Raising kids today costs a fortune. Last month, the Department of Agriculture estimated that each American child costs an average of $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18.
Who knew I was so darn rich! Man if I had know that we would have been living the high-life all a long. Fancy vacations, expensive jewelry, dinners out at nice restaurants and running shoes...fur-lined running shoes of course.
Just exactly what are these people spending $204,060 on? Therapy for their kids because both parents are working 60 hours a week? Ritalin? No they must have prescription drug cards. Those yuppie pre-schools for toddlers? Designer summer camps to entertain them? Gold-plated diapers? Soy Milk and organic tofu?
Lets do some more math. $204,060 works out to $11,336 per year over 18 years. Times 11 kids in my abode = $124,696 per year it should be costing me to raise the little darlings. Well that's the problem, I don't make near that much a year.
Even if we bought brand-new baby stuff with each kid (crib, clothes, stroller, car-seat etc...), I don't think I could spend that much,
I swear I think the feds just make up these numbers to frighten people away from having more kids. But that doesn't make sense. They should be encouraging people to breed. More babies = more future taxpayers and voters. Maybe they just need the publicity these types of numbers generate in the press. Got to keep justifying their existence and feed the machine.
And by the way, I was an econ major (granted a lousy one) so don't go preaching on the 'economies of scale' that I get by having so many kids.
I guess to save a few bucks I could kick them out of the house at 16. Does the French Foreign Legion still exist?
What's worse, the desire to have another child opens one up to charges of elitism and status consciousness. In many major U.S. cities and their suburbs -- especially New York, where I live -- having three or more children has now come to seem like an ostentatious display of good fortune, akin to owning a pied-à-terre in Paris. The family of five has become "deluxe."
If having 3 kids makes one elitist and a showoff, just how pretentious does that make us? Worse than Al Gore? I would imagine.
7 comments:
ooh ooh.... i am an elitist and showoff!!!! love it!!!!
perfectly happy with not being able to afford three at the moment...
plus, there is that whole vasectomy thing... ;)
I saw their statistics a few years ago, and unless they have changes, they include a Disney-type family vacation every year. That's how they are hitting $11,000. That mouse costs a lot of money.
You also need to take overlap into consideration. You don't have to pay a different mortgage for each child or another car payment. I wonder how much that changes the figure?
Isn't it funny that the saying used to be "The rich get richer and the poor have babies" and now it is "The rich get richer and have big families and the poor have both parents working their behinds off while someone else raises the one sad child they can almost afford to raise"?
Or you could not worry about it and revel in your conspicuous display of prosperity.
donk: this is a catholic site...please don't use that word!!!
The "V" word is naughty! Catholics have to reproduce. We are a ridiculously good looking people. It's our moral obligation:)
Oh the 'v' word...I thought you didn't like him using the 'h' word (happy), it doesn't fit the Donk at all.
That is a whole lotta $$$$$$$$.
Even when I lived very close to the state of NY, I never thought of myself as a showoff of 5 children. I can imagine that there were people who thought "wow, you guys are good people", but then behind our backs they likely called us "stupid" and completely nuts for having 5 children that would cost us an insane amount of money to raise. It still drives me nuts when people say "good luck with paying for 5 weddings".
You might be wrong about the gov't discouraging babies. Check out this article. Seems in Australia they've decided that having babies takes mothers out of the work force. The near term "drain" on the labor pool and economy outweighs the long term benefit.
Sorry for the interuption, y'all can get back to talking about geldings.
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