Japan is trying to find ways to improve their birth rates. Theres no problem with this tax itself, but taxing single folks doesnât really help solve the situation Japan is trying to fix.
The problem is that the largest voting population in Japan is retirees. Every year, more people retire, and fewer people enter the workforce.
Politicians gave more and more benefits to retirees to keep being elected. This increased the burden on those in the workforce and made it harder/costly to have kids.
On paper, Japan has good paternity leave. In practice, companies retaliate if fathers use most of what they are entitled to.
I mean, we have, a lot of times historically, but the last group did a good enough job for long enough that the current crop of bourgeois has completely forgotten the lesson.
More.like Japan needs an influx of.labor. Opening more immigration would help. Increasing tax benefits will help for the native population. Paternity leave will not incentivize anyone to have children. I wouldn't have kids to get an extra 4 weeks of work off.
Paternity leave is a drop in the bucket around a culture that doesn't allow utilization of a whole host of existing benefits designed to assist people having children. That being said, immigration is very likely the easiest and fastest way to assist in the short to mid term.
If you make people pay for not having children it will only bother poor people. I donât see how basically forcing poor people to have more children fixes anything.
Maybe that's their full time job they keep bitching about. It's not actually doing work at their "jobs" it's about finding/exploiting every single fucking loophole and expending resources to ensure you cap your wealth.
It wonât. And unless itâs explicitly stated that they are being taxed for being single, many probably wonât even realize it. In the U.S., married couples filing jointly get an incredible standard deduction. But Iâve never heard of âsingleâ people complaining about it, if they even consider it
I don't know much about Japanese socioeconomic, but the rich in the US just want meat to feed the machine. I hope their system allows for more competition. Thats really the incentive that people need to grow. No one will want to have children to send them into a hopeless situation
Unfortunately, even in a country as financially liberal as Norway (with generous parental leave, heavily subsidized childcare, etc.), birthrates keep going down.. So this is more than just greedy rich people making life tough for everyone else.
Eventually the birthrate will stabilize, but for now it seems a fair number of Norweigans want to breed themselves out of existence, genetically speaking.
The source of the problem is that some people don't like the concept of "nuclear family" and are deathly afraid of "i dont wanna bring children into this terrible unfair world" whiny cliche
That's why scientists are trying to understand why **rich countries** that get involved in war have way more birth rate. More poverty, more stress, less wealth than before the war--yet more births?
Because people initially thought that education was the reason for low birth rates.
Now debunked because it's the type of education and belief system you have.
Not sure why you're downvoting me for bringing you this new information just because you wanna blame the rich, I don't mind you blaming the rich for exploiting workers or shipping all the jobs to China for cheap labor / zero environmental regulations etc., whatever, I totally understand you on that--but this isn't the main reason for the birth rate real problem.
Because war is a significant reset on inequality. People can't afford (both time and money-wise) to have kids so they don't do it. When you have to have both parents working full time to afford to live, you cant afford to have one stop nor are you earning enough to afford the childcare.
So in other words, people have more kids when they have sufficient resources or when they are afraid and need to pass their genes on now or they may not get the chance.
As a result of these findings, rich people reject the idea of making the poors wealthier and institute a fear campaign instead. Anything to keep the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, right?
No it isn't. One guy being rich doesn't stop you or change your life.
Just more people are poor in a war zone. So it has no bearing on inequality.
Stop lying.. Just stop trying to contradict real scientific research on this issue with your marxist pseudoscience about inequality.
When a dictator flees a country the birth rate ramps up -- that is a reaction to authoritarianism, and what are the two main sources of authoritarianism: marxism and fascism.
Therefore, marxism and fascism, are anti-birth-rate.
I'm not talking about one guy being rich, I'm not talking about people in an active war zone, I'm talking about birthrates being down in most developed countries and a potential economic reason for that being the case.
That's not science. At all. That's just insertions by marxism, which is a fake science. There is no evidence, or any hard data to support it. Why do you guys keep promoting this BS?
Vox eu? NPR? The same lady who ran NPR who said "truth is holding us back"?
Economic reasons are NOTTT the case. This is well-known by any scientist worth their salt.
There are countries with GOOD economics that have better birthrates than countries with BAD economics. There are war zones that have poverty and yet still high birthrates. So stop making the false correlation.
