[zdragnar]

Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.

The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.

A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.

[snapplebobapple]

Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids

[dumberquestions]

25 is an odd choice, you incentivise them to have children but you're also making it more difficult for them to do so, and not enough will have children before 25. 30 or even 35 would make more sense.

[M95D]

What about freedom?

[snapplebobapple]

If the government can charge me a higher rate of tax because I am not a useless turd with no marketable skills then charging people more for failing to keep population at or above replacement is also not an infringement of freedom. While we are talking about freedom, have you looked at what happens to societies when population growth rates collapse? They tend to not stay societies for very many generations after that. They tend to get invaded and added to an empire that still has a positive population growth rate, or they collapse internally due to the weight of unfullfillable promises and infighting over the shrinking pie and get picked off at the edges. In that regard, policy to preserve the birth rate is a freedom enhancing choice if you think our current society is free. I personally think it's not that great but everything else is pretty bad, so it's the best of a bad situation choice, which makes it worth preserving.

[M95D]

Sound like a totalitarian regime to me. Look at which countries already tried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness These were all communist countries with at least an intention/policy of providing social services for those children: free health, free education, guaranteed job after that, afordable or even free housing, etc.

USA has none of those. The rich will have a choice; the poor won't. And we already know that children of the poor tend to stay poor and the more children the are, the poorer they'll be. It will be a generation of poor with no hope of escape.

Then there's the slippery slope: What stops the government from increasing the tax to severe punishment levels or levels completely unafordable by anyone?

[snapplebobapple]

The taxation scheme on not being a useless turd is closer to a totalitarian regime than taxing people for not having kids is.

[M95D]

Whataboutism and not true.

[bdangubic]

no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.

[zdragnar]

Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.

Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.

Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.

Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...

[bdangubic]

I was commenting on

> A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such.

And not anything political. United States is so fucked beyond repair when even commenting on birth rates turns into “being on the left politically”

[zdragnar]

Well, you proposed fertility treatments in a discussion on an article entitled "Falling fertility on the left as a key driver of US birth decline" so I had wrongly assumed you were engaging with that conversation.

We're taking two different approaches to the same problem. I suggested something that will change attitudes (though I will concede it would be only a first step, not sufficient on its own) whereas you suggested making medical intervention for fertility cheaper for patients.

Hence, my final line was a bit of a tongue in cheek remark on which of the two approaches was more likely to have an impact on the article's thesis.