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>I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children Yeah, and many people in the US would b

>I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children Yeah, and many people in the US would be way more eager to do that had we had: - affordable housing - minimum wage that allows a single parent to support themselves - universal healthcare - mandated paid (and then, unpaid) parental leave - free childcare - substancial financial assistance to new parents - walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own - widely available after-school programs - free college education ...you get the drift. Dating isn't the bottleneck here.

skrbjc 3y ago
Most people in the past and in the current day have none of that and still have children. The most well-developed and stable countries will most of what you laid out have some of the lowest birth rates.
claytongulick 3y ago
What tax rate do you think would be required to support those programs? How much would you have left over for raising children?
- delecti 3y ago
  I dunno, why not ask most of Europe. Those are not radical policy suggestions.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  > What tax rate do you think would be required to support those programs? I guess the middle class needs to pay 45% effective tax rate on all income. And, upper incomes would need to pay about 55% effective tax rate. > How much would you have left over for raising children? How much more do you need if you have all of those benefits? Not much.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway743 3y ago
  Ending wasteful spending of our tax dollars on gov contractors and letting them slide with huge overcharges, partly due to use-it-or-lose it budgeting, would help in a big way. Ending this shit budgeting practice would also be big. Nevermind how much of our tax money goes towards the MIC. Rather see our money go towards these programs to help one another, over bombs to tear people apart.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    Optimizing spending and cutting waste only gets so far, and its only a short term fix. At the end of the day the system needs to include a sustainable model for one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else, in this case that segment is single parents. With many western countries also seeing a large growth in the retired population, that leaves a segment of the population heavily subsidizing the elderly and single parents, along with all other government programs and similar groups that need help (like the poor, students, those too sick to work, etc)
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      > one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else When you frame it that way, you're setting it up to fail, asking "everyone else" to pay tax dollars to support "one". How about instead: one of the population (namely ultra-wealthy people and businesses) subsidizing everyone else. Now, it's the larger "everyone else" who is benefitting, at the expense of a small group who should hold less democratic power due to its size. I'm not saying you're doing this but phrases like the one quoted above are sometimes used to divide the "everyone else" group against each other, in order to erode support for programs that ultimately benefit them.
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        I totally get that framing can make a difference, unfortunately in politics it often seems to be the largest factor. If the system is that fragile, though, it does make me question if its the right answer. People that can should be willing to help subsidize those in need because they see it as the right thing to do, not because they're convinced by a story that may be more spin or even a hit of gas lighting "for the greater good." That said, with regards to dividing "everyone else" with such phrases, I wish politicians hadn't done so well leveraging phrases that best explain a program as divisive language. It is one part of the population subsidizing others, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. Politicians get involved, though and such phrases become weapons to keep "everyone else" divided and unaware how similar we all are. If you want to stay in power, just keep your people fighting themselves so they never look up.
- herbst 3y ago
  The EU is funding game studious and other tech companies with millions right now. It just happened nobody seems to have proposed the right idea yet.
tomp 3y ago
Sounds like a few European countries. But! Turns out it doesn't work. At all.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though. Or remove old age benefits, and make it so you might only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you. That would put long term consequences more into view and link costs and benefits.
  - bunabhucan 3y ago
    >only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you Society would rather take their chances with Gen Y and Millenials than open that pandoras box.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      In countries with solidary pension systems you can surely bind retirement benefits to number of children. The issue being, they try to avoid paying more than the bare minimum anyway and if you pay less, that means dead old homeless people on the street. Would be a great advertisement to having children, thoug. In my coutry, most people under 45 (who could actually bear children) doubt they will see any retirement ever. Of course that affects their desire for procreation as well.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    > There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though. I always thought this was closer to fair. If (expected cost of child) >> (expected benefits for having child), are we really surprised that a lot of people decide not to? If you want to look at the results when that changes to == or <, look at lower income families, where the US incentives are higher (additional low income-qualified programs + absolute tax breaks are more valuable) and child costs lower (greater use of public education and facilities). But... given the nature of a free market, I expect adjusting the benefits for higher-income people would be cost-prohibitive.
shiroiushi 3y ago
>- free childcare Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors. >- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own This would be great, but most Americans don't want this. They sure as hell aren't voting for it, and achieving it would require basically bulldozing most American cities. Americans have built themselves, ever since the end of WWII, a country and infrastructure that's entirely incompatible with the lifestyle you advocate here. I live in Tokyo now, and it's exactly what you're advocating here, but I simply can't imagine America somehow becoming like this in my lifetime. (It's one of the main reasons I came here.) Anyway, as other posters have noted, other countries have much of what you want here, and their fertility rates are quite poor, worse than the US in fact. If you really want to get people to have more children, you need to force society back to the "good old days", where women have far fewer rights, divorce is highly stigmatized, being non-religious or non-Christian is highly stigmatized, contraception is generally non-available, women basically can't have jobs except for schoolteachers (and only until they're married) or maids and need to just find a husband and become a SAHM, etc. Just look at the societies with high fertility, but contemporary and historically: they're absolutely horrible for women's rights. High fertility and large families have always been accomplished on the backs of oppressed women (and I'm not sure it was all that great for most men either).
- ethbr1 3y ago
  >>- free childcare > Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education. Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this. Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).
  - shiroiushi 3y ago
    Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too. I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.
_heimdall 3y ago
That sounds very, very expensive. Assuming that the single parents that would most need the help here similarly can't afford the taxes to fund these programs, who is paying for and subsidizing it? If its a massive shift towards corporate taxes, I could probably get behind that.

skrbjc 3y ago

Most people in the past and in the current day have none of that and still have children. The most well-developed and stable countries will most of what you laid out have some of the lowest birth rates.

