what people freaking out about birth rate decline sound like
Right now, raising a child in the U.S. costs an average of $300,000 from birth to age 18, excluding higher education. That is roughly equivalent to the cost of a brand new 27-foot boat. Of course, raising a child requires much more labor than maintaining a boat.
Personally, I think raising a child is perhaps more fulfilling than owning a boat, but to each their own. My point is that you never hear people going around demanding strangers to buy more boats. Yet, there are always people screeching about young people not having enough children. This behavior is so common that we sometimes forget how unhinged it is to ask others to spend $300,000 and 18 years on something they may or may not want.
I understand that these screechers lack the imaginative skill to put themselves in other people's shoes, an unfortunate malady among the old, the loud, and the powerful. But you see, this is all pretty simple if we boil everything down to economics.
- Why don't young people buy boats anymore?
They can't afford them, duh.
- We used to force teenage girls to take on massive debt to buy boats.
We don't do it here anymore. Also, that was fucking barbaric.
- If young people stop buying boat, then we won't have tax revenue from boat sales.
Find tax revenue elsewhere?
- I won't be able to ride in people's boats anymore if there are so few boats around.
It's incredibly entitled of you to ask people to buy boats just so you can take rides.
- Boatless young people are selfish.
Listen to yourself. You are the selfish one here.
Also, used foreign boats are cheaper and work perfectly well. If you want your boat rides so badly, why are you against importing foreign boats?
- Because foreign boats are the wrong colors.
That's too bad then. No boat rides for you.
- My religion dictates that everybody should have boats.
And you wonder why your religion is in decline.
- By acquiring boats, we pass our boat owning culture down.
Sounds like a Ponzi scheme that serves no purpose other than perpetuating itself.
- Educated women don't want as many boats as uneducated women.
Yeah, you see. Education makes people do sensible things. It makes people stop doing dumb things, like buying multiple boats when doing so would push them into poverty.
- People used to keep boats despite being poor.
Look, if a boat costs $300,000, buying one only makes sense if it actually makes your life better. People stopped buying boats because they didn't think it was good for themselves or the boats.
- It used to be a lot cheaper to maintain a boat. We took our boats out even if they were in bad shape; boats can take a beating. A lot of people neglected maintenance, too.
That's probably why so many boats sailed away on their own. The owners never saw these boats again.
- If nobody buys boats anymore. There will be no boats in the future.
Plenty of people are still buying boats once they save up for them. Chill.
If you really want more people to buy boats, just make it cheaper to buy and own boats.
- Practicality is not my concern. Young people need to buy boats because I want them to.
With a society full of adults like this, who needs children?