It is. I was really surprised at the amount. I wonder whether it comes down to demand (ie not enough foster families so increase the funding until you hit a sweet spot) or whether fostering requires that much income (especially since a lot of kids are brought up on something like a quarter of that amount).

Healthcare load I'm probably fine with, however I don't know what I should be tax to pay child benefit to others.
In my head it's like making blind people pay TV license.

You know they actually do do that, right?

Yes but tax payers also benefited from child benefit when they were younger, even if they did not get the money personally. It is a matter of swings and roundabouts. Blind people can get a discount but they still have to pay if the full amount if they have visitors.

I think tax is a mess though. Either children are good and we pay tax benefits to families and help people conceive or children aren't that useful and we pay neither.

Surely the point of tax is that we all contribute for the good of the country as a whole. Sure, some taxes are aimed for funding certain relevant chunks of society, but the overall effect is improvement for large chunks of society.

Politicians need children, they are the ones that will be paying for our pensions in the decades to come. Our grandchildren will be paying for our childrens pensions. That is how the state pension operates, one generation is paying for the one ahead of it.

Exactly, though if we want to pick and choice what we pay for we can kiss good bye to many things because "I do not use it"

+1
There are plenty of children who need adopting if people can't have their own.
My wife and I agreed years ago that if we couldn't have our own children naturally, we wouldn't have IVF.

+2 and I had to pay for my vasectomy. The world is already over populated, and as Wolf and l3v1ck said, there are plenty of children that need a good home.

But you're men and you don't understand the power of a woman's womb and ovaries. Some women just have the need to produce a child of their own and nothing else will do.

It's not just women. Men generally want an heir, and often feel hostile towards the progeny of other testicles under their roof. This is less true in younger men as in younger women, but you can witness the hostility in the abuse figures. It's the selfish gene at work.

Note, as with all generalities it does not apply to everyone. I am adopted BTW. Some guys make awesome stepdads and not all stepmothers are wicked. That's the power of conscious thought.

I understand we, both male and female, are supposedly rational thinking beings and not a slave to our instincts. Plenty of women choose not to have children. The biological imperative only counts if you assume we have no higher consciousness than our biology.

If someone wants to have a child, that is an individual decision and therefore an individual responsibility.

Lmao, Jon and I say the same thing so it must be true

I didn't say that couples needed to have children, nor that they needed to have children of their own. Merely that if they can't have kids and want IVF, they should (IMO) pay for it. I recently saw a patient who couldn't have children, fostered loads but decided to go for IVF. Unfortunately for her, I stopped her from doing this. Mainly because I picked up the fact that she had cancer. And it looks terminal.

TBH I feel the same way about people who want to have sex-change operations - it should be entirely privately funded.