I get food stamps, and I’m not ashamed — I’m angry

[RavenSky]

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yeah, SSDI isn't enough for most people. I simply brought it up as a measure of how many would become disabled.



One of the biggest causes of poverty is having kids too young. Once you've made that mistake there usually isn't much of a way out.

Few people would think that starting your family when you are in your 30's is 'too young.' My friends were all in their mid to late 30's when they lost their husbands. Neither had a child before age 30. All (husbands and wives) had finished college and were in professional careers. For women, starting a family much later than their 30's is not a good option.

You're mixing up cases.

I'm not saying they started their families too early, I'm saying the woman in the OP started her family too early. Your friends error was a lack of life insurance.

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...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

 

[laughing dog]

Yes, yes, by now we all must be well aware that you can beat any six-year-old on the planet at "I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you." You claimed that paying somebody can cause them economic or physical pain, but you offered not the slightest hint at a physical mechanism by which the purported cause might bring about the purported effect; so I was sarcastically commenting on that.

With that response I am wondering if your irony is intended or unintended. I didn't think I needed to metaphorically chew your food for you. I apologize. Obviously, paying someone can cause them economic pain if the payment does not fully compensate them for their efforts and/or what they gave up in order to do the work. And that pain can become physical pain.

You seriously couldn't follow that? You made a claim that one thing may cause another. So I'm pointing out the logical criterion for causality, and I'm challenging you to explain how your alleged case of causality satisfies that criterion. If I pay somebody $14 and he experiences pain, am I supposed to just take your word for it that my act caused his pain?

I would expect you to take his word for it. Or I suppose you could learn to read minds. Furthermore, you are using a double standard, you expect me to accept your word that a measurement of harm must be made in comparison to doing nothing.

Tell it to a six-year-old. If you want to say something worth being read by an adult, explain what the bullet to the head has to do with anything. Explain how your response in

A person is better off if you pay him $15 than if you pay him $0; therefore it isn't hurting him.

By that reasoning, a person is better off if you pay him nothing rather than paying him with a bullet to the head, therefore being paid $0 isn't hurting him.

qualifies as "By that reasoning". The criterion I exhibited is to compare something with doing nothing. When the criterion you use is to compare something with shooting someone in the head, you're applying different reasoning.

No, I am not using different reasoning. In both cases, there is a comparison with an alternative outcome. We simply disagree on that standard for the comparison.

People volunteer to work for $0 all the time. I cleaned out my invalid father-in-law's rain gutters. He didn't offer to pay me; I didn't ask him to. By what stretch of the imagination do you figure he hurt me?

If he didn't offer to pay you, then there were no wages. But what stretch of imagination is your example relevant? If you wish to have an adult discussion, at least attempt to use basic reasoning.

 

[Bomb#20]

I can't imagine operating a McDonalds all by myself at all and would need no fewer than n employees to meet local demand for burgers.

But you don't have to meet local demand for burgers. If you fail to produce enough to meet local demand some of your potential customers will eat at Wimpy.

The demand is determined by burger price offset against local wage levels, the going rate for employees is determined by the labour market, and the marginal value of the last employee I need is an irrelevant abstraction.

Well, it's an irrelevant abstraction if you aren't trying to maximize your profit.

You paid me less than $15. My eyelid hurts. Therefore you caused me physical pain. Is that your reasoning?

Oh come off it!

More like : I'm paid so little I need two jobs, don't get home in time to help my kid with her homework and am tired and irritable in what little time I have with her mom/dad. You're not harming me so much as the rules we're playing by are.

So, "Oh come off it! You're right."?

I said people should be allowed to hire other people for less than $15 because hiring people for $14 doesn't hurt them; that's not a claim that every rule in western civilization doesn't hurt them. By all means, identify rules that hurt people and let's talk about repealing them. We certainly have some rules in the U.S. that hurt people, such as the rule that we have to pay taxes to subsidize high-fructose corn syrup. But I can't see how you and another guy both hiring me for $9 apiece, which you do because I'm willing to do two jobs, which I need because nobody's income will go up $15 as a result of hiring me so nobody has a reason to hire me for $15, could plausibly be the cause of nobody's income going up $15 as a result of hiring me. The underlying reason for my tiredness/irritability/homework problem is my not knowing how to make other people's income go up $15. The legality of hiring me for $9 didn't make me not know that. Banning people from hiring me for less than $15 won't fix that. Since I can't increase anybody's income $15, all it will do is make sure that anybody who hires me would lose money on the deal. So they won't hire me. That would be a rule we could play by that would hurt me.

