Seconding this. It's very expensive to have a child in the US. It can easily cost thousands of dollars. And you'll have to spend a lot of time fighting different charges with the insurance company post birth because there is a 100% chance they'll deny something that should be covered. We could've fixed this with a single-payer system but instead we doubled down on the worst aspect of our health care system and enshrined private insurance companies into the law. Predictably, they are taking advantage of it.

> The pensions, the tax system, the politician's salaries and kickbacks, they can all burn.

A pretty straightforward fix would be to make pension eligibility contingent on fertility: no kids, no pension benefit. Of course, you'd still have to pay into the system, regardless.

That's a recipe for a generation of kids warped and broken by being raised by parents who only see them as a cash cow. It's a terrible idea.

> That's a recipe for a generation of kids warped and broken by being raised by parents who only see them as a cash cow.

No, unless everyone who currently chooses not to have children is a sociopath.

There are less black and white positions: that would incentivize people settling for relationships they have doubts about or to stay in failing ones (being a single parent is not easy), and it’d be especially cruel to anyone with fertility issues. As social policies go it’d be much easier to simply allow more immigration.

> There are less black and white positions: that would incentivize people settling for relationships they have doubts about or to stay in failing ones (being a single parent is not easy),

And if it does that, so what? Is perfectionism really that important?

And honestly, my proposal isn't so much about increasing the birthrate, but preventing a certain kind of freeloading ("The pensions...they can all burn"). Totally make the conscious choice to go child-free, just understand if you do you may not be able to retire.

> and it’d be especially cruel to anyone with fertility issues.

And if that's really an issue, which I'm not convinced of, because policies are invariably "cruel" like that in innumerable ways, you could always carve out an exception for people who've attempted fertility treatments.

> As social policies go it’d be much easier to simply allow more immigration.

Except that probably would be even more cruel, since it falsely hand-waves that there's enough high fertility elsewhere to sustain a low fertility rich country. It turns out there isn't, so what you proposal requires is either: 1) export the labor shortage to poorer countries that are less equipped to handle it, or 2) maintain crushing poverty in many countries to turn them into baby factories for the immigration solution.

One could start buying unwanted fertility from the childfree using carbon credits for the kids they’d never have, investing the lump sum, to attempt to tip the scale back. There are economic tools available if intentionally choosing not to have kids is weaponized by nation states through policy for exploitation.

Love this. Then our leaders' true views of us as cattle will be out wide in the open.

> Love this. Then our leaders' true views of us as cattle will be out wide in the open.

Wow, you misunderstood that pretty badly.

Unless you can make a money-golem, a pile of cash can't take care of you in your old age, labor will. If you haven't had kids, it means you haven't paid into the future labor pool, and it would therefore be unfair for you to withdraw from it once labor becomes too constrained. To do otherwise would be like paying out full pensions to people who never paid a dime into the system.

You already pay in by working during your productive years. You’re arguing for a pyramid scheme where you pay for both generations before you and the ones who come after. Better to simply opt out if you’re going to be squeezed economically for a suboptimal socioeconomic system. You’re just livestock that didn’t consent to be here.

I agree that this is a bad idea, but you should note that Social Security in the US is already a pyramid scheme. That's the entire reason these articles about the fertility rate are a thing -- there aren't enough able bodied people being born to cover Social Security for the people aging out of the workforce in 20 years.

Indeed, population ballooned [1] and everyone thought the gravy train of growth was never going to end. Sucks to discover the future isn’t going to be better than the past. Quality of life was artificially inflated, and the bill coming due will be unpleasant.

Regardless, individuals must be empowered to live their best life (if they choose to be childfree) [2] [3] [4] [5], even if it breaks the entrenched system.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population

[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/young-adult-sterilization-i...

[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230208-the-adults-cel...

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...

> You’re arguing for a pyramid scheme where you pay for both generations before you and the ones who come after.

The system I'm starting to conceive doesn't seem like a pyramid scheme, but rather something more balanced than what we have now:

1. You contribute into the pension system to support your parents (through a pension), as a societal obligation. After all, they more likely than not supported you when you needed it.

2. You contribute labor to the next generation of society, in the form of children, to make a claim to the society's, labor-dependent, old-age support programs (funded through point 1). Otherwise, you're on your own to support yourself, which would probably consist of working well into what we currently consider the "retirement years," and/or "choosing" euthanasia when that is no longer possible.

> You’re just livestock that didn’t consent to be here.

No one ever consented to "be here," and it would be impossible to do so. That's just a fact of life.