If Freakanomics is to be believed then widespread access to abortion means the opposite, less unwanted children and less "hopeless" parents.
Poll: Poll: Prime Minister Theresa May calls General Election on June 8th
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If Freakanomics is to be believed then widespread access to abortion means the opposite, less unwanted children and less "hopeless" parents.
See...where I am we see something that I honestly don't know the name for. Basically because they want to.live a certain lifestyle both parents work. This means the kids spend a lot of time either alone or with grandparents. And one thing I know from experience is grandparents tend to be a bit...lax with discipline.
We have a lot of kids who on paper come from good backgrounds but are absolute little sods because they know no boundaries. Its gotten to the point now where we have nigh on constant police patrols in our area because of none stop low level youth disorder. Also if anything the girls are worse than the boys.
My local neighbourhood officer is a friend from school and he said he's lost count of the number of times he takes a kid home and gets the 'Oh No, my son/daughter wouldn't do that'. Even when he's witnessed it first hand they just will not accept it.
With respect, I said nothing about tactical voting and coalitions. I was talking about a "progressive alliance" which is, in many ways, the opposite of both tactical voting and coalitions. In an alliance you choose for your voters how they should rank the parties and you make your position on coalition before the electorate has spoken. Tactical voting is a poor man's alternative vote; in our woeful FPTP system you have the option of choosing to vote for a less favoured party if you believe they stand more chance of beating a least favoured party. It is a way of expressing an opinion more complex than 'A is best' in a system so defective that it cannot properly express it. A "progressive alliance" (or any other kind of alliance) reduces the expressiveness of your vote, the very opposite of tactical voting. A coalition is recognition that, after a vote, the kind of government a party would like to form is not possible and that compromise must be reached - and it is thus a result of the democratic will of the people - whereas an alliance ignores the possibility of a full government and substitutes in its place a coalition before consulting the people (if it even does that: does anyone doubt the LDs would form coalition with the Tories if the electoral arithmetic produced that result regardless of any "progressive" alliance they'd entered into?).
Not really. His successes were mostly things that were in motion before he joined (e.g "Boris" bikes, the Olympics), while his unique actions were mostly marred by incompetence and vanity as his bizarre vanity projects (the new routemaster, the garden bridge, the cable cars over the Thames) failed to attract promised private money and were bailed out by public money as well as deeply flawed in conception. His office was also plagued by corruption and croneyism.
Criticising the moronic idea of state-enforced birth control not only because of the obvious social and ethical problems, not only because it reeks of totalitarianism, but because of the evident long-term economic pitfalls, isn't the same as suggesting we need a higher birth rate. The perils of a low birth rate, of people having children later, and people living longer, are well documented and understood. The problems we stand to face over the next few decades would only be made worse by reducing the birth rate further.
As for your argument on the living wage; it doesn't hold water. Rises in the NLW are comfortably above inflation, despite the weak pound. This has resulted in real-terms wage growth at the bottom of the market, against largely stagnant wage growth overall. Many naysayers predicted a rise in unemployment. Two years on, this hasn't materialised. Frankly, the idea that increasing wages will see a corresponding increase in the price of goods is laughable; it doesn't stand up to the briefest scrutiny. The cost of goods and services are partly, not solely, based on wages.
On the rest, it doesn't warrant comment as it'll just descend in to the battle of the anecdotes.
I'm not sure that capping child benefit at 2 or 3 children equates to state enforced birth control, no one is preventing it simply incentivising against it. Also if the kids who'd have otherwise been born but weren't as a result of the disincentive wouldn't have been net contributors (in terms of their tax and any useful output from their work) then they weren't going to be much help with respect to an gaining population anyway. Overpopulation is a serious environmental concern and frankly if you're worried about aged population then immigration can be very useful at helping with that, in fact I'd argue that immigration (in particular points based immigration encouraging say tech workers from India etc..) would produce more useful result than keeping in place the current incentives for the sort of person utterly reliant on child benefit and additional social housing in order to raise more kids.
Too many chavs not enough Indians IMO.
Too many chavs not enough Indians IMO.
I'd agree that seems reasonable enough, though it falls foul of what has already been discussed; if you limit child benefit to the first two children, what do you do when someone continues to have kids and cannot afford to feed them? Saying "tough luck" doesn't really work, as it simply results in the kids growing up in poverty, which leads to a downward spiral of well documented issues, easily visible across many US cities.
Ultimately, it's a balancing act. Does the magnitude of the problem justify the pitfalls of any potential action?
Why must Dis86 come up with the solution simply because he's the one to recognise the problem???
Because finding problems is easy? Many problems exist because they have no effective solution. Many problems are the most effective solutions we have to much bigger problems. The government giving people money to help raise their children is a prime example.
Democracy itself is a problem, as referenced in the famous Winston Churchill quote:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Frankly, problems are both easy to find and utterly meaningless. Politics is the debate around solutions.
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There are many solutions but too many people find them unpalatable.
As I originally stated though it's crazy that to drive a car, have a gun heck...even buy alcohol have restrictions yet any idiot can pop out an unlimited number of kids. The thing that requires the most responsibility has the least control.