Other economies play by different rules to mutual benefit.

No doubt. By all means, identify some rules from another economy that would be mutually beneficial for us to adopt and let's talk about passing them.

Your preferring advantage over me is harm by your definition.

Sorry, I'm not following. I prefer mutual advantage. When one person hires another it makes them both better off.

Let's say the market rate for some work you know how to do is $12. That happens because at the current level of production of the good in question, adding a worker to a typical factory will increase production enough to increase income by $12. But one employer calculates that at her factory income will increase $13 -- she's operating at too small a scale so the returns on adding employees have not yet diminished to $12 for her, as they have for her competitors. So she offers you a $12/hour job. Dissatisfied with your current $9/hour job, you take her up on the deal. Your income goes up $3; hers goes up 1$. Your current employer goes off and hires an unemployed person who knows how to do your old $9 job but doesn't know how to do your new $12 job, which means he's less likely to quit his new $9 job than you were. Win-win-win-win.

So what is this advantage your new employer has over you, that she prefers, that you are being harmed by her preference for?

 

[RavenSky]

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Of course you do, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Just curious, is sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options suddenly magically available after a woman has one child?

 

[GenesisNemesis]

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Of course you do, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Just curious, is sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options suddenly magically available after a woman has one child?

There's also the cultural issue of being pressured to have children. We don't know if this person had kids simply because they wanted kids, or if they were pressured to do so in some way.

 

[arkirk]

I understand that. The problem is to find the balance between taking care of those children and not incentivising people to have children they can't afford.

And what if there is no balance, only a choice? Your statement sounds well reasoned, logical, even compassionate, but what if it cannot be done? The "not incentivising people to have children they can't afford" part always means cutting money to the "taking care of those children."

Not to mention, no one ever describes how to determine what "incentivising people to have children they can't afford" and how that squares with the rights of people to do what they will with their own bodies. How do you prove that a person having a baby was "incentivised" to do so and not because she simply wishes to be a mother? Do we pass laws that limit people's reproductive rights to meeting a financial means test? And what do we do if people break those laws?

And what about the children, here and living in the mean time?

I lived my whole 72 years so far without making anybody have a baby. I have looked at this wobbly social structure we call the United States and frankly do not find it a fit place into which to insert a young human and expect him/her to do well into the future. Our governmental structure is susceptible to domination by rich people's kids taking over and overriding the interests of 99% of the people in our country. I doesn't look like a likely place to put one of your own offspring and expect them to thrive. Our information distribution system is corrupted by propagandists who call themselves "marketers." These is little love either won or lost in our culture. It appears to be stuck in adolescence. So let us talk about children. What is wrong with an outfit like Planned Parenthood helping people realize their aims (from raising a family to perhaps not raising a family). I support their concept of fairness. If you do not have a rosy picture of humanity's future on this planet, you should have a right to not make babies....PERIOD...WHETHER IT BE BY CONTRACEPTION OR ABORTION.

One of the areas we seem incapable of dealing with is the physical reality of the world we have built. We have no way of accurately totalizing our cumulative effects on the environment that isn't challenged by some dingleberry get-rich-quick alleged genius business man looking to take just one more scrape at the bottom of the barrel for himself.

The idea of incentives is heavily colored by the perceptions and the ability of many to perceive the actual state of our environment. We know from the German experience in the 1930's that austerity visited on the least of us can be a powerful tool of maniacal tyrants to seize power and wander into the land of crimes against humanity. Just like family planning, we need societal planning and a human basis for those plans. Nothing like that is in place, though we know what it would look like. Our people just feel it is impossible. Those are all reasons for not having kids and instead working on the disparity and the environmental degradation of our lands, atmosphere, and waters.

 

[Derec]

I did not say that it gets you rich, only that it is financially beneficial.

Was it you that posted the picture of the sweet hammock on the beach?

Yeah, because only rich people own hammocks.
But that picture was actually a reference to German expression of "soziale Hängematte" (social hammock) vs. "soziales Sicherheitsnetz" (social safety net). The latter is in Germany often criticized as overly generous and comfortable by using the former expression.

