[myrmidon]

There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already.

IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (and resulting demographic problems) is that the state has invalidated/replaced all the economical gain that families got from children (cheap "workers" and elder care), but the chld-related costs to families have only increased.

Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers, but economical incentives are not aligned at all; children cost their parents a lot, society reaps all the benefits, but does not compensate parents enough economically.

[hobofan]

You are not wrong. But the reality of this government in Germany is that they are also cutting down on the assistance that parents receive.

With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.

[robocat]

> the elderly that have created this mess

Unbalanced... The elderly also created most of the infrastructure everyone depends upon.

When you get to be elderly, it will be your turn to be blamed.

[_DeadFred_]

In the US at least the majority of current elderly (boomers) fought tooth and nail against infrastructure improvements, and when they did happen often funded them with debt to pass the cost off to someone else. The Greatest Generation (WW2) and Silent Generation did the heavy lifting here.

[robocat]

The US is an economy - what matters is the resource flows within each day or year.

I sincerely hope you've had your 2.4 kids to support yourself - that's what the boomers managed and it is hard to measure in dollars or debt. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281453

The idea of monetary debt between generations is just hand-waving (apart from the issue of trying to "color" a dollar via creative government accounting).

Note that government lending in other countries is different when borrowed in foreign currencies e.g. USD or Yuan (ask anyone living in bankrupted countries).

The boomers are dying (20% gone so far) - - in a few decades everyone else will have inherited everything, and the blame will shift to another name.

[ProfessorLayton]

>I sincerely hope you've had your 2.4 kids to support yourself. that's what the boomers managed and it is hard to measure in dollars or debt.

Oh you mean the same boomers that pulled the latter up behind them via NIMBYism that caused housing prices to explode, starved education funding and made universities expensive, and pushed back on universal healthcare while also getting tax-funded healthcare themselves?

Now they're mad we don't want to have more kids to fund their elderly care and retirement? Those boomers?

[myrmidon]

IMO Germany is in a pretty tough spot, and lots of countries will run into similar problems because of demographics.

It is very difficult to diminish pension benefits that were promised 30 years ago (when the worker/retiree ration was 4:1 instead of like 2:1) and almost half your voters would be affected (>40% of voters are over 60).

Any "solution" is going to hurt and feel unfair to a bunch of people and it is very difficult to make "young-people-politics" when most of your voters are old (problems probably need to escalate more to achieve approval for anything that financially hurts retirees).

People sometimes like to point at wealth disparity as a real root cause for the floundering pension/elder care system, but even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade, so no easy solution from that direction, either.

[triceratops]

> even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade

This is a very naive take that assumes wealth gets turned into pallets of cash and those pallets get fed into a furnace when the cash is spent. None of that is true.

Disowning the richest 10% of Germans would be economically disastrous. Levying a 1% wealth tax, payable in the form of assets rather than cash, would produce a very different outcome. The assets should go into a sovereign wealth fund run by some passive algorithm, and its returns must be used solely to reduce income taxes.

[myrmidon]

My point is that this is not a case of "the rich took all the money so we can no longer pay decent pensions", even stripping "the rich" of everything couldnt prop the system up for long at all.

I'm very much in favor of more progressive/capital gains taxation but thats not gonna fix this problem.

[triceratops]

> stripping "the rich" of everything couldnt prop the system up for long at all

I'd encourage you to think about what this actually means. When you say "stripping the rich of everything", what do you imagine happens to the factories and labs and patents and copyrights? Do they immediately cease to provide enough food and shelter and clothing for everyone just because they changed hands?

The problem with actually doing it is that this is textbook communism. Communism suffers from low productivity and competitiveness. It leads to or requires totalitarianism. It's a dead-end. We already know this.

> [more taxation]'s not gonna fix this problem.

I didn't say "more taxation". I argued for a different type of tax system altogether. We haven't really tried more taxation. And we definitely haven't tried what I proposed.

"This problem", namely the problem of people having fewer children, has many causes. One of them is that most households need two earners just to stay afloat*. Taking care of kids after a hard day at work for both parents is hard. The current financial incentives for having children don't come close to compensating for this penalty in time/energy/lost wages.

* Obviously there are others: For instance, Netflix is way more fun than cooking dinner only to watch your kids not eat anything.