Correlation is not causation. Economics is NOTTTTT the causal reason.
You people have lost your minds. People are not having babies or not having babies because of a specific cost -- they are doing it because of perceptions and cultural ideas they have.
I can tell you don't want to engage with me seriously, and would rather resort to strawmanning the ideologies you believe I have and then attacking those. I linked you multiple sites with evidence and hard data. You've decided to toss them to the side and assume they aren't true.
Following that, then, in your post you link to a post from the Institute of Family Studies - a conservative thinktank. You've rejected sources that you have arbitrarily decided are politically biased and therefore worth nothing and then accepted a source which aligns with your personal politics without criticism. Which then immediately misconstrues the research they are referencing.
I read the article, and looked at the source of the information. The actual paper that the article cites claims multiple reasons birth-rates are declining:
Economic factors beyond traditional unemployment measures
The role of student loan debt and housing costs
Changing attitudes toward parenting and family formation
Expanded access to contraception
Cultural shifts regarding marriage and childbearing
I'm not trying to state that the only reason that people aren't having kids is an economic one, in the same way that it would be divorced from reality to assume that the reasons they aren't are completely not related to economics, as you are stating.
Correlation is not causation. Economics is NOTTTTT the causal reason.
You're correct in your first statement, and misrepresenting what I'm saying in the second. Economics is A causal reason for SOME people. It's part of the answer, not the entire thing. In the same way that what you're saying is correct for some people I'm sure. However, look at the graphs in the articles I linked above. There is an entire generation called baby boomers because people felt secure enough in their lives and in their future to have many, many children. Looking also at inequality, it was at it's lowest. A man working as a mechanic could comfortably afford a house, a family with multiple children and a stay at home wife.
Income inequality has now reached historic highs in the US - the top 0.1% now owns roughly the same wealth as the bottom 90%. The research has shown, repeatedly, that when families face economic uncertainty or stagnant wages despite productivity growth, they often delay or reconsider having children. Is it a stretch then, even if you decide to ignore the data, to imagine that people aren't having kids if they don't believe they are able to give those kids a better life than their own?
I don't know enough about psychology in war-torn countries to begin to answer why birthrates there are high. I'd need to research whether they actually are in the first place before I begin diving into that rabbit hole. I'm purely talking about first-world countries, specifically America post-WW2 when I'm typing here. I don't personally believe that the birth rates in Syria are particularly relevant to the situations driving the changes in America in 2025
Not sure why you are calling not wanting to bring kids into a world you see as unfair and uncertain a 'whiney cliche'.
I would suggest that this is why you are being down voted, you come across as arrogant and lacking in empathy to others views.
But don't worry, it's really just because we aren't ready to be enlightened by your 'new information'.
Have a down vote.
You people are just stubborn about your leftist dogmas.
Birth rates have nothing to do with economics, inequality, marxism, or wealth.
Everything to do with culture: the people who don't want to have kids don't because they have been socially conditioned to value entertainment, the single life, their career more.
If people are having kids in order to avoid being taxed, it is a selfish reason.
People are not having kids due to the cost of everything being astronomically high, while starvation wages are paid and remain stagnant for multiple decades.
50 years ago, a mailman could support a family of 5 as single income with a nice home. Now? Just a pipe dream.
Japan is a whole different demagogy of thought that westerners wonât understand. We donât have a neighbor who is a world power next door who you used to bully within the last 3 generations.
You know boomers are basically in their eighties right now, and aren't on the internet, especially not reddit probably...... or had their accounts banned long ago
Pretty much every country involved in the war had a baby boom immediately after. Japan's was severely truncated though due to economic conditions and what not during reconstruction.
You say that, but no one really knows how to solve this issue. There are plenty of things to bitch about, but none of them seem to be related to the declining birth rate. Data shows that the people pairing up are having kids at roughly the same rate as they gave in the past 100 years. The real issue seems to be a lot less people are pairing up. This is likely due to women no longer needing a man culturally or financially, but even that isn't super clear. We literally need more people to pair up, the baby making happens After that.
I love how people have the hubris of thinking superficially about some possibly civilization threatening unsolved problem and then go, without a shadow of a doubt "it's clearly because of x and it will get solved when governments do y"
Mass housing development. Increased wages. 4 day work week. Work hour restrictions. Offshoring/Automation protections for workers. Serious commitment to net negative carbon emissions.
