[endymi0n]

I think so mainly because of the near total lack of societal support of bringing them up to be educated, responsible adults with opportunities. If you want to have them, fine. But then, you better be prepared to be able to pay for health care, child care and college. Without maternal / paternal leave, having kids also puts their parents at a financial and career disadvantage to non-parents, so they are indeed a luxury.

[swiley]

There’s a lot of fear here that giving people something for free means that the people receiving it will abuse it. People who want free education are viewed as “entitled.”

The US is really weird about children, they’re the most important thing in most peoples minds but as soon as they turn 18 they’re dangerous and entitled.

[ebikelaw]

The underlying reason is racism. White people dislike the idea of a social system that benefits everybody, because that would include the blacks. This is even true of desperately poor white people, who are very numerous, but would rather deny a social program to black people even if that means they also cannot benefit from it.

Many of the countries we think of as quite successful and wealthy and educated and having many social programs are also shockingly homogeneous, so it’s hard to know if, say, Finland would be exactly as nice if they had more different races there. But we can say for certain that racism is holding America back.

[endymi0n]

Just for the record, Norway is just about on par with the US if you count foreign born population, and Germany is even slightly above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

[onetimemanytime]

https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm US might be doing it wrong, but it does spend a lot of money on children

[maxerickson]

There's all sorts of subsidies and programs that only apply to kids. Maybe they aren't as big as they ought to be, but other poster has a weird conclusion going there.

For instance, 35 million children get health insurance from the government:

https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...

That's close to ½ of the kids in the country.

[Avamander]

> That's close to ½ of the kids in the country.

Um, that's a good thing?

[maxerickson]

My intention was to contrast against "near total lack of societal support", not to state an opinion about Medicaid and CHIP.

[williamdclt]

I think that the point was that "½ of the kids in the country" sounds very low. Admittedly that's not "near total lack of societal support" but still, half of the kids are not provided with something as basic as health insurance from the gov

[maxerickson]

More than half if that is what you want to say.

In a private insurance model, ½ is a lot. I suppose it can be fun to act all astonished that the US has a private insurance model.