claytongulick 3y ago

What tax rate do you think would be required to support those programs? How much would you have left over for raising children?

delecti 3y ago
I dunno, why not ask most of Europe. Those are not radical policy suggestions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway2037 3y ago
> What tax rate do you think would be required to support those programs? I guess the middle class needs to pay 45% effective tax rate on all income. And, upper incomes would need to pay about 55% effective tax rate. > How much would you have left over for raising children? How much more do you need if you have all of those benefits? Not much.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway743 3y ago
Ending wasteful spending of our tax dollars on gov contractors and letting them slide with huge overcharges, partly due to use-it-or-lose it budgeting, would help in a big way. Ending this shit budgeting practice would also be big. Nevermind how much of our tax money goes towards the MIC. Rather see our money go towards these programs to help one another, over bombs to tear people apart.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Optimizing spending and cutting waste only gets so far, and its only a short term fix. At the end of the day the system needs to include a sustainable model for one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else, in this case that segment is single parents. With many western countries also seeing a large growth in the retired population, that leaves a segment of the population heavily subsidizing the elderly and single parents, along with all other government programs and similar groups that need help (like the poor, students, those too sick to work, etc)
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    > one of the population to be subsidized by everyone else When you frame it that way, you're setting it up to fail, asking "everyone else" to pay tax dollars to support "one". How about instead: one of the population (namely ultra-wealthy people and businesses) subsidizing everyone else. Now, it's the larger "everyone else" who is benefitting, at the expense of a small group who should hold less democratic power due to its size. I'm not saying you're doing this but phrases like the one quoted above are sometimes used to divide the "everyone else" group against each other, in order to erode support for programs that ultimately benefit them.
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      I totally get that framing can make a difference, unfortunately in politics it often seems to be the largest factor. If the system is that fragile, though, it does make me question if its the right answer. People that can should be willing to help subsidize those in need because they see it as the right thing to do, not because they're convinced by a story that may be more spin or even a hit of gas lighting "for the greater good." That said, with regards to dividing "everyone else" with such phrases, I wish politicians hadn't done so well leveraging phrases that best explain a program as divisive language. It is one part of the population subsidizing others, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. Politicians get involved, though and such phrases become weapons to keep "everyone else" divided and unaware how similar we all are. If you want to stay in power, just keep your people fighting themselves so they never look up.
herbst 3y ago
The EU is funding game studious and other tech companies with millions right now. It just happened nobody seems to have proposed the right idea yet.

tomp 3y ago

Sounds like a few European countries. But! Turns out it doesn't work. At all.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though. Or remove old age benefits, and make it so you might only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you. That would put long term consequences more into view and link costs and benefits.
- bunabhucan 3y ago
  >only get them directly from your kids if the kids are willing to support you Society would rather take their chances with Gen Y and Millenials than open that pandoras box.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    In countries with solidary pension systems you can surely bind retirement benefits to number of children. The issue being, they try to avoid paying more than the bare minimum anyway and if you pay less, that means dead old homeless people on the street. Would be a great advertisement to having children, thoug. In my coutry, most people under 45 (who could actually bear children) doubt they will see any retirement ever. Of course that affects their desire for procreation as well.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > There should be an auction system for women to accept bids from the government to have kids. Might not get the type of parents society wants though. I always thought this was closer to fair. If (expected cost of child) >> (expected benefits for having child), are we really surprised that a lot of people decide not to? If you want to look at the results when that changes to == or <, look at lower income families, where the US incentives are higher (additional low income-qualified programs + absolute tax breaks are more valuable) and child costs lower (greater use of public education and facilities). But... given the nature of a free market, I expect adjusting the benefits for higher-income people would be cost-prohibitive.

shiroiushi 3y ago

>- free childcare Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? There's already a labor shortage, and presumably you want to make sure child-care workers are highly vetted. On top of this, with an aging population, there's a greater need for care workers for seniors, and here there's a lot of problems with these workers abusing the seniors. >- walkable safe environments, transportation, and regulations that allow children to move around on their own This would be great, but most Americans don't want this. They sure as hell aren't voting for it, and achieving it would require basically bulldozing most American cities. Americans have built themselves, ever since the end of WWII, a country and infrastructure that's entirely incompatible with the lifestyle you advocate here. I live in Tokyo now, and it's exactly what you're advocating here, but I simply can't imagine America somehow becoming like this in my lifetime. (It's one of the main reasons I came here.) Anyway, as other posters have noted, other countries have much of what you want here, and their fertility rates are quite poor, worse than the US in fact. If you really want to get people to have more children, you need to force society back to the "good old days", where women have far fewer rights, divorce is highly stigmatized, being non-religious or non-Christian is highly stigmatized, contraception is generally non-available, women basically can't have jobs except for schoolteachers (and only until they're married) or maids and need to just find a husband and become a SAHM, etc. Just look at the societies with high fertility, but contemporary and historically: they're absolutely horrible for women's rights. High fertility and large families have always been accomplished on the backs of oppressed women (and I'm not sure it was all that great for most men either).

ethbr1 3y ago
>>- free childcare > Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education. Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this. Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  Um, I don't think this answers my question. Online courses aren't a substitute for early-childhood daycare. You have to have actual people present in-person to do these jobs, and people willing to do these jobs for the wages offered are in short supply, or are people you really don't want watching your kids. This also extends, as you seem to say, to other jobs with high contact with young children, like elementary school teachers. There's a shortage of them too. I suppose increasing salaries a lot might help, but we seem to be talking about government workers here, so that seems unlikely to happen.

_heimdall 3y ago

That sounds very, very expensive. Assuming that the single parents that would most need the help here similarly can't afford the taxes to fund these programs, who is paying for and subsidizing it? If its a massive shift towards corporate taxes, I could probably get behind that.