re: On a scale of 1 to 10... how much do you believe the Great Replacement is real.

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Higher taxes for services you cant utilize:
Take Baton Rouge for example, medium sized racially divided southern city. We pay taxes for a city bus service and public schooling. The bus system is primarily used to transport homeless drug addicts around town and the few people that are forced to ride with them because they have no other option. If you want evidence of this, please go ride the bus next time you are in town or do some independent research.

Taxes funding public schools that are so bad, that a portion of the city sued the city to form its own city. Shootings and stabbings are common in the public schools here, and it is frankly not a place you would want to send you children. So guess what, everyone who can afford it sends their kids to private school, which is not cheap. Imagine spending $20k a year to not send your kid to the free public schooling you already pay for.

Police funding. Millions of extra tax dollars we have to spend on the police force to deal with daily murders, robberies and other violent crime.

These issues are allowed by social politics and create larger problems for the country in the long run. Judges now sentence people based on their political ideology instead of facts. We have normalized bad behavior and it costs the country money and time that could easily be spent on more useful things.


It is obvious that these things affect housing prices and neighborhoods, directly making it harder to settle down and raise a family. Safe housing is far more expensive than the median income. You may call it obsession with materialism, but people just want to live around other respectable people in their community.


Now i am a big proponent on people moving to a different state if they cannot afford the life they want. But that is easy for me to say as an outgoing, college educated professional. Lower income people may not have the means or ability to get out of town and make a big life change. And if you rely on a nearby parent for childcare, that added expense likely exceeds your income potential.

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Thank you for answering the question, I do appreciate the time and effort you put into the post.

I am not swayed, however.

Let's go point by point. City bus systems/public transit systems have always been something that tax payers have had to pay for and the cities in which they are adequate to meet the transportation needs are few and far between. By the 70s and 80s most urban areas were growing outward much faster than public transit could keep up with, so even if it wasn't because of zombies on the bus, public transit has long been something you paid into and didn't get the benefit of.

Public schools. Sure, they are getting worse (and will continue to do so), but you might be interested to know that in 1970 around 20% of students went to private school in Louisiana vs about 13% now. It does look like state sales tax went up during that time frame from 3% to 5% (which is how around 45% of education is funded in Louisiana), but with a corresponding proportional drop in utilization of private schools.

Crime. Crime is lower now than in was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even in NO and BR. And you always had to pay for the po-lice.

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It is obvious that these things affect housing prices and neighborhoods, directly making it harder to settle down and raise a family.

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No, it's not obvious to me. Fewer people are utilizing private schools, crime is lower now than it was in 1970 (and a LOT lower than in the 1990s), and the public transit system is irrelevant unless you are talking about living in areas in which people don't own cars.

Homes ARE more expensive though.

In Louisiana specifically, about 40% more expensive than 1980 when adjusted for inflation. (Of course, they are also on average about 40% bigger than they were in 1980 as well.). And if you compare them to homes in 1970 and 1990, that gap is even wider.

However, just the fact that the assumption is that you HAVE to own a home to have a family is what I mean by materialism. That isn't true, and people in the largest cities in America where real estate has historically always been the highest have rented instead of bought for many decades. New York, San Francisco, etc.

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Lower income people may not have the means or ability to get out of town and make a big life change.

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And yet the irony is that statistically those are the people who are still procreating at an above-replacement rate clip. They are also the same people you mentioned who have no option but to use public transit.

I wouldn't send my children to public schools in 2026 no matter what. Even if the school is a "good school," they still are going to be guaranteed to be indoctrinated in some philosophy that I would object to.

I know probably 12-15 families who made that same choice, homeschooled their children, and made creative lifestyle choices that enabled them to do it.

They all own homes, by the way. Some of them drive absolute beaters for cars, but they all own homes. Some of them have one spouse who makes more money than average, but most of them don't, and none of them have a spouse that makes WAY above average...there are no surgeons or airline pilot captains among them.

The fact is that there is a large portion of the country—largely in fly over country—where you can raise a family and own a home on probably $75,000 a year. You won't drive brand new cars, you won't have the latest iPhone, you won't get monthly mani-pedis, you won't order DoorDash 5 nights a week, you won't have $300 worth of streaming services a month, your kids won't have $4,000 birthday parties or play travel ball or go to Disney every other year (or maybe ever), and they probably will share a room with a sibling and eat leftovers and wear hand-me-down clothes and play with hand-me-down toys.

But it's very doable if parents are willing to prioritize family instead of things. To the point that they are willing to move to the interior of the country, probably in a smaller town, and live a simpler lifestyle than has become the normal middle class lifestyle.

Hell, that's how almost everybody I knew lived growing up in the 70s anyway. There was no such thing as "travel ball," not as far as I know, anyway, and if anyone I knew proposed to their parents that they spend the equivalent of $20k+ a year on an 11 year old riding around the country playing baseball every weekend they would have laughed. And that goes for even the upper-middle class or rich folks I knew growing up. Even the ones who could have afforded it.

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Well, procreating is different from raising a family imo. This one of our country's big problems.

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Sure, but that's not a function of anything we've talked about. Except materialism, although even that is just one of several factors that contributes to that trend.

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And i use the medium to large sized cities because that's where the vast majority of the population lives.

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But they don't have to. That's my point. People can make a choice to not live in medium to large cities. There's a shortage of many types of services and products in smaller towns across America. The opportunity is there. People just are not choosing it.

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I agree it is "doable" to raise a family on 75k HHI if you move to a rural area and live frugally. But people with the desire AND ability to do so successfully are outliers in this country.

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The "ability" argument falls flat when you learn that there are government assistance programs to fund low income people moving...even to a different state.

It's a choice. Which is what I said from the outset. All of the objections to why people don't do this anymore are excuses. The opportunity is there. People just don't prioritize it.