I am curious how you came to this conclusion.
Just from everyday interactions with people who don't want children, and feel that society in it's current form is too child centric. Also from people who frequently vote against increasing taxes in districts with dilapidated school systems. I don't even think it is ill intentioned most of the time. I just think people are ill equipped to empathize with people in different circumstances and also are bad at long term thinking.
Not a flame. But as a childless person, my every day interactions with other childless-by-choice people is that like 90% of them are flaming liberals who frequently vote against their own best financial interests.
Certainly, we are not a large enough proportion of the population to form a influential voting block. So maybe you've made some assumptions about who is voting against tax increases for schools and figure it must be all those child-hating childfree people! In truth, demographically speaking, it's probably richer people with kids in good school districts (or private schools) who don't feel there's a problem, and empty nesters who feel they've paid their dues and shouldn't have to do more. Those people probably actually really do comprise enough of the voting population to influence a school taxes vote.
Pretty much what Cpa cat said. The people voting to lower their taxes and privatize public schools are often conservatives (though of course liberals will probably just as frequently choose private schools if they can afford them). The question is: do people who tend to vote conservative have more kids, on average, than people who vote liberal? And how are those tendencies related, if at all? I'm not sure about those things....does anyone have any data on this?
As a personal matter, I don't hate kids and I don't like kids particularly either, as a group. I disliked kids in general MORE when I was a child myself. I had a few close friends, but mostly I found children silly, tribal, and kind of mean. Presumably I was also silly, tribal, and mean as a kid, but I wouldn't have noticed that, would I? I wanted to hang out with grown ups! As an adult I found out lots of adults are also silly, tribal, and mean (including myself sometimes LOL). So essentially, it turns out I'm just not a people-oriented person in general. However, if I had to pick between interacting with a group of unknown kids and interacting with a group of unknown adults, I'd automatically pick adults. Possibly I'd regret it. If I had accidentally had children of my own, I expect I would have loved them intensely while still finding other peoples' children tiresome.
It is true that in the long term I'm much more concerned and emotionally involved with welfare of other life on the plant than humans (who seem to be a species with the staying power of cockroaches...we aren't in danger of going anywhere). So I feel concern for kids growing up in poverty, but not as much as I feel for wildlife species going extinct.
That doesn't mean I feel no empathy or concern for the plight of kids/people, or wish them harm in general, but it does mean that I am not very sympathetic to people who have more than 2 kids on purpose and then whine about how hard or expensive it is to raise them.I want our global human population to shrink, so naturally I am not in support of people having tons of kids. However, given that kids don't choose to be born, and given that societies in economic melt down tend to be even worse for natural resources than stable societies, I certainly want to be sure that kids are safe, fed, properly cared for and loved, have access to health care and education/jobs, etc. I believe gov't should play a big role in that (exactly how and how much is open to debate).
To sum up, I wish like hell that there were fewer people on the planet, and that people would stop breeding so much. BUT (at least so far...though recent political events are severely trying my patience in this area) I am strongly in favor of personally chipping in to make sure those people that are here have a decent life and that reducing our populations is done in a slow and stable way to reduce societal upheaval. So I vote to raise my own taxes because I think American society is falling short in this regard.