 

[Derec]

Even with the generous assumption that your numbers are reasonably accurate,

Those assumptions are accurate. I based them on actual 2015 tax info.

in order for you to provide evidence that such women have a net benefit from their large progeny, you need to supply evidence that cash flow received for the progeny exceeds the cash flow out for the progeny. You have not done anything remotely close to that.

Expenses are highly variable though. And children have non-monetary benefits as well, which is why it is the parents, not the taxpayers, who should shoulder most of the financial burden.

$25K gross is not much to support 3 people (one adult and two children) in the USA in most places.

$25k net, from $20k gross. I.e. -25% effective tax rate. Pretty sweet, isn't it?

All you have done is seflishly simper about your imagined tax burden and their imagined windfall.

Neither my tax burden nor their windfall are imagined.

It is obvious you have no fucking clue about the effort and expense it takes to raise a child (or children).

I know what it costs me every time I file a tax return, thank you very much.

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Daycare alone will cost about $200/week, and from my experience the daycare facility will charge you for a full week regardless of how many days your child is there. That adds up to over $10,000/yr.

And daycare is mandatory, like car insurance? Obviously it is not. And besides, if you choose to have a child, you should take care of it. Not unload the burden onto taxpayers or your employer by demanding they pay you $15 for flipping burgers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Of course you do, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Just curious, is sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options suddenly magically available after a woman has one child?

After she's had one oops I would expect her to try to find out how to avoid another.

- - - Updated - - -

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Of course you do, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Just curious, is sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options suddenly magically available after a woman has one child?

There's also the cultural issue of being pressured to have children. We don't know if this person had kids simply because they wanted kids, or if they were pressured to do so in some way.

Who pressures unmarried women into having kids?

 

[laughing dog]

Expenses are highly variable though. And children have non-monetary benefits as well, which is why it is the parents, not the taxpayers, who should shoulder most of the financial burden.

In otherwords, you have not shown there are net financial benefits accruing to these women.

$25k net, from $20k gross. I.e. -25% effective tax rate. Pretty sweet, isn't it?

Totally irrelevant, and misleading since it ignores the effect of payroll taxes. The official poverty threshold is $20,090 for a household of 3 and $24,250 for a household of 4, so the alleged $25K is not really "pretty sweet".

All you have done is seflishly simper about your imagined tax burden and their imagined windfall.

I know what it costs me every time I file a tax return, thank you very much.

Assuming you have a clue what portion of your income taxes go to income support, that tells you nothing about the actual cost and effort to raise a child.

 

[RavenSky]

...Her main problem lies elsewhere, though. Note: She's always worked shit jobs. She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Of course you do, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you.

Just curious, is sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options suddenly magically available after a woman has one child?

After she's had one oops I would expect her to try to find out how to avoid another.

Of course you would, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you. But you have failed to actually address the issue. Where is this sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options going to come from when Republicans are going out of their way to make sure she doesn't have access to any of it?

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Who pressures unmarried women into having kids?

What I'm saying is we don't know anything about her motivations for having children, or how she got from point A to point B.

 

[angelo]

She likes kids???

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As opposed to 0% fault you want to assign her. By the way, female (and female only!) contraceptives are 100% covered by Obamacare.

Kindly do not assign assumption to me that I have not stated for myself. Also kindly stop trying to derail yet another thread with your anti-women rhetoric, especially on the back on one of my posts.

As for ObamaCare, it has only been in effect since January 1, 2014. When were her children born? Moreover, depending on what state she lives in, ACA may cover 0% of anything because the Republican Governors have chosen not to allow its benefits to that state's citizens... which simply supports my original point, thank you.

Huh? If the states didn't get involved they just went to the federal site. That's what I had to do when our state site got a big boot up it's ass.

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Of course you would, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you. But you have failed to actually address the issue. Where is this sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options going to come from when Republicans are going out of their way to make sure she doesn't have access to any of it?

While the Republicans are trying they haven't succeeded.

Sex-ed: Ever hear of a library? Cost: $0.

Affordable birth control: Condoms are cheap and given away at many places.

Reproductive health care: Irrelevant.

Child care: Again, irrelevant.

 

[angelo]

In Australia, like most of the free world, there are some women who may have up to four kids, all by different fathers. The first and second, easily accidental, but above that, it then becomes questionable.