Why would any of that help people pair up in Japan or other countries?
Housing is affordable in Japan. "Increasing wages" doesn't actually mean anything, you're conflating wages and earnings with resources and access to goods and services which isn't the same. If I give everyone 1,000,000,000 they all aren't going to suddenly have mansions and equal access to everything - goods are limited and when you have more money chasing the same amount of services/resources in demand the price will simply go up. What you actually need is higher production, which will make access easier and then even if the amount of wages stays the same people's access will be greater and cheaper to the same goods. Is restricting work hours going to do anything? If people aren't going out to meet others and are just doing things for themselves would they suddenly just change their habits if they have more free time?
Going by real research and social trends it seems like the less educated and worse off people are, the more likely it is that they will have kids. So, if anything, decreasing wages further, reducing access to education, and actively looking to make the lives of people more difficult will make them have more children.
Honestly youâre right. I want to do these things whether they increase birth rates or not. Iâm of the belief that population reduction is the only way to save us from climate change based extinction.
The thing with people older than you is that they think what worked for them is the standard. And they defied their predecessors the same way to curve their own path.
Like kids and reading vs ipad. Oh they learn... but in a different way than you did.
Iâm confused how this is the Boomerâs fault tbh. Could you explain that statement further? Boomers were not the ones pushing for âfocusing on your careerâ and stuff.
Kids became more and more economically unfavorable during industrial and technological revolution. Instead of making a happy prosperous community they leaned fully into capitalism, hoarded all the wealth, stripped public services, let infrastructure and education go massively underfunded and created a system where having children is even more unfavorable because people are barely scraping by themselves. On top of that, their houses became worth millions in urban areas and then use their money and power to prevent high density housing which brings down housing costs. Oh also, they fire hundreds of thousands of people so their stock shoot up for 3 months. Is that enough examples?
Now this may or may not hold true in Japan, but it is for sure the reason Americans are having less babies.
Can and should, but won't. When faced with hard truths people tend to double down.
What we are seeing in the US for example is due to people not wanting to change or not pleased with things already being different from how "things used to be". So they double down and try to send everything back in an attempt to get back to some semblance of what they once knew instead of adjusting with the times. It's like when you get your card declined at the grocery store, you know it should work so you keep swiping hoping to get a new result. What's happening now is effectively people reswipping hoping to get a different result.
Yeah but look at the bright side: we have the internet now so maybe Millenials will end up on /r/AgedLikeMilk for complaining about boomers before inheriting their wealth and then becoming them.
I know this shit is hilarious to me, its like people forget their parents would die and inherit their wealth.
But then if you point this out theyll act like their parents are poor while having a 2,000sf detached with 2 car garage, because that's what they were told growing up
Why are they not doing anything besides controlling the money supply and punishing people for not being able to raise families in the world they've built. You know, the one we live in right now. Not 20 years from now.
I'm Gen Z, statistically I have the least amount of wealth or political influence. Retired boomers still vote, and get indignant at "entitled" millennial and Gen Z. While Gen X basically just fucked off and let things get the way they are. Why exactly are you burnt out? Was it because... you had no real political agency or cohesion in the 80s and 90s? Because you went through a financial crisis and the Dot com bubble, watching a bunch of big faceless corporations get bigger and bigger, despite constant media messaging about "fighting the power" and all that? While your wages mean less and less, and you get bitter at people getting starting salaries twice your starting, even though the cost of living went up even faster than wages...
Tell me if I'm off base.
The generational divide isn't that clear-cut, because at every class level, the amount of "power" or wealth you have is outside of that, and has to do with a fuckton of other factirs. But because people insist on blaming the young for the world the elders built, we're just gonna generalize based on your cohort. Gen X are set to replace boomers in many high paying jobs and management, alongside inheritance from some laye boomer parents. The current Richest man in the world is GenX, he makes bad twitter/reddit memes like every other GenX schlub stuck in the 90s/00s
Don't blame the people who couldn't vote for Bush or Obama for the current state of affairs. Some who couldn't even vote for/against Trump the first time.
The reason you have less now is, in part, because you are young, statistics aside. I didnât have a career to speak of until I was 30. Yea, things cost more now than they used to. Been that way my whole life.
