Op-Ed: Why is it so hard to understand why people aren’t having kids?

Link2Feed used USDA data to explore the history and scale of the school breakfast program. The U.S. served a record 2.5 billion meals to kids in 2022. 
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There are some big important reasons for people not having kids. Some of these reasons are biological, like massive rises in infertility. Some are personal preferences.

People do still have personal preferences. It’s now considered a niche market.

Others, presumably those realists we’ve all heard about, can’t afford kids. That charming cost of living insanity we all adore so much apparently does affect people other than billionaires.

(Are there people other than billionaires? Really? Why? Nothing better to do? You’d never guess.)

Declining birth rates are another ongoing suffocating factor. That’s also been going on for years. It’s getting so critical that it’s even being mentioned on the political news in between propaganda sessions.

However –   None of this information has translated into anything resembling a response to the fact that kids are simply too expensive to have. Like housing, health education, and other commodities, it’s just too hard.

The society isn’t much of a help, either.

Consider this blissful vista:

You’re working in a nowhere job for peanuts. You’re entertained by whatever new bit of information is infesting your middle manager’s brain. You’re trying to coexist with people you couldn’t be paid to bury. The risks of even thinking about money are just too high.

In a mad moment of self-compassion, you inhale a bit more of the crumbs of that stale decade-old Dorito you use as an alternative to antidepressants. Your partner slithers in through the window frame in your apartment. Kids? You want kids? How?

The process of making the world unliveable is doing nicely, you’ll be pleased to know. If whatever is driving you nuts is an issue, it’s OK. It’s anti-human, it’s both policy and somebody’s deeply held ideological belief. So that’s all right.

With that glitzy excess of competence and lazy lack of vision we now blithely expect from the world’s Mensa escapees, things are great. Getting to the end of this unforgivable century will be ever so interesting.

It’ll be OK. With generations of parents and grandparents happily letting the next few generations go broke before they’re even born, things are just peachy keen. Five generations of highly educated demographics are astutely paying to be robbed blind.

On a bright note, ridiculously overpriced education is getting some karma. You are now being sent broke by the people you pretended to train jacking up prices beyond anyone’s reach across the board. How about that?  

You get nothing for your taxes. Your money is something you can wave at as it passes whimsically by your pocket. Economics has evolved into a sycophantic game of “Can’t be bothered whacking a mole”, and that’s nice, too.

Doesn’t really answer the question of why is it so hard to understand why people aren’t having kids, though, does it?

Let’s try a theory.

Maybe:

Criminally greedy price structuring can’t work and never has.

Obsolete economic theories don’t work and never did.

People don’t work because they can’t even afford to work.

Therefore, a capital-based society built on fiction and greed can never work.

Now a reciprocal theory:

People who tolerate this suicidal idiocy shouldn’t have kids.

They should have subservient fatuous media run by subhuman nonentity losers.

They should have nice cheap excuses, not food, water, shelter, lives, etc.

Bottom line – You’re paying for your own stupidity. Enjoy!