Tag Archives: Taxes

News

What happens when the government pays people to have babies out-of-wedlock?

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Take a look at this article from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Britain’s most feckless father is having another five children  – and is apparently ‘engaged’ for the third time in three months.

Unemployed father-of-10 Keith Macdonald – who pays just £5 a week to support his offspring – will cost taxpayers more than £2 million by the time all his youngsters reach 18.

He has got two new girlfriends pregnant, is having another baby with an ex and a fourth woman who was already known to be having his child has discovered that she is actually having twins.

But it remains unclear whether the latest pregnancies will make Macdonald, from Washington, Tyne and Wear, a father-of-15. The 25-year-old has admitted he has only eight youngsters, while one of his former lovers has claimed he already has 11 children – so when the next five are born he would have 16 in total.

[…]By the time each of his 15 children are 18, they will have cost the state £50,000 in child tax credits, £20,000 in child benefit while each mother could receive £30,000 in income support and £50,000 in housing benefit.

He’s also spent time in prison and is currently unemployed. So where exactly is this guy getting the money to convince all these women of his ability to provide for them?

The father, who has met most of his conquests at bus stops, claims £68.95 per week in disability benefits because he has a bad back and £44 per week in income support.

He has previously said it was ‘not his fault’ he had fathered so many children.

[…]He fathered his first child when he was just 14.

What can these women possibly be thinking, having sex before marriage with such a beastly man?

He is now engaged to marry 32-year-old unemployed Amy Ward, from Chester-le-Street, Tyne and Wear, and she is expecting his child.

Unemployed Emma Kelly, 18, and 21-year-old ex-girlfriend Clare Bryant – have also both recently been made pregnant by the feckless father, it emerged today.

And another one of his expectant partners – 24-year-old Danielle Little – has just found out that she is expecting his twins.

It remained unclear when Macdonald, who has been in and out of prison, will tie the knot with his expectant fiancee Miss Ward.

[…]But Macdonald was also engaged to unemployed Danielle Little, from Sunderland, in September.

He had promised to marry 19-year-old beautician Sarah Armstrong from Chester-le-Street in the same month when he discovered she was pregnant.

Miss Little warned Miss Ward about the feckless father on Facebook – but she reacted with fury in a post on the site.

She wrote: ‘Some people just don’t get on with their own lives and just like to cause s*** for other people.’

I think everyone can see that this man is not the sort of man that would pass any father’s pre-dating interrogation. This man is scum. There was a time when a man like this would not have been able to afford bus fare if he didn’t have a job. But now the government is paying him so that he can carry on with women as if he actually had a job. They are enabling him to act like a child well past the time where he should have grown up.

The author of the post on RuthBlog asks this:

Questions for Your Consideration

  1. What is the womens’ role here? Are they victims? Why is the article centered around the man?
  2. Imagine what these kids’ reactions might be when they grow up and learn their dad is the father of many other children, most by different mothers. Do you think the parents considered the kids’ reactions before having sex? Generally speaking, are a child’s future (and unknown) reactions something parents ought to consider?
  3. In your opinion, is this the sort of future most women dream about when they’re young? What is the government’s role, if any, in supporting the dreams of its youth?

Those are good questions, but I have one of my own.

Husbands or government

When women think about marriage, do they think about where the money is going to come from to buy all of the things they dream about? I know that they dream about babies, weddings, clothes, shoes, jewelry, a home, home decorations, a garden, furniture, drapes, vacations, and so on. But my question is – are they dreaming about who is going to pay for all of that? And if they know about these costs, then why are young, unmarried women voting to increase government spending on welfare? The only way to pay for all these benefits is by raising taxes and confiscating their future husband’s earnings and investments. It may feel good to “soak the rich”, but does it result in more marriage-minded men? (Obama has greatly increased welfare benefits, thus undermining marriage and the need to choose a man who can earn money). How does heaping taxes and regulations on businesses make a man more likely to be employed? How does raising capital gains and dividends taxes make a man more able to earn a return on his investments?

A man cannot pay for all of these social programs, (which just incentivize more and more costly behaviors), at the same time as he is supporting a family of his own. If the government is handing out money to single mothers, then women do not need men to prove that they are good earners before having sex with them. So men stop trying to do well in school and get good jobs, and instead focus on being popular, exciting and entertaining.

The man in the Daily Mail article is an ex-con and unemployed. He is the worst sort of man for a woman to choose – and yet women are falling all over him. Because the government is making it unnecessary for them to care about whether he can earn a living and act responsibly. The government is saying “we pay the bills, so you can choose men on the basis of sex, drama and to impress your girlfriends with the drama”. Women have decided that there is no way that men ought to be – they certainly should not be respected as the protector and provider and moral/spiritual leader.

Ends and means

I have been struggling lately to understand why women spend so much time thinking about what they want, and complaining about their friends who are getting married, and yet spend so little time acquiring funding, skills and knowledge to achieve what they want. One woman I know who wants to get married recently gave a one-word review of “Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”, which I made her read. Her review was “Barf!”. She has no idea what demands marriage will place on her, and resents the needs of men (and probably resents the needs of children too). However, she is very interested in Mark Driscoll and loves to load up obligations on men. Obligations on men = GOOD! Obligations on women = BARF! That’s how she thinks. It’s the feminist double-standard that Dr. Laura writes about in PCF Husbands. And, of course, if anything thing goes wrong with the intentions of women, they can just blame the man and claim that the failure was unpredictable and not their fault.

