Canada

I would love to pump some baby batter into my gf and start having a kids, can't do that while we're stuck living paycheque to paycheque on a combined 130k in my parents basement.

Oh hey! It's literally describing my current situation.

Got engaged, got a promotion, have solid long term housing ("renting" from family)

Still can't keep more than 1.5k in savings month over month. No way in hell in having a baby in these conditions... and i feel like I'm better off than most

Groceries and housing cost way too much for many people to make babies.

Tax domestic speculators. It's such an easy solution. It's going to be painful because it's been allowed to happen for so long. Canadians are doing this to other Canadians but no politician wants to do this to help end this gross cycle of exploitation, add in the fact provinces like Ontario that remove things like rent control and things become even further out of reach.

Who the fuck is financially prepared for having children?

As a father of two, I sure as shit wasn't.

This is quickly becoming a crisis for the next twenty years but nobody is doing a god damned thing to actually fix the cost of living issue.

We need to vote in people affected by this, not benefitting from it.

There’s too many people on this planet anyways.

Imagine wanting to have a child in times where the only way to afford a house is to never purchase a single thing with your next 4 decades worth of pay cheques from a high paying job.

Then come find out you get to finally own a single square foot of land because everyone else comes in and swoops up everywhere else or the bar rises quicker than you could ever hope to catch up with or some other dumb reason.

I have long speculated that the reason why birthrate goes down in societies with a higher standard of living is because a higher standard of living effectively reduces the "carrying capacity" of the environment for humans. Which is not a bad thing, IMO, it's just the underlying explanatory reason for why we see this pattern. Access to family planning and such is just part of the mechanism this operates by.

A common pattern in population dynamics is the S-curve, where population initially grows in an exponential-like pattern and then flattens back out again as it approaches the environment's carrying capacity. I think we'll see that with the human population too, and we are in the unique position as a species of being able to somewhat control where that carrying capacity will be. In this specific case here, we could boost our capacity for population growth by making housing more affordable.

There are a few people in my family that are married with good jobs and own their own homes and they are not having children. They are focusing on other things. I am proud of them as I am proud of those in my family who have chosen to have children. This does not need to be one more point of division. It is OK to have kids and it is OK to not have kids.