 

[Bomb#20]

She has kids, plural. There doesn't seem to be a husband or child support in the picture. Sorry, gal, but if you get yourself knocked up repeatedly before getting an education you're going through life in poverty.

Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the conservative push to eliminate sex-ed in schools, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, child care options, etc. Yep, it is 10,000,000% all this woman's own fault.

She had multiple kids. I can understand the Republicans leading to one such oops but if a woman has a second I blame her.

Um, did you guys read the article?

"The government's WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program helped a little, and I learned a few things at the weekly classes it mandated, but toddlers eat more than babies and our rent had just gone up and there were two adults but only one of us had a job. So I signed up for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, known colloquially as food stamps) for the first time when my older child was about 2 years old.
...
After that first stretch, I didn't go back to SNAP for almost three years. Then suddenly I had two kids, a divorce, a single, crappy job, and all of the expenses of a household on my head. I went back to food stamps."

This isn't the fault of the Republicans or the fault of an unwed double oops. If it's important to you to assign blame, then you're just going to have to find out who's fault the divorce was.

 

[RavenSky]

Kindly do not assign assumption to me that I have not stated for myself. Also kindly stop trying to derail yet another thread with your anti-women rhetoric, especially on the back on one of my posts.

As for ObamaCare, it has only been in effect since January 1, 2014. When were her children born? Moreover, depending on what state she lives in, ACA may cover 0% of anything because the Republican Governors have chosen not to allow its benefits to that state's citizens... which simply supports my original point, thank you.

Huh? If the states didn't get involved they just went to the federal site. That's what I had to do when our state site got a big boot up it's ass.

If I recall correctly, you are so wealthy and perfect you likely didn't qualify for subsidies at all anyway so I guess I should forgive you for not understanding how ACA actually works, but because you continue to make pompous pronouncements about people like the woman in the OP, I don't excuse you. In other words, your claimed experience does not give you complete knowledge from which to judge ( as less) everyone else around you.

If the woman in the OP earns below the minimum income level set by ACA for federal subsidies, and her Republican governor refused to allow the expansion of Medicaid in her state, she's SOL. This is where my daughter is. At 26. She has aged off of my insurance. As a full-time honor-roll college student, she likely won't make enough working part-time to qualify for any federal subsidies for her health insurance. As a full-time honor-roll college student with a part-time job, she doesn't get health insurance through her employer nor can she afford the monthly premiums for the unsubsidized insurance. This is the real world, Loren. Would you like to stick your nose up in the air and criticize my daughter for her "poor planning" now?

The reality is that the Republicans go out of their fucking way to make it as difficult as possible for poor people in general, and women in oarticular to obtain sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options. That is the point you continue to refuse to concede. You would rather blame individuals for things that are beyond their own control.




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Of course you would, Loren. I wouldn't expect anything else from you. But you have failed to actually address the issue. Where is this sex-ed, affordable birth control, women's reproductive health care, and child care options going to come from when Republicans are going out of their way to make sure she doesn't have access to any of it?

While the Republicans are trying they haven't succeeded.

Sex-ed: Ever hear of a library? Cost: $0.

Affordable birth control: Condoms are cheap and given away at many places.

Reproductive health care: Irrelevant.

Child care: Again, irrelevant.

Libraries that Republicans try to shut down and/or censor

Condoms - Republicans are successfully shutting down the very places that gave condoms away for free

Reproductive health is the most relative! IUDs don't insert themselves

Child care is also highly relevant. You bashed the woman in the OP for supposedly not educating herself. How is she supposed to do so with affordable child care after her first child? How is she supposed to work without affordable child care.

 

[Canard DuJour]

But you don't have to meet local demand for burgers. If you fail to produce enough to meet local demand some of your potential customers will eat at Wimpy.

Exactly. You need no fewer than n employees to maximise profit.

The demand is determined by burger price offset against local wage levels, the going rate for employees is determined by the labour market, and the marginal value of the last employee I need is an irrelevant abstraction.

Well, it's an irrelevant abstraction if you aren't trying to maximize your profit.

Opinion noted but I've just said why I disagree.

You paid me less than $15. My eyelid hurts. Therefore you caused me physical pain. Is that your reasoning?

Oh come off it!

More like : I'm paid so little I need two jobs, don't get home in time to help my kid with her homework and am tired and irritable in what little time I have with her mom/dad. You're not harming me so much as the rules we're playing by are.

