"Better never to have been born into the world, than to have seen and suffered so many miseries" - Ecclesiastes 4:3

I’m all for extending opportunity and assistance for the poor and working poor in America. In fact I think we should do much more to help the working poor and the middle class afford education in all its forms. We also need to do much better to ensure that people can actually live on the wages they receive from their work.

Yet there is no denying that extending this assistance, both to those trapped in a generational cycle of poverty and those with productive values but very limited resources, is expensive to taxpayers.

One of the ways we can bring this cost down in the future sounds very oppressive, but I believe is fair. We should encourage poor people who will not be paying the full expense of raising their own children to have less kids.

We should do this in two ways, one generous; the other not so much.

Generously, we should, beginning some day in the future, lets say January of 2013, warn people that we’ll begin a system where we taxpayers will pay for daycare from birth until kindergarten, after school and summer programs, for an income eligible parent, but only for one’s first child. In fact, this will create an incentive for people to stop having many children at public expense. It will encourage people to think twice about having a child where the father is unlikely to pay for the child’s support and diminish the monetary value increase of someone having more and more children and receive more taxpayer support.

We should start to enforce statutory rape laws more seriously for those having intercourse and having a child with or as a girl under 16, not just at the insistence of the girl who had underage sex or her family, but at the insistence of the state.

Underage sex leading to childbirth by teenagers most often leads to problems for that mom, child, and society. Allowing this to continue unabated without more direction is foolish. Boys and men who have sex with women before the age of consent should face the possibility of a restricted living habitation or at least probation. Perhaps the girl too, obviously outside of being the victim of non-consensual intercourse, should also face some penalty.

More dads who completely fail their child need to be held accountable, even by detaining them for non-support and removing them from their freedom as punishment.

We need to help people more who are trying to climb their way out of poverty. We need to structure and enforce our laws more to prevent children from being born into a cycle of poverty from which they are very unlikely to escape. We cannot be afraid to squarely address the gravity of this problem solely because we are reluctant to put demands on people who act self-destructively while being supported by other people’s labor.

This is Randy Feldman on WCRNs midday-report.