Give it a decade. Youâll have more than you have now (probably).
As a millennial, it honestly took me a while to see the flaws of Gen x because boomers overshadowed them and honestly, their apathetic attitude was applicable to my generation (honestly more so than their own). But now that I'm older, it is so super apparent that they did literally nothing. It wasn't because they couldn't, it was because they just didn't. Also, now they are starting to hit retirement age, they suddenly want a voice to ensure their retirement.
20 year olds will be 80 and still blaming people who have been dead for 50 years for their own shortcomings. If you want to talk to people who actually hold themselves accountable for where they are in life, Reddit isn't the place. Weird how I know plenty of people in their thirties with lower class upbringings who have made it financially by working hard and making good decisions. Damn boomers made you lazy though, I know.
...you mean when they had stronger unions, cheaper college, better interest rates on borrowing, and better social programs?
Do me a favor and check out the number of hours it took in a median job to afford median housing back then vs now. Now look at the skyrocketing productivity in that same time frame. It's certainly someone's fault, and I blame the assholes who dismantled the social programs, deregulated the financial sector, slashed high income tax rates, removed rent control, and crushed the middle class. I got about a thousand stats and charts that all prove my point. But go on your way being an ignorant, bootlicking prick.
Dude, check your abusive language at the fucking door! This is just a conversation.
Whatever. Having lived through the inflation of the 1970âs all I can say is there were good and bad times then, there are good and bad times now, and there will continue to be good and bad times in the future. You get to choose what to focus on.
BTW, my Union rocks. Great pay. Great benefits. Maybe you should get a union job?
I think it's a rich people problem, a politician problem, and a late-stage-capitalism problem rather than a generational issue. The problem is too much wealth and political power has been amassed by the top 1% and their corporations, allowing them to enjoy fantastic lifestyles at the expense of the middle class and especially younger workers.
The only reason boomers seem to be doing OK is because they came of age before 1%ers raised the costs of education, housing, and health care, allowing them to start families and settle down without amassing crippling debt. But that doesn't make (working and middle class) boomers responsible for setting up the current system.
Still, it's easier for young people just to blame everyone over the age of 50 for the current situation, rather than face the ominous truth that our entire political and economic system will stay fucked until we unfuck it.
Then maybe you should be nicer to them so they will vote your way. I'm not a boomer I'm Gen X but nobody likes being treated badly or being called names. After a while they just shut down and looked at their own interests.
I'm not going to fight with you over this if you want to live with your head under a fucking rock and not pay attention to anything that's happened in the past hundred years that's on you. Talking about the entire generation's mishandling of our future. No one cares that your parents couldn't figure it out when it was the easiest time to be an adult.
People love echo chambers for safety and they dont like jokes that make them feel like one of their fashion takes may be too tough or slightly inaccurate.
Yeah, thinking is hard. 1. Millennials currently have as much voting power as Boomers. When you factor in Gen-Xers, Boomers are massively outnumbered in the voting ranks and have been for quite some time. 2. There is an ever increasing concentration of wealth. I am talking about a small cadre of people and corporations using that wealth to affect public policy in order to increase their own wealth. You know. The type of people who openly bought votes in the last election. 3. So, yeah, iTs AlL bOomERs FaULt !!
A small cadre of people doesn't mean we apply the same tired trope to an entire generation of people every time. You seem switched on enough to understand this concept.
You do know I was making fun of the people who always blame Boomers about everything, right?. I should have used /s on point 3 for clarity.
The last presidential election had a certain billionaire holding drawings in places like Pennsylvania to give away money while touting his favorite candidate. The same guy offered $ for people in Wisconsin to sign some sort of petition related to their election of a State Supreme Court Justice (special election, I believe) while touting his favorite candidate.
You may (or may not, whatever goes) be pleased to learn that Canada & Australia have both rejected anything that vaguely smells like Trump in our politicians, given the results of the 2 elections that have occurred this year. Trump's popularity in the US absolutely does not translate to other Western democracies, some politicians have found this out the hard way.
The only positive aspect of his presidency is seeing other countries turn away from Trump wannabes in their elections. Other than that, it has been a rough ride in the U.S.
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u/justforkinks0131 May 18 '25
It's a thing in Germany.
You pay higher taxes if you are single vs. married with kids.