[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.

[snapplebobapple]

sigh Very much true and very much not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes. If you like progressive taxation then the onus is on you to justify your claims that applying the exact same regime to another characteristic (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement) Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not (you've failed to do this btw because you can't because they are either both totalitarian or both not because they are the exact same premise).

Also, you fail to appreciate what tax penalties look like. This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file. It was said partially in jest, but it is actually a good policy if you can price it low enough that it doesn't cause migration but high enough that it does cause more kids.