants are the reason America is ill...
The rich can absolutely afford as many children as they want.
Whom you are talking about are upstart "upper middle" who have a good wage but no capital of their own, and the rich are generally happy to have them thrown under the bus rather than face them as equals.
The method of throwing under the bus is have them overwork for a wage and then second job to waste that wage on "fueling economic growth". Not turning these into anything permanent.
