Baggydave said:
If we did not have kids then there would be nobody to drive your buses, stack your shelves or change your nappies when you are in old age.
This is not just hypothetical in Japan - it's a real crisis. They have the longest living senior citizens in the world and only something like 1.5 children born per couple. However, in the UK I suspect we could probably cut back on a few 'childlessness taxes' and the population would still grow. And young adult immigrants (whose upbringing has been paid for by another country) are a particularly good value way to supplement the labour pool.
So should everyone should pay for kids? Do people without kids really benefit from other people having them? How? (See bottom of post for more on this...)
Jane said:
Ultimately we are put on this earth to procreate-it's a fact of nature. I wasn't crazy about kids in general until I had some of my own and your whole world changes for the better.
I think there's an interesting irony in these statements. I think you'd be pretty hard pressed, Jane, to find someone who had kids in order to further existence of the human species. I reckon it's a pretty safe assumption that the motive for almost everyone (excluding unplanned pregnancies) has kids for the pleasure of having kids. This is a point that's often forgotten in all this talk of equal pay - that the person who takes time off to raise kids gains something non-financial that the childless person doesn't - the pleasure derived from the raising of kids. This is not an trifling benefit. You only have to look at the amount of money that people are willing to pay, and to forego in missed earnings - typically many tens of thousands of pounds - to realise how much people really value this. The US research quoted by Elizabeth25 ignores this aspect:
Women in the workforce are also less likely to work a full-time schedule and are more likely to leave the labor force for longer periods of time than men, further suppressing women's wages. These differing work patterns lead to an even larger earnings gap between men and women - suggesting that working women are penalized for their dual roles as wage earners and those who disproportionately care for home and family.
They ignore the fact that women working part time gain a benefit over their full-time working partners - they get to spend more time with their kids, and crucially that this is a pleasure worth paying (or sacrificing pay) for.
They repeat this point again:
After accounting for so many external factors, it seems that still, at the root of it all, men get an inherent annual bonus just for being men.
You could equally well say that women (in general) get an inherent bonus just for being women - they tend to (on average) spend a lot more time with their kids.
I also wonder whether they are a little biased in their interpretation of some of the other stats:
Men with children appear to get an earnings boost, whereas women lose earnings.
I'm only speculating, but I'm a bit skeptical that the evidence really does show a causal link, not a correlation between earnings and number of children. The way it is written suggests that having children causes men to earn more and women to earn less. Might it not also be possible that the amount you earn influences the number of kids that you have? (Or indeed that both earnings and number of kids are effects of another cause, such as education, geographical origin or location, etc?)
Elizabeth25 also quoted the following result of some research:
Women graduates are paid less from the very beginning of their careers, with men earning ?1,000 more than their college classmates within three years of leaving university, according to a major study published today...these findings suggest that women are paid badly even in fulltime graduate jobs and even before they start to have children, take time out and fall behind in their careers.
Again this seems open to questioning. Is it necessarily the case that the average male graduate should earn the same as the average female graduate? As the links I pointed to in one of my second and third posts in this thread pointed out, women tend to study different subjects to men and these subjects tend to lead to lower paying careers. So have they factored this in? Maybe they have, but it's not clear from the quotes. Succintly put by Baboonery:
...does it say anywhere that women are paid less than men for doing the same job?
Getting back to the topic at the topic at the top of this post, in reply by shzl400's post just above this one, I think there's arguably a difference between paying for other peoples' kids' Child Trust Funds and paying for the NHS and the dole. When you pay National Insurance you get something back - a sort of heath and unemployment insurance. You might not be sick or unemployed right now, but you might be in future. In the case of paying for someone else's child's Trust Fund, do you really get anything back?
Although the tax system is complex, it should still be fair (indeed it probably needs to be complex in order to be fair - although if course what exactly is 'fair' is up for debate).
Oh, and I've always found a good way to find our whether you're worth a raise or not (without the risks involved in the 'just ask' technique) is to get offered another job (one that you'd be willing to take - it has to be one that you'd actually be willing to take) at an equal or higher rate, then ask your current employer to match or better it. It'ss a win-win situation for you, but also not bad for your employer. You can't lose, as you either take the new job or get paid enough more in your current job that you don't want to move. Your employer also gets to find out what other people are willing to pay for you, so then can either happily raise your pay in order to keep you (within what you're worth to them) or let you go and replace you with someone cheaper.
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