So, "Oh come off it! You're right."?

I said people should be allowed to hire other people for less than $15 because hiring people for $14 doesn't hurt them; that's not a claim that every rule in western civilization doesn't hurt them. By all means, identify rules that hurt people and let's talk about repealing them. We certainly have some rules in the U.S. that hurt people, such as the rule that we have to pay taxes to subsidize high-fructose corn syrup. But I can't see how you and another guy both hiring me for $9 apiece, which you do because I'm willing to do two jobs, which I need because nobody's income will go up $15 as a result of hiring me so nobody has a reason to hire me for $15, could plausibly be the cause of nobody's income going up $15 as a result of hiring me.

And I can't see what this has to do with the comment you're ostensibly addressing, which makes no such claim.

The underlying reason for my tiredness/irritability/homework problem is my not knowing how to make other people's income go up $15. The legality of hiring me for $9 didn't make me not know that. Banning people from hiring me for less than $15 won't fix that. Since I can't increase anybody's income $15, all it will do is make sure that anybody who hires me would lose money on the deal. So they won't hire me. That would be a rule we could play by that would hurt me.

Not if marginalism is an ideologically motivated crock of shit and employers simply pay as little as the rules allow them to - i.e what's under dispute here.

Other economies play by different rules to mutual benefit.

No doubt. By all means, identify some rules from another economy that would be mutually beneficial for us to adopt and let's talk about passing them.

Higher MW, stronger employee protections, collective bargaining, shorter work hours, generous enough welfare that unemployment isn't a disaster for a family, big powerful unions represented, by law, on firms' boards. The strongest economies with the highest living standards have 'em. They have plenty of rich folks too, only they're less likely to have become rich by employing people in miserable conditions.

Your preferring advantage over me is harm by your definition.

Sorry, I'm not following. I prefer mutual advantage. When one person hires another it makes them both better off.

Oh good, then you'll have no objection to the above. Otherwise I believe you are "following"

Let's say the market rate for some work you know how to do is $12. That happens because at the current level of production of the good in question, adding a worker to a typical factory will increase production enough to increase income by $12.

Well no, revenue would have to increase by more than $12 for the employer to profit.

But one employer calculates that at her factory income will increase $13 -- she's operating at too small a scale so the returns on adding employees have not yet diminished to $12 for her, as they have for her competitors.

Nah, you're assuming what I'm disputing. It just doesn't work like that in any firm I've seen, and I used to draw up manning schedules for some big contracts. Marginalism at firm level is - as a prominent industrialist described it when first expounded - "the product of the itching imaginations of uninformed and inexperienced armchair theorizers."

So she offers you a $12/hour job. Dissatisfied with your current $9/hour job, you take her up on the deal. Your income goes up $3; hers goes up 1$. Your current employer goes off and hires an unemployed person who knows how to do your old $9 job but doesn't know how to do your new $12 job, which means he's less likely to quit his new $9 job than you were. Win-win-win-win.

So what is this advantage your new employer has over you, that she prefers, that you are being harmed by her preference for?

Her preference isn't stated in that anodyne little homily, so who knows? In the real world she'd offer slightly above $9 in order to maximise profits or she'd be replaced by someone who would. Unless, of course, there were rules mandating more equitable mutually beneficial deals.

 

[Derec]

In otherwords, you have not shown there are net financial benefits accruing to these women.

I would call no federal income tax liability and $7k in refundable tax credits in addition to programs like SNAP and receiving child support quite a benefit. Note that while the woman from the OP mentions food stamps and WIC she ignores the sizable tax benefits (two extra exemptions and $7k in refundable credits) nor does she say anything about how much child support she receives. Mentioning all that would have made it clear that her financial situation is hardly as bad as she makes it out to be and would have lessened the impact of her woe-is-me article.

Totally irrelevant, and misleading since it ignores the effect of payroll taxes.

How is it irrelevant? And I am not ignoring payroll taxes (FICA) which you would know had you bothered to read what I wrote earlier.

The official poverty threshold is $20,090 for a household of 3 and $24,250 for a household of 4, so the alleged $25K is not really "pretty sweet".

It's pretty sweet to get so much free money from the IRS.

Assuming you have a clue what portion of your income taxes go to income support, that tells you nothing about the actual cost and effort to raise a child.

I know my taxes have to be higher in order to subsidize those with children.