Sunday, January 23, 2011

The Crushing Economic Burden of Family and Children

My grandfather only completed eighth grade and spent his life installing and finishing wooden-strip floors. His wife took in sewing part-time. They had nine kids and lived a middle-class existence.

My father did a little better educationally. He completed eighth grade but not high school, although he later got a GED. My mother also got a GED. My father was a general contractor and my mother was the night admitting clerk in the ER. We had a comfortable middle-class existence.

Wages stopped going up in 1973 and have been flat ever since. Worse, one percent of the population owns 40% of the wealth. These two things were caused 100% by the government interfering in the economy.

It used to be one man could support a family – his wife and a few kids – by himself, and all could live a middle-class existence. These days, both parents have to work, and the children have to be given to a day-care center when they’re barely beyond being babies.

There are a lot of problems with day-care centers. Parents expect the workers to be cheap and perfect. That doesn’t happen, as in a case in Chicago in which a young woman slammed a boy, less than two, onto the ground. He picked up his favorite blanket, crawled into a chair, and died.

Giving children to be raised by strangers is one of the basic tenets of Communism. Specifically, they are to be raised by the State. The destruction of the family and both parents working is also one of the basic planks of Communism.

When you give your kids to be raised by someone else, you no longer have any control over their education. They can be indoctrinated with the exact opposite of what you want them taught.

It’s got to the point the only way you can have control over how you want your kids raised is to home school them. And if you don’t want them in a daycare at less than two years old, and instead want one parent home with them, the only way to do that is to simplify your standard of living.

This simplifying essentially means living in a cheap trailer without cable or a big-screen TV. Living in a nice middle-class house on the income of one spouse and working 40 hours a week? Get a time machine.

A lot of families have opted for simplifying their lives, rather than give their children to be raised by strangers from the age to 1 ½ to 17. With college, try to 21, at the minimum.

If the government hadn’t so severely damaged their economy by interfering in it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average salary was $70,000 a year.

Because of this crushing burden, families are no longer having children. The U.S. is no longer at replacement level – witness my grandparents easily affording nine children and my parents able to have only two. And now, parents aren’t having two children – they’re having one. Such is the crushing, oppressive burden of the Black Thing that our government has become.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

The trailer and the home schooling aren't so bad, actually. Ours is in the middle of 4 acres of mountain forest and home schooling is sometimes climbing trees.

You're entirely right about two income households becoming the nearly necessary norm, of course. There's a woman whose name escapes me who's made a career detailing stats, she claims that this idea that two incomes is all about a fancier lifestyle isn't supported by reality -- people aren't really living in houses that are that much bigger or better, etc. You really need two incomes to support a lifestyle much like our grandparents'. She also points out the hazard of the two income household, that in the past if the husband lost his job and couldn't find another, the family could be kept afloat if the wife found a job. Now, if one of the two loses his or her job, the family is in trouble, there's no safety net.

Tom Brown said...

Well said and succinctly too.Kudos, Bob! Brownie