[fallingfrog]

Well, these are good points.

But still, I think if it became necessary, governments could offer a one time cash payment of 50,000 dollars per child and that would send birth rates up pretty fast. That’s not free though. I see what you’re saying about it being a different situation now, and you’re right, it is.

There are about 4,000,000 live births in the USA every year; paying 50,000 for each of them would cost 200 billion, which is less than a third of the military budget, not cheap, but doable.

[riffraff]

this is more or less what Hungary does: you get a lot of stuff for making kids, e.g. you get 10M HUF (~$35k) if you make a third child, and 3MHUF (~$9k) to buy a car. This is of course much more significant in Hungary than in the US due to cost of life.

But it does not seem to have (yet) significantly impacted population decline for now.