[myrmidon]

I'm not arguing against wealth taxation, my point is just that the amount you can extract that way is too small relative to pensions, even under extremely generous assumptions (in Germany, you'd need a ~7% yearly tax on all wealth to pay for pensions, which would be super insane compared to the income-based scheme used now).

The narrative "rich people took/take all the money that's needed for pension funding" is simply incorrect, and that is what I primarily wanted to argue against (the pension funding problem is an order of magnitude bigger than wealth inequality right now).

[Projectiboga]

Some couples are infertile so this discriminates against them.

[medvezhenok]

Soviet Union had childlessness tax, but you were exempt if you could prove infertility

[ghusto]

Adoption.

[Jamesbeam]

I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make.

But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.

Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?

It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.

[dchftcs]

Lots of things that are wrong are also imposed on parents. Not to say involuntarily childless people are to be blamed for anything, or that two wrongs make a right, but society is immensely misaligned against having children, and forced charity already exists in various forms whether you like it.

But honestly, developed countries not having children itself isn't that bad a thing. I feel that our existence and the hedonistic treadmill drains too many scarce resources, and population growth should not last long. On the other hand, it seems societies still gain productivity in spite of the slow population growth. There should be plenty of slack for everyone, so that middle-class parents don't feel like they are constantly in a deathmarch, and voluntarily childless people don't need to be pressured. There's an immense misallocation of resources that is hard to solve, and you end up seeing proposals like this.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

A parent has to pay for the dentist of the child (and so much more).

But more importantly, people die before enjoying their pension and they don't get a refund.

[djoldman]

> Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers

It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.

A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.

All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.

[myrmidon]

This only applies in a steady state.

If your populations shrinks quickly, you end up needing to run the infrastructure (and elder care!) for a whole country with too few working-age people.

This is a massive problem, and some incentive complexity to avoid it is certainly worth it.

[7bit]

The approach is completely backwards. You incentivise having kids, not punish those who do not have kids or worse, those who can't get kids.

[spwa4]

You forget the problem that's being solved here. It's not how to incentivize having kids. It's how to increase taxes while reducing pensions. Increasing the obligations of everyone currently working while decreasing what the state provides at the same time.

The full details are: this is an additional 2.5% non-progressive income tax, two thirds paid by employers, one third by employees.

Other "currently proposed" changes:

Active aging: the elderly need to keep working longer.

Elderly care is pushed onto families.

Elderly care is now much less a right that an individual can enforce. This changes the situation to that the state must put in efforts to care for elderly rather than giving individuals the right to elderly care. Right now an elderly person can sue the government if they fail to provide.

Other various rights are being curtailed. Such as the right to "digital inclusion". The state's obligation to provide access to care offline is dropped.

[soco]

And why wouldn't the elderly need to keep working longer? They did benefit from all the new medical stuff extending their active lives, so how about giving back by working a few years more? It's also their own decision to have less children, thus less workers, and also they generally don't want more immigrants, so there - it's either more work, or magic. And we don't know how to do magic.

[skeledrew]

Elderly means old enough for certain classes of issues to pop up that makes continuing to work less feasible. There's only so much more years that can be added before their contributions become absolutely net negative. Unless we also find general medical solutions to freeze/reverse the issues.

[spwa4]

You mean spend more money on the elderly? You seem to misunderstand the purpose of this whole exercise.

I will point out that the tax increase being proposed here is, of course, ALSO extra money for the state that people are expected to pay in trade for elderly care that the state, of course, ALSO doesn't have the money to deliver when it's needed. In other words, it's demanding the general population pays for a service now, a service math dictates they will never receive.

Oh AND the state is further defunding child care, schools, universities, ... which of course is also being put forward as "families need to take more responsibility".

[skeledrew]

And your solution is? The problem is many eldery are currently going without sufficient care. How do you address that?

[spwa4]

They voted and paid taxes based on a deal that was presented to them, in writing. Now the deal is being changed.

[soco]

Deals kept changing, both the economy and politics never kept the same line over time. We even vote every few years for a deal presented in writing and it never turns out as written, so I'm not sure why some folks could claim with a straight face whatever historical promise. And let's be honest, there was never a "written deal", ever - what you mention here is simply an expectation building up for the last decades and currently ebbing down.

