- High taxes
- Scarcity of land for private property and agrarian lifestyles
- Poor living conditions
The Wall Street Journal just published the following on the increased cost of child-rearing:
A child born in 2009 will cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or about $222,360, to raise to maturity, up a little less than 1% from 2008, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday in its annual report on the average cost of raising a child. (The department runs the survey to help courts and state governments set child-support guidelines.) Expenses for child care, education and health care rose the most compared with 2008, while the cost of transportation for a child actually fell, the department said. Annual child-rearing expenses for the average middle-income, two-parent family range from $11,650 to $13,530, depending on the age of the child, the department says.Child care accounts for 17% of the total spending, and education for 16% of the total. The cost of housing makes up nearly one-third of the total; this is gauged by the average cost of an additional bedroom. But the tally excludes any spending on kids over age 17, so it doesn't include one of the biggest and fastest-growing single financial outlays many parents make: the cost of sending your child through college. Higher-education costs aren't included, the department says.Families in the Northeast have the highest costs, followed by cities in the West, then cities in the Midwest. Families in rural areas and in Southern cities have the lowest child-rearing costs.For families with many kids, however, there is some good news: The more children you have, the less it costs to raise each one. These economics of scale deliver 22% savings per child for families with three or more children. That is because kids can share a bedroom, hand down clothing and toys to each other, and consume food purchased in bulk quantities, reducing costs. Also, private schools and child-care centers may offer sibling discounts. The data is compiled based on spending by 11,800 two-parent families and 3,350 single parents with at least one child under 18 living at home.
What if we started distributing land instead of money? What if we created tax laws in favor of small business, family farms, and distribution of ownership to employees instead of corporate combinations owned exclusively by big businessmen?
In such a new climate, would we find our work more fulfilling and quit working for a paycheck? Could we start finding fulfillment in our families instead of individual consumption?
Might I propose that God made us to flourish in families, living in gardens, working with our own tools, and not on assembly lines, working with other people's machines, and looking forward to the weekend and our next spending spree.
4 comments:
"What if we started distributing land instead of money? What if we created tax laws in favor of small business, family farms, and distribution of ownership to employees instead of corporate combinations owned exclusively by big businessmen?"
1) We would run out of land, unless the government started seizing it-- because landowners prefer to accumulate, rather than dissipate.
2) There would still be big businesses, because our fallenness makes us people given to greed and pride; only then, goods would cost twice as much or more, and there would actually be fewer of them than there are now.
3) It'll never happen in a capitalistic aristo-plutocracy!
"In such a new climate, would we find our work more fulfilling and quit working for a paycheck? Could we start finding fulfillment in our families instead of individual consumption?"
In short: YES, work would be more fulfilling. So would family life. And most people would therefore have a better work-ethic, yet they wouldn't be work-aholics. BUT: See 1, 2, and 3 above.
We're too comfortable with our lives for that degree of change. People fear change.
Thanks for your comments Ed.
My follow up is how do we make people more uncomfortable with their lives in order to induce change? How do we get rid of a capitalistic aristo-plutocracy?
GK Chesterton said: "Every contract by which small property would pass into the possession of large property should be prohibitively taxed, and similarly the setting up of every small business or every small ownership of land should be advantaged in the same fashion."
Matt, the only way to make people uncomfortable enough to change is to topple their idols. In our society's case, those are the idols of capitalistic greed, aristocratic pride, and plutocratic power.
The toppling of these idols in 21st century America looks like this: higher-- and even severe-- taxation (as Chesterton suggested); substantial election reform; and earnest redistribution of wealth. The problem is, the sum of those looks like the fundamental undermining of our country's identity, and there are enough people whose fourth idol is also patriotic democratism to prevent that from happening.
Furthermore, there's no certainty that these idols wouldn't be replaced by different but equally-bad idols! The only REAL solution would be genuine and wide-spread Gospel revival. Thomas Chalmers's "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection" is helpful in this.
Lesslie Newbigin's discussion of the political realm in Foolishness to the Greeks: the Gospel in Western Culture is also useful in understanding the "lay of the land": Newbigin discusses how our modernist culture creates a dependence on the state, but that bureaucracy appears as tyranny, creating a sense of oppression. Though it was written 25 years ago, I think that perfectly describes the climate today, which is an odd combination of hatred and desire when it comes to government.
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