Summary
The Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued a memo prioritizing federal funding for communities with marriage and birth rates above the national average.
The directive, which applies to grants, loans, and contracts, also prioritizes projects benefiting families with young children.
A congressional aide criticized the policy, saying, “Considering fertility rates when prioritizing federal grants? We obviously have no idea what the full impact of that will be… It’s absolutely creepy. It’s a little ‘Chinese government.’”
The memo also blocks mask mandates and requires compliance with immigration enforcement.
Is there some problem with underpopulation? The qons were always saying “America is full” when it comes to refugees.
Gotta be the rwhite color…
They’re just going to need more people in general, so they can let us die sooner and replenish the workforce.
This. They need fodder
Natalism, no stupid mask mandates and foreigners remaining foreign. Oh no.
Weird.
It’s actually common.
Do people dislike your opinions everywhere you go or just here? It may be time to reexamine some things internally
Thanks for your fake concern but I don’t take mental health advice from passive aggressive people on the internet.
And I don’t argue with chuds who’s top biggest concerns contain having to wear basic PPE sometimes.
Clearly you do even if you say you don’t. How vaxxed are you? Did you get your most recent booster?! It’s over dude. No one cares about your virtue signaling anymore. The truth is no one ever did.
Yuck. What a yucky comment.
Yeah, I think I just threw up a little.
This is going to benefit communities with a lot of hispanic families, lmao.
Inb4 non-white children born only count as three fifths
They’ll find some way to draw up a beneficial neighborhood map that excludes black and brown neighborhoods.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it gets tied to income
They already messed with the 2020 census, so red states will benefit from everything more.
Good point. Maybe it will be something like: ‘Households already receiving benefits will be ineligible for this program’, and they will count something like food stamps or a child attending public school will keep them out.
As someone else has said, I’m afraid we are giving them ideas.
Maybe they’ll even draw the lines in red
They would probably make the lines blue, because they are trying to continue that, and avoid the possibly negative SEO of Red Lining.
Not to mention, blue means democrat. If the lines are blue they can blame it on the democrats when things go wrong!
“This neighborhood has too high of a birth mortality rate, let’s pick this white neighborhood instead”
Nah, it will be more racist than that. It will just say “High birth rates of people, PS, we don’t consider non whites to actually be people.”
They will have more work to do and it will be closer to home. Win win!
Gonna solve that 101 freeway issue right quick
Utah enters the chat…
Do illegal marriages count?
Wait until conservatives find out that communities with high birth rates are not white.
The ones actually running the show don’t actually care what skin color they have so long as they are able to work them hard with minimal labor protections and rock bottom wages.
If you look around at the news articles out there… nobody is talking about farmhands getting picked up by ICE. It seems to be exclusively people in major cities. Maybe someone has seen some articles talking about ICE arrests at places of work, but it seems like this time the goal is to nab them at church, the grocery store or when they are bringing their kids to and from school.
I’m sorry to tell you this but there will be fewer workplaces in the future.
There have been three significant developments throughout human history:
- agricultural revolution
- heavy industrial revolution
- information technology
I’m afraid there won’t be a third wave, and technological progress will slow down. I’m sure it will lead to a decline in well-paying employments, and wages will go down. An effective counter-measure would be if the number of workers in the country would also drop, as that would lower supply in workforce and increase prices for labor (a.k.a. wages).
I’m sure people at the agricultural and heavy industrial stages said the same thing. Maybe stop roleplaying you can see the future?
“I was told there would be a medal”.
Shamelessly clipped from History.com:
This Day In History: December 16
1938 Hitler establishes Mother’s Cross to encourage German women to procreate
On December 16, 1938, Adolf Hitler institutes the Mother’s Cross, to encourage women of “pure” German origin to increase the size of their families and grow the population of the Third Reich.
The Nazis started such encouragement early. When members the League of German Girls (a wing of of the Hitler Youth movement) turned 18, they became eligible for a branch called Faith and Beauty, which trained these girls in the art of becoming ideal mothers. One component of that ideal was fecundity. And so each year, gold medals were awarded to women with eight children or more, silver medals to women with six to seven, and bronze medals to women with five. The crosses were distributed between 1938 and 1944.
Knowing Turnip the medals will probably be cheap gold colored metal with an image of himself on it.
Crappy chocolate medal covered in golden foil.
Yup, because people don’t move around… Wait… Want it a DOT memo? LOL.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993
50 States, 50 Protests, 1day
Feb 5 @ your downtown.
Pass the word!
For all those asking, the Facebook link didn’t even work for me, so I just searched and there looks to be an active r/50501 group.
