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Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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$5k is roughly 1/4 the cost...
... of a birth.
Alone. Just, average medical costs of a birth, without insurance.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-baby/
https://www.uwhealth.org/news/how-much-does-it-really-cost-have-baby
... And they are slashing Medicaid.
If you do have insurance... $5k is about half the cost of a birth.
So... congrats, you can have two kids, and then uh lol have fun paying the cost of raising two kids, which is about half a million dollars.
And that's just to 18, btw, this assumes those kids can find a job immediately after high school and move out into a place they can afford on an entry level income.
Which uh, is basically wildly unrealistic at this point.
Because all entry level jobs require 2-3 years of experience.
And housing costs are insane.
It costs 20 000 USD to give birth? My goodness that is insane
Yeah.
The US is indeed, completely insane, compared to the rest of the developed world, but the average person has no other frame of reference.
Literacy rates in the US are down to 80%, by the way.
20% of the adult population cannot read or write beyond a 2nd grade level.
The average literacy ability is a 5th/6th grade level.
So... something like 2/3 of the country has reading and writing skills below that of what a high school (primary school, before a college or uni) graduate is supposed to have.
Our school systems are collapsing.
(And yes, you may notice that proportion of people with sub high school literacy rates is so large that it also includes many people with Uni/College degrees. Yep. That is correct. Many of those also fail to teach basic writing skills before giving someone a degree.)
A big problem is that we stopped teaching phonics. School districts spent hundreds of thousands on a terrible curriculum (and this model of teaching reading had already been tried and showed not to work in the 70’s). Teachers were forced to use this shitty “whole reading” model.
The other big problem is that high school English classes don’t have students read entire books anymore. They read short passages with multiple choice questions, because that’s what the standardized tests have. When you think about what media literacy is - that’s what the point of reading books in English class is! Thinking about the point and purpose of long texts!
Jesus.
Yeah, if you only read short passages of a book... well you definitionally lose all the context of the entire rest of the fucking book.
I guess the teachers are just assigning Cliff's notes summaries instead of the entire text now?
The attention span destroying effect of short form video content is literally stupifyjng us.
I've said this whole fucking time: TikTok should be banned for children. Not because its Chinese, its not like every US social media app doesn't spy on you as well.
All short form video content is addictive, habit forming, spreads mis and disinfo, and ruins your attention span and ability to concentrate, makes you more emotionally unstable, fucks with your sleep schedule.
This has all been studied.
Brain rot is real.
Short form video content apps are the modern day cigarettes.
High school would be mostly secondary school I think.
Primary is like from ages 5-11, with secondary being 11-16.
College/sixth form 16-19 and Uni 18+
(In context of the UK)
... All Im really aware of as far as terminology goes is that basically its different everywhere, even inside the US.
What it was for me: grades 1 - 5 are elementary, 6-8 are middle school and 9 -12 is high school.
But different areas ... either don't do a middle school, or call it something else, or its only 2 grades instead of 3... it varies.
By the time you are done with all this, you are 18 yo.
So... 2nd grade is basically the schooling level of an 8 yo. 6th grade is the schooling of a 12 yo.
After that, you're going to a college, community college, university, something like that, to get a 2 or 4 year year degree (associates or bachelors), then another 2 after a bachelors for a masters, roughly another 2 after that for a PhD (doctorate).. but there is also variation in terms of exact education track and how long it actually takes to complete them vs how long its 'supposed to take'.
Public education in the US generally stops at grade 12, and then any college/etc after that is 'secondary', as in 'optional'.
EDIT: Adjusted age dates. I just woke up from a nap, blarrrgh.
While we certainly need to do much better, this is a bit alarmis: I don’t believe we’re that different from other developed countries. I don’t believe it’s that low depending on what you mean. However I’m pretty sure you’re comparing numbers in different definitions.
One article that I won’t link because I don’t know the sources, though the numbers are consistent with good sources, stated it like
So we have at least three definitions of what literate means, and very different numbers.
'Functional Literacy' is generally defined as 2nd grade and up.
By that metric, yeah, 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.
Technically, they can read and write at a very basic level... but not 'functionally', as in, they could not function in society. They couldn't read a news article and understand all the words. They have a very limited vocabulary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
Wikipedia is currently going with an 86% literacy rate for the US, and I'd be willing to bet the discussion page is full of arguments about how to reasonably compare different metrics.
You may also notice that 86% puts us as neighbors with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
This is what happens when Ya'llQaeda takes over a country.
We had considerably better literacy rates a decade or two ago, more like 95%.
That's on the low end. My son spent three months in the NICU due to being born premature. His hospital bill ran into the six figures.
Fortunately, thanks to a hiccup of history in which one of JFK's family members was in the NICU for a similar length of time and experienced sticker shock. She lobbied Kennedy and he lobbied Congress. So now, this bill is automatically covered by Medicaid.
Sorry your kid and you and your partner went through that... that must have been just cripplingly stressful in so many ways...
But uh... yeah.
You understand got lucky by basically random chance, at least in the monetary cost part of that situation... but of course, there are so, so many other nonsense 'exceptional' scenarios which... well actually millions of people end up in each year, and they just get to be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, for things that happened to them which would generally have been impossible to precisely predict or prevent.
We are ruled by idiot, corrupt nepobabies who just actually cannot theoretically grasp things that do not specifically, personally affect or traumatize them.
Only if you have complications.