"Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment."
If the degree benefits your employment chance, you should have done it before you have kids. If the degree does not benefit your employment chance, then why do it at all? Either way, finish it before.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?
No, it's inflicted by a broken society. In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living. This allows both a flexible economic system (entrepreneurship, job-changing, etc.) and family life to coexist: your company going bankrupt does not mean your kid can't attend school or eat. The American solution seems to be that people should have a corporate job for life with the old IBM or Amoco, which provides both ultra-stable employment and benefits (company-provided childcare, parental leave, health insurance, etc.) and only those people are "deserving" of having kids.
No, it's not. The broken society didn't make the woman pregnant and give birth. Also, 'broken' sounds really melodramatic.
"In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living."
Is having and maintaining a Ferrari a basic standard of living? No? Well, that's how expensive kids are, no, they're even more expensive.
That is a very ambitious basic standard you're setting here. Obviously, this is going to cost uninvolved people heaps of money just because everyone thinks they are entitled to make as many children as they want regardless of their ability to support them. It's a huge burden on everyone else's back. The pinnacle of selfishness.
Unlike having a nation full of Ferraris, having a nation where at least a replacement-rate of kids are born is necessary to keep it from aging and eventually dying out. Human reproduction is not a random consumer product, but an integral part of the continuation of human societies. Therefore, society puts in place a social system to ensure that kids can be raised, educated, etc., but does not put in place a system to ensure widespread Ferrari ownership.
I didn't have children until my 40's (admittedly, that's probably kind of too late). Why? Because I wanted to have a stable marital and financial situation in place for them. If you have no husband and no job, you shouldn't be having children just barely out of your teenage years. Children don't happen by "accident".
And you're very right, nowadays people feel that they're entitled to a Ferrari just for being alive. Our society sure has changed in recent decades.
Bah. Watch me get voted down along with you. I don't care. It needs to be said.
Can I guess that you grew up in an environment where you were taught, either by family or schools about birth control? That you had healthy role models about what a stable family looks like? That it was odd where you grew up for people to have children in high school? Or that you were taught how to calculate how much time/money it takes to support a child?
If so, you grew up with enormous privilege. Lots of people are born into situations where none of that is true. Some truly exceptional folks are born without any of that privilege, make what we consider to be mistakes in family planning, before learning any of that, and still strive to make their lives better. I for one would like there to be resources available to help them escape that brutal cycle.
Saying that it is self-inflicted shows a gross myopia about how much of the world lives and implying that the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us can coerce us into doing anything is laughable.
What degrees offered 15 years ago are irrelevant today? Honest question here, as someone who dropped out of college 10 years ago, I've no idea of how academia works in that direction.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?