Budgeting: Mother of 8 Challenges Mother of None

Gary North - June 18, 2018

Suze Orman is a lesbian. She has lots of advice on how expensive it is to raise children.

Here, a Christian mother of 8 instructs Ms. Orman on budgeting.

We both watched as you were in the middle of counseling a young couple, 29 and 30 years old, who wondered if they could afford to have the wife quit her job and have another baby. . . .

But we were absolutely dumbfounded when you told them that their expenses would go up $700-1000 each month due to necessary baby items, like “diapers and this and that”. (Diapers were the only actual expenses you came up with.)

Diapers? $700? A MONTH??? Really?

Ms. Orman has not shopped for diapers.

And neither do all the other baby related expenses all added up, even if we went hog wild and bought Pampers without a coupon.

You told the couple “sorry, you can’t afford it,” and there was “no way possible” for their plan to work.

No possible way? Really?

Suze, pardon me for saying so, but I don’t think you know what you are talking about here.

For years, I read a child in the USA costs $100,000+ to raise. But inflation has caught up. Now it costs $227,000. It’s utter nonsense, of course. It is so off-the-wall silly that nobody but a liberal could believe it. Liberals tell us that a poor mother in a ghetto with 5 children from 5 fathers needs welfare. They never say that the woman will need $1.3 million in welfare. This myth for people without numerical skills has been part of the liberal assault on the family. Liberals have believed this myth. They do not have 2 children per family — replacement rate. They have fewer. They will die out. This is good. (For a great book on this, see David Goldman’s Why Civilizations Die.)

In my youth, I saw the movie Cheaper by the Dozen. It was the story of the efficiency experts, the Gilbreths. Their work was based on cost-benefit analysis of remarkable precision. They understood this:

You see, families who are adding a second, third, or (insert freakishly high ordinal number here) child can actually re-use car seats, high chairs, baby beds, clothes, and all of the other stuff they spent way too much money on for the first kid.

Her conclusion is correct: “Babies take time. They take patience. And sacrifice. Lots of it. But not a lot of money.”

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Published on December 9, 2011. The original is here.