It doesn’t seem like an organized thing, just be at your state capital. Here’s a few posters from the reddit:
why the hell do they plan these during the week, DURING the work day?? Saturday would be too convenient??
I’m not sure if the work distribution is part of the point or not. The protests would have to be huge though for that to make a dent I’d think though.
Part of what these protests are against is the removal of protections for employees, so having people risk employment during this time does seem a bit problematic.
I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do anymore, especially living in a time with surveillance everywhere. I’m just volunteering in my community and letting people know I’m on their side should they need me.
I had the same thought. States are huge, too, so state capitols are going to be a healthy drive for a lot of folks. Short notice, far off location (I mean, take Cali; San Francisco and LA are NOT close to Sac), and middle of the workday/school day timing. If you were planning a fake protest to show how little enthusiasm there is to push back against Trump, it’d be hard to do better than this.
I didn’t know anything either. I just got overly pissed this morning because they removed Transgender from all government websites. Like dude, that’s us! Who’s next? Who will protest when there’s no one left to speak up?
They are really going full speed on the destruction of near everything. I thought it would be more methodical, but it seems scorched earth is what they’re going for.
My heart goes out to you, it seems like trans rights were just starting to catch on and now it feels like you’re in more danger than ever. But none of us that do support you did so just because the gov told us it was ok now, so we won’t stop just because of crap like this. Millions are still on your side.
That looks important. Too bad I can’t read or upvote it because it’s a link to a fascist platform.
Make your own link in here and pas the word so it happens! Yeah I got no Facebook or reedit account. I’m just not gonna ignore it when the government wants to ship my mom off to India or Quebec.
I get it’s still more popular than Fedi apps but using Facebook kind of feels like we’re asking the King permission to revolt.
Meta can suck all the ass, but you have to admit that abandoning it entirely will just enforce the echo chamber. I think we should at least try to continue the fight inside. I almost never use it, and have disabled all the settings and tracking that allow it to make the most money off of me.
I feel like there’s at least some importance to meeting people where they are.
Cheap labor. Meat for the grinder.
Can’t let their slave labor pool dwindle.
Me and my wife have been watching Handmaid’s Tale over the years and we’ve been saying for some years now that America is way closer than what’s comfortable to actually becoming that society. It’s actually unreal to see it unfold.
Prioritize funding for places with higher birth rates, you say? So… Communities with loads of immigrants. Got it.
They were removed from the calculation after Elon was given network access and privs to the US government.
the “white” was implied
They don’t even have to imply it!
They can just define it with congressional districts or some arbitrary measure that clusters their desired groups and fragments their undesired groups.
Even if this wasn’t the actual, real end to even the charade of U.S. democracy, it would take at least a generation or two to “prove” those policies are hurtful in the courts.
What then? The damage is done. Infrastructure built. Certain groups given generational advantages, certain groups left behind.
I know we like to shit on Trump for his dumb ideas, but why is this idea bad? I would remove the marriage rates, but prioritizing communities with many children, especially families with young children seems to me like a sane idea, this is where help is needed the most and where you make the most impact for the future generations or am I missing something?
and where you make the most impact for the future generations or am I missing something?
Yeah you definitely make an impact, if by making an impact you mean flooding the future labor market with quasi-slaves.
Off the top of my head, it makes it desirable to cook the stats to get money, whether by banning abortion or simply prioritizing births vs children. Every funding metric is gamed, that’s why there’s arcane rules to enact change by hoping for a certain game strategy. In this case every strategy leads to misery.
Who has marriage and birth rates higher than the national average? White evangelicals. This is a gift to the religious right.
Who’s that weird family with a ton of kids? They get all the money. Also, Utah.
Probably cause those are richer communities. If i had to guess.
Isn’t poverty strongly correlated to higher birth rates? Education is very much known to cause lower birth rates and poorer areas lack (access to) education.
Yes but my counter point would be not when people are taking BCs or doing abortions. No one In right mind has children that can’t afford if they can help it, which is a issue globally. Plus the stress of caring for someone in uncertain times.
Box of condoms way cheaper than a child. I would bet if you gave poor countries free BCs, you would see a sharp decline in pops in a few years.
Eh, I’d argue for birth control to be effective the knowledge how to use it and have safe sex is pretty important - which relies on education (though in a sex-ed and not tertiary education kind of way).
Increasing education spending directly results in a lower birth rate, much more so than “just” providing free birth control. Ideally both should be provided though.
Lol this feels like chicken and egg convo.
Education leads more people wanting to take BC Vs Bc allow more people to get educated.
Gay marriage will be used against areas. Fertility rates are higher in rural and conservative areas because of a lack of access to proper sex ed and contraception. Everything about this screams punish blue states, funding only for maga.
