I must admit, my high school had two homecoming "princesses" from each class: one white and one black. I've always assumed that they dropped it after a while (my class was the first integrated class to go all the way through my high school (in the 80s, it's all rather depressing) and there was a lot of weird stuff with race going on in school policies), but there was none of that shenanigans with class officers or one's race barring anyone from doing something. That's just, words fail me.

"When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we're seeing that in the Great Recession today," said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

There's also the fact that I've seen that for people near or at the poverty line, childcare costs are %50 of income, even above that it's something like %25.

for people near or at the poverty line, childcare costs are %50 of income

Yikes! I did not know that.

How are they even allowed to get away with that? How is that not illegal?

I can vouch for that. My annual child care costs have always run around $12K; sometimes more.

That's like...a car a year!

My annual child care costs have always run around $12K; sometimes more.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

$12K

::weeps::

That's like...a car a year!

They are very expensive.

Major cities worse, of course, poor Sparky. (Athens GA, $125 a week per kid is standard; Durham NC major centers were $1200-$1400 a month for an infant. I remained stunned by how cheap it is down here.)