[spwa4]

My father was a teacher, a public servant. At one point he showed me "the deal in writing". Signed by the director of the school. It had a reference to the law, but everything was copied into the contract. The pension plan, including the age he would be allowed to go onto pension, how sick days are handled, how holidays are handled, how long-term illness would be handles, sickness insurance, what was covered, how ... It was over 20 pages, which was certainly not the norm for a contract in the 70s.

They updated the law and the contract meant nothing. I mean, he and other teachers occasionally, through long term and sometimes very wide strikes, got some new policy struck down. But never through the courts. They won several court cases against the government, mind you, that was not the problem. But the government simply voted in a new law, including a stipulation that the court case result meant nothing (because of course a bunch of people were owed back pay due to the court's decision. Out of over 10.000 teachers that got court judgements against the government, TWO got paid what the contract explicitly said over 1 million teachers had a right to)

[thefz]

What about taxing the rich instead of putting yet another burden on the young.

[utilize1808]

If there are no young people to produce resources and care, your money is just numbers.

[bigballsbjorn]

again, the problem is demographic. people like you are not able to see beyond the first order effects. if you finance the social system from the rich you will fundamentally not fix the issue. you can't eat euros.

[thefz]

Can't even eat babies (unless you visited a certain disgraced financier's island)

[lokar]

Society pays a lot for children as well. Including members without children.

[myrmidon]

Yes, but not commensurately.

A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state.

And the public paying for education is not a subsidy for parents in my view, but an investment into the children, i.e. future taxpayers (=> the parents don't really gain from that).

[lokar]

I think you are arguing inconsistently here. You can't claim at the same time that we should recognize all of the benefits of children (in their adulthood) and at the same time not recognize the cost to society to educate them. It's a subsidy, a wise subsidy and money well spent, but it's still a cost.

[myrmidon]

My point is: Society itself recoups the investment into education very easily (from competent taxpaying workers some years later), but the main cost of raising children is paid by parents, and they don't get back anything (economically).

All the benefits that used to be there (adolescents helping with farm/work, children taking care of aging parents) became more and more irrelevant, but general costs of raising children (to parents) have not decreased at all (and "reputational" cost of just skipping parenthood is at rock bottom, too, so that is no longer pushing prospective parents towards economically irrational decisions, either).

[thefz]

> A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state.

Yet another reason for others not to chip in your bad ROI decisions then

[utilize1808]

The fact that birth rate is so low in countries with good social security safe net suggests that the society isn't paying enough.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Not necessarily. It's possible that no amount of money would solve this problem. Birth control inherently broke the previously built evolutionary mechanism that insured that the extremely strong built in desire for sex would result in kids. That's no longer the case, and a lot of people would decide to not have kids even if money were no object.

As you point out, Finland famously has incredible family support, and also a birth rate under 1.3.

[theragra]

Afaik according to research, the only thing that helps is

1. Lump sum, pretty big (like year worth of salary or close) payment on birth

2. Works for first child only.

That's it. So, it kinda works, but very limited. Increasing sum did not increase birthrates, if I remember correctly.

[myrmidon]

This sounds extremely plausible to me, but I would be very careful about conclusions from such studies, because I believe the general expectations of society as a whole regarding child-raising matter a lot and you can't easily quantify that.

Anecdotally, when my grandmother did not birth a child for two consecutive years in her thirties the village priest came to investigate (!!). Expectations have shifted massively since, and the single/dink lifestyle is way more "acceptable" now.

[lokar]

And often the payment merely changes the timing of the child

[dude250711]

E.g. they have "free" higher education in Germany isn't it? Maybe not even just for domestic students?

[lokar]

I know a big factor in Korea is social relationships between the genders (expectations about housework, childcare, etc). The current arrangements are not attractive to many women.

How is it in Germany? I would guess better

[em-bee]

not much. the reality is that women still take a hit on their potential careers and income, and are expected to do most of the childcare work. another problem that i see not only in germany is that men are not trusted with children or being capable of doing housework.

also on the attractiveness for women, germany being less traditional means that more women are willing to break traditions, so even if the situation there is better for them, women are still less interested, which means the effect in the end is the same.

[lokar]

A mismatch between expectations (of women) and the current status (of men, and society).

[djvdq]

People who don't ride trains also pay taxes for rail.

People who are not flying are also financing airports from taxes.

This is why butthurt "childless pay taxes for schools but not using them" is super stupid