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Notes -
Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.
Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not? The payment is certainly not ideal, perhaps an argument could be made for support working parents as well. But I think this is at least on the right track. We hear people complain about the cost of raising children all the time, (though I suspect this isnt a genuine complaint for most - many who are saying this probably wouldn't have children even if the cost were $0) but I think this may encourage the few who do actually think like this to go through and continue with more.
My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.
I would have been against this 5 years ago or super against it outside of that time frame. Here’s my thoughts:
American fiscal capacity is amazing now. It really feels like we can run an economy with only 10-15% of the population working and everyone else on benefits or make-work programs. With half of our smartest people playing zero-sum games like trading or market making on prediction markets. It would be nice to get back to 80% of people working but I don’t know how. For all the things we subsidize I think subsidize children is the best.
I don’t like it with current demographics. If we deport more I like it more. 50% of blacks are on government programs or government jobs (basically fake). I am fine with sharing with them now because we are rich enough but seems like we have migrant communities that will max abuse it.
Way better than unlimited disability for benefits. If we are going to do UBI it should be for everyone.
Decent chance the amount of people who need to work falls to <5% of the population by 2040 so something needs to happen. This actually isn’t rare event in human history. At one point 90% did agriculture so it’s not impossible we basically figure out how to make everything without working. The rest of the economy will be tastemakers. Weirdly architect was a terrible career for a while but the jobs of the future will be the tastemaker - someone who can make a neighborhood look nice.
Somehow I think rich and poor people will still exists even with unlimited material wealth. Baltimore or Haiti will still be a ghetto while Greenwich and Palm Beach will not be. It’s just the poor areas will have a lot of stuff but lack all the other things that make a community great. Being high IQ, Conscientious, honest, fun to be around, good looking etc will still matter. The Southside of Chicago will likely still be shooting each other even when unlimited money exists.
When was Architect ever a terrible career? There definitely have been periods of oversupply versus demand and/or people learning that their dreams of being Frank Lloyd Wright that drove them through University aren't going to happen and please boxtick the generic townhouses. But that goes for the vast majority of creative jobs, and even other 'high agency' ones where it turns out the Orchestra of whatever requires a lot more Triangle players than it does Virtuoso Soloists.
I would have loved to be a boxticker architect. Sadly, when I was looking at universities, they all wanted the next Frank Lloyd Wright. I walked into the admissions office, excellent SATs in hand, and before the topic came up was told, "oh, don't worry if your SATs are bad, we only really care about your portfolio!"
To which I (whose art courses had ended only slightly past stick figures) effectively responded, "Portfoli-what?"
It's a general issue with university admissions, I think. No university department wants to be known as reliable producers of pretty-good-quality employees, they want to be known as the people who first spotted and nurtured a genius.
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