Maybe the folks taking advantage of the bonus
are not quite the ones the creators of this
policy hoped for?

If this policy doesn't specify ethnic/racial origin as a criteria than it's quite a foolish
policy.

I think the Muslims will find a way to win at
this game.

I don't know about ethnic/racial origin, but I would hope (against all experience) that there's some string attached about the mother being married and the family not otherwise being on welfare. The article doesn't seem to support that hope, sadly.

Random:

Why? If you farm out reproduction you can't be choosy.

Two reasons. First, there's already more than enough fornication (and other irresponsible immorality) in our culture without the government subsidizing more of it. Second, other things being equal, it is better that children be reared by a father and a mother who are married to one another and paying their own way in the world than that they be reared by persons in other social arrangements. (Though I suppose it's a matter of marginally less consequence who bears the children.)

In the US, neither the Earned Income Credit, (which is strongly biased in favor of people with children), nor the Federal Child Tax credit have marriage provisions, and both are available to people who currently are, or have been at some point in the year, on welfare or food stamps, as long as they've made some taxable income.

If Australia's "baby bonus" programme did contain a marriage clause, it would just increase the divorce rate, as people who nominally married, to qualify, separated after the birth and payment.

The biggest problem with the payment is that it's not large enough to tempt the professional and/or highly educated women, that Peter Burnet was posting about last week, to have extra kids.

Although of course the people who do tend to have large families, (the less educated and the lower socio-economic groups), aren't necessarily unintelligent or otherwise poor breeding stock, it's easier and cheaper (on average) to raise, train, and educate for maximum utility children whose parents are themselves well educated or highly successful.

Random:

Our culture isn't the problem. In the rest of the West there's too little fornication and too little of that procreative. Other things aren't equal.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/013240.html

There is plenty of fornication in the West,oj,it's just recreational rather than procreative,much like education today.Largely irrelevent anyway,as the West(including the US)is destined to become a 3rd world backwater of poverty and illiterate peasants.

Too many fleas,not enough dog.

There is plenty of fornication in the West,oj,it's just recreational rather than procreative,much like education today.Largely irrelevent anyway,as the West(including the US)is destined to become a 3rd world backwater of poverty and illiterate peasants.

Too many fleas,not enough dog.

You're far too optimistic, Mr. Anonymous; The West will no doubt perish from genetically modified food, or some bio-warfare accident, before then.

There are not nearly enough people. The Earth is empty.

Michae H.

Everytime I look at California,I'm just giddy with optimism.

David Cohen:

True enough.

Ms Anonymous:

And so you should be.
California has a naturally vibrant and growing economy and culture; Most of what gets blamed on the immigrant population is actually a failure of government, predominately the California gov't, but also the Federal.

Legal and illegal Latino immigration is also high to Arizona and Texas, but neither of those states have had quite the same intensity of problems with 'em as Cali has had in the last thirty years.

Michael H., I won't defend the Internal Revenue Code, it's indefensible in numerous ways, including those you mention. Even if a "marriage string" would increase the divorce rate, I suspect it might at the margins result in more kids raised by married and employed parents. But speculation either way, I suppose. I agree with you about the size of the "baby bonus," though -- but that's hard to overcome at the top of the socioeconomic chain without amplifying the malign effects at the bottom.

OJ, I would have thought that with your views on your daughter's future vis-a-vis the convent you might have been more sympathetic to the "too much fornication" point.

She gets out once she's an adult.

What? You mean before her arranged marriage?

Michael H

Sorry,you show your ignorance,Arizona's public health services are collapsing and Texas is spending billions every year to clean up the appropriately named colonias,shanty towns with no water and open sewers.For every one cleaned up,2 pop up the next morning.
Latinos have a drop out rate approching that of blacks and,contray to OJ's fantasies,3rd generation does no better than 1st generation.
CAlifornia is losing it's most educated,skilled and profitable populations in exchange for increasingly uneducated,minimum wage workers who will eagerly vote for the very government you say is the only problem the state has.
Throw in the ethnic/cultural seperatism that's growing there and it adds up to a poor and backword California that rest of us will be required to subsidize.

Ms Anonymous:

Yes, a truly terrible situation, and you have every right to be a bitter cynic.

However, since your ilk have been saying the SAME THING for over 175 years now, forgive me for disbelieving that California's immigrants will be the death of the state and the nation.
In fact, San Francisco's self-absorbed socialist-if-someone-else-is-paying angst-ridden navel gazers and San Jose's foolish sure-I'll-pay-$1.2million-for-a-two-bed-one-bath-ticki-tacki-box math impaired residents are a greater long-term threat.

Fortunately, the former are dying off, and the latter are leaving for Vegas since the dotcom die-off.