I mean why not just say higher population density and leave room for abuse? because they want room for abuse.
Which makes no sense when beep boops are around the corner. Every company is talking about AI this and AI that.
“Sooo you don’t need more workers, lets scale down the pops so we have more resources to share, got it!”
And all I hear is “oh not like that”
Thank you for taking the heat of the hive mind, I genuinely didn’t understand the problems either.
If the criterion is to prioritise funding to areas that need the most why not just say higher population density? We already know republicans use “traditional family values” as a propaganda tool. Can you seriously not see how this can be abused by Trump administration after news like ordering to retract the word “gender” from medical articles published by CDC:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction
In my mind it was because children are expensive, so high birthrates - less “free” income, means higher reliance on public services like transportation. At least here in Germany highest birthrates are usually low income, low education, often immigrant areas that would profit greatly from having a broader support from the public.
Can you seriously not see how this can be abused by Trump administration after news like ordering to retract the word “gender” from medical articles published by CDC:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction
Well now I obviously do, but like I mentioned, I am from Germany, I try to keep up with rapid-fire bullshit machine that is governing the US right now, but unfortunately we are also in a dire situation here right now. And I wouldn’t expect the whole world to automatically understand all the details of what is happening in our government right now, for example how terrifying and dangerous the last three days were for our democracy. I am happy to answer that for anyone asking genuinely btw. Hence why I was happy someone asked the questions that I had in mind while reading the article.
yes but birthrate is the derivative of population over time. trying to base this prioritization on birthrate only is like claiming you can understand where a car is going by only looking at velocity and not knowing anything about its position.
obviously the best way is to base this on multiple relevant criteria which includes population, birth rate and amount of development already present. but the more precisely you layout conditions for spending of course less open it is to abuse for popularism.
One thing to note about the US is that this funding directive means that funds will go to areas that oppose public transportation, as well as keeping funding from cities that could use it.
During the creation of the national highway system (which, apart from destroying much of the public transport in the country, destroyed many immigrant and black neighborhoods and replaced them with highways), there was a designer in New York City who expressly designed the bridges near his home to be too low for busses to go under to keep black kids from being able to take the bus to the beach near his house. His words, not mine. This funding will go to rural, conservative areas, who hate bikes, buses, trains, and outsiders.
Add in the marriage rate part (which goes hand in hand with the poor and uneducated), and the possibility of repealing gay marriage, and it’s obvious to everyone here that this is about denying funding to cities and liberal states, not actually improving communities.
🤦
Can you explain that reaction to me? OP posted a question that I also had about this thing, it didn’t seem disingenuous to me.
I forced some pushback on me by attacking the reactions as “hive mind”, which is lazy and combative, I understand that, fair enough.
What I fail to understand is the push back on the original question.
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First of all - thank you for taking the time!
I totally understand, we’re all on the edge right now, my antennas are also sensitive to that kind of “just asking questions” disingenuous bullshit. But this didn’t feel like it to me, it felt like a genuine question, because I had the same thoughts before someone explained it.
I am from Europe, I suppose OP is also from a non-US country and at least to me it wasn’t quite clear that the group with highest birthrates are white evangelical Christians for example, like now I know and it makes sense, but without that context it’s hard to understand.
For example here in Germany, if I would read about our DOT making the same policy, I would think (without looking too much into actual data) - yeah okay, highest birthrates here are usually low income, low education, often immigrant families who are very reliant on public transportation to manage their day-to-day life - totally makes sense to support those areas with a higher budget.
To summarize what everyone else is saying: It can (and therefore will) be abused to only benefit “the right people”.
Despite whoever is pushing this, doesn’t it make sense? Communities with a lot of children need public transport more than others.
The money that is cut from welfare programs isn’t going to be spent on helping people and we all know it.
Said marriage rate too… that shouldn’t be a factor, just a bias marker. More kids? Yeah public transit, more people? Yeah public transit. More public transit. This is just cherry picking it.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, TRUMP?
Why are you giving the guy a hard time? He’s just doing all the awful stuff he said he was going to do plus maybe a little bit of extra awful stuff that he should have been expected to do.
Not that surprised. You have three options:
- Make babies above the replacement rate. This tends to be hard to control/enforce in general.
- Import lots of people from outside. This tends to cause cultural drift, reduced social trust and various kinds of other complications if you aren’t careful about it.
- Have an aging and shrinking populace and with it tax base, GDP, and several other things that are pretty important at a national scale.
Since Trump is actively rejecting 2 and 3 is suicidal to a nation, that leaves 1 - promote people having kids above replacement rate.