I once had a conversation with an unemployed Christian woman who was explaining to me how she had a right to collect welfare from the government in order to have a child out-of-wedlock by choice. She had NO IDEA what fatherlessness would do to a child, and NO IDEA how increased welfare spending caused higher taxes and reduced the number of men who could afford to marry. She was left-wing on most fiscal policies. (But she was also not a feminist and she was chaste, so not totally awful)

Contrast that woman with another Christian woman I know who did a B.S. and M.S. in engineering, worked 10 years, saved all her money, and helped her husband pay off their house, before becoming a stay-at-home mother. She wanted a husband and a home, so she went out and did two degrees in engineering so that she could help her husband pay for the things she wanted – before becoming a stay at home wife and mom. The engineer is vehemently opposed to big government, higher taxes and welfare because her husband’s salary is what is allowing her to be a good wife and mother, away from the stress of work.

Socialism and feminism

Why are women pursuing men like the unemployed ex-con? I actually wrote a post on why women prefer bad men, and why they would prefer not to have to deal with traditional men acting in traditional male roles. It’s less work for them if they just get a check in the mail – they don’t have to be respectful of a husband if a check just comes in the mail. Some women really resent the authority that a man has in the home as the primary earner, and they also resent having to respect men and deal with their other needs for sex, verbal encouragement, etc. They want government to replace men, because men, especially good men, are authoritarian and demanding and judgmental. And the result is skyrocketing rates of single motherhood. The out-of-wedlock birth rate is 40% in the United States, costing us 112 BILLION dollars a year.

Here is another post discussing research on the attitudes of college women to hooking up done by the University of Virginia. Women really are choosing this. No one is making them do it. They are doing it because they want to. The bounds of traditional sexual morality, traditional sex roles and traditional courtship  are not fun. Read the research and see for yourself what they say.

Socialism and Polygamy

This post on Haemet talks about the social costs of polygamy, which is another arrangement that can’t easily be sustained without government support.

Related posts

Videos

Let’s learn economics using videos from Thomas Sowell

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ECM sent me these videos from the Uncommon Knowledge web site. Tom Sowell is the official economist of the Tea Party movement.

Part 1 of 5: (Housing Boom and Bust)

Part 2 of 5: (Quantitative Easing and Tax Cuts)

Part 3 of 5: (Health Care)

Part 4 of 5: (Trade, Trade Deficit, Protectionism, Tariffs)

Part 5 of 5: (The Federal Reserve, Bailouts, Keynes)

The fourth edition of his new book is out! Only $25 or less. (One of my readers bought it for me for Christmas, so please don’t buy me one!)

You can translate youtube videos into MP3 using the “vidtomp3” web site. Or I could make them FOR YOU!

UPDATE: Within 5 minutes somebody asked me to make the MP3s for them. So here you go if you don’t like YouTube.

These are low-quality so they could be smaller.

UPDATE: Commenter Jim says:

Downloads of Sowell’s interview are also available in both audio MP3 and video M4V formats.

News

Is Barack Obama responsible for rising gas prices?

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Here’s an article that takes a look at the effects of his energy policies. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

With gasoline currently above $3 per gallon nationwide and economists expecting that price to rise even further in 2011, America should be getting serious about producing more of its own resources. But instead of focusing on how to bring more relief to American motorists, President Obama has imposed massive new regulations, restrictions, and even threatened higher taxes on American energy, all of which negatively impact domestic production.

What follows is a list of the five most egregious actions on the part of the Obama administration that have contributed to higher gasoline prices and greater dependence on foreign dictators for our energy…

Here’s the one I thought was the most interesting:

Cancelling existing permits: Immediately after taking office in 2009, President Obama’s handpicked Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. The fact that this was one of the administration’s first regulatory decisions meant that American energy companies were immediately concerned about their ability to produce oil and gas in the future, injecting a level of uncertainty into the market that moves the country away from job creation and economic recovery. One year later, the administration canceled 61 more leases, this time in Montana, as part of President Obama’s war on global warming.

And here’s the conclusion:

Why has President Obama led the charge to restrict American energy? The answer is elusive, and it’s anyone’s guess what his administration will do (if anything) to fight for lower gasoline prices. But if past statements from him and his administration are any indication, the U.S. could be stuck (absent major legislative and regulatory changes) with prohibitively high gasoline prices: Then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008 that he doesn’t object to high oil prices as long as they come about gradually, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once famously said he hoped the U.S. would “boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” where prices are currently about $7 per gallon.

Yes, it’s true. People on the left are willing to enact policies that cost consumers more money, reduce the number of jobs for Americans, outsource energy production to other countries, and even pay our enemies to produce energy in ways that are more damaging to the environment than our ways of producing energy. This is the Democrat way. They don’t care about you having cheaper energy prices, they don’t care about creating jobs for Americans, and they don’t care about reducing pollution. If you want to see where this is going, just look at the policies of the socialist Dalton McGuinty in Ontario, Canada.

Why do they do this? Well, people on the secular left are often stuck believing in doomsday predictions about overpopulation and resource exhaustion that were discredited years ago. Having rejected God’s sovereignty over the universe as part of their embrace of moral relativism and rejection of ultimate accountability, they look to big government to reduce the uncertainties and fears of a mindless, random universe.

If no one is in charge, then anything could happen, they think – and they are frightened. Thus, they look to government to coerce people to behave predictably, and also to reduce the total number of people (abortion, DDT bans, purges of dissenters, etc.). And of course fussing about imaginary bogeymen like global warming gives them an inflated sense of self-righteousness and justifies their nanny-state micro-managing of ignorant taxpaying businesses and workers.

These are not good people. These are not competent people.