Soldato
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That's precisely the point: it's a fixed electoral coalition whose purpose is known in advance, which can take best advantage of allies' resources, tactical voting and planning to overpower stiff odds. It gives you a good chance of getting what you want for the most part countrywide in exchange for a sacrifice of party identity and self-interest in some constituencies; the final accountability of the arrangement isn't perfect, but better than a referendum with no fixed manifestos and elected representatives bound to them, for example.
A critique of alliances is by necessity a critique of both of their key components: tactical voting and coalitions to do X. Under FPTP, neither is entirely avoidable, so you either get smart or you get crushed by whatever happens to be the more solid bloc. In our present case UKIP/Tory. While a post-fact coalition always has an element of surprise - the result of coalition talks which may or may not recombine the known manifestos in an expected way. An alliance avoids this Hail Mary mess.
What's regrettable is the fact that we lack any credible recall powers and our votes are thus static - whatever is on offer, they cannot be reallocated after the fact as an extra check on power. Thus you only choose when not if your expressiveness is ultimately restricted by executive action, though people are indeed happier with this trade-off under proportional systems.
Still, faced with a prospect of not even Labour believing they can win, and the alliance effect spontaneously emerging on the ground regardless, I'd take the least worst option of having it above board. This is not a popular opinion. I understand that a decision was reached not to pursue this to counter the 'coalition of chaos' attack; yet this attack is still going to connect, people will still collaborate, and Corbyn remains the problem.
There are various approaches you could take to implement it, it isn't really about punishing anyone but there really is something rather wrong about the cases where some women keep on having kids while expecting the rest of us to pay for them. You could perhaps introduce a three child benefit cap or perhaps cap at two and have some provision for additional benefits for a third child* which are paid only in return for agreeing to long term contraceptives - i.e. injection, implant etc.. Lots of emphasis on contraception, information about morning after pill and other options etc.. for people on low incomes who've had two kids and would otherwise struggle with another.
(*or rather pregnancy as twins or more are a possibility/exception)
Soldato
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Not surprising, bristol is full of dreadlock wearing regressive lefties, I still like bristol mind.
It may be the point, but it's also the flaw. It imagines that politics is reducible to something akin to this line:
Greens - Labour - Lib Dem - Tories - UKIP
And that anyone who favours a party to the left of centre over a party to the right will also favour all parties to the left of that party over all parties to the right. But this is clearly nonsense, and to see why you only have to consider the Lib Dems in the centre of that line. If one voter favours the Lib Dems over the Tories because they liked the coalition but oppose Brexit how does it follow that they'll favour Labour over the Tories? If another voter favours the Lib Dems over Labour because they feel betrayed by Corbyn's damp squib approach to Brexit how does it follow that they'll favour UKIP over Labour? The whole thing assumes an ordering that simply doesn't exist. Even if you're going to accept the excessive oversimplification of a left-right line, people will still prefer the closest candidate. The unity of an anti-Tory "alliance" is a myth; most people simply don't vote that way and the key centrist constituency definitely don't.
Now, to be fair, the idea of a centre ground and thus a "key centrist constituency" is something of a myth but what is undeniably true is that elections are won by winning over voters who will consider voting for either Tory or Labour; these voters are unimpressed by the idea of a coalition against either. In fact, it's very likely that by presenting themselves as indistinguishable from the Greens the Labour party will reduce their vote by a bigger amount than winning Green voters in seats the Greens can't contest can possibly make up for.
The absurd nature of our pathetic excuse for a voting system means that our parties are already broad tent alliances - come on, does anyone really think Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn should really be in the same party? - that are only barely sustainably broad. Pursuing an alliance means pushing these alliances past their breaking points. That might appeal to minority parties like the Greens and Lib Dems but it's hopelessly inappropriate for parties with credible aspirations of power.
Labour are a complete mess. A "progressive alliance" is still making things worse. Labour have literally nothing to gain from this nonsense. Consider Brighton Pavillion - the poster seat for such an alliance - what other seat do the Greens offer for this one which Labour held until the Greens took it in 2010? And where they are still the second party?
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You're still totally reliant on people agreeing to do the "right" thing there. You're hoping people will agree to not have any more children. If they don't, you're back to square one. Do you then help pay for the upbringing of those children? Or do you accept that they'll grow up with a high chance of becoming a problem for society?
It's a bluff.
However the current state of affairs relies entirely on those parents spending that additional money on their kids. I for one know.of several examples where that just doesn't happen.
Infact this discussion started with someone doing just that.
I'm certainly not suggesting he's neglecting his kids but he certainly isn't spending that benefit on them either.
Yep 100's if not 1000's of protestors lined the streets... lol
https://mobile.twitter.com/tristancorkpost/status/859459413027028993
Corruption will always exist. I can 100% guarantee that whatever you do, there will always be **** people on this planet. They will infest every part of society, and come from every economic background. They will always find ways to selfishly play the system for their own benefit.
Tackling them is always a challenge, as the only way to stop them often involves the detriment of bystanders.
Which is ironic given the clampdown this government has had on just that yet they persist with this heavily flawed system!
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