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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
I'm curious, would you support funding to help anyone willing to homeschooled their child as an alternative solution here?
I often hear similar arguments for the need to help parents offload certain portions of childcare so they can go to work, I don't know that I've ever really heard any meaningful push to help parents offload work so they can raise their children full-time.
No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids?
Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one parent to stay at home with 1 or 2 kids, how the hell is society going to pay for that? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Raising children full-time is a luxury. It has to be paid for by one family member (usually the husband) working enough to pay for the entire family expenses, or keeping this term short enough that savings can be used until the kid is old enough that the parent can go back to work. There simply isn't enough money to tax people, then pay a portion of that back to those same people so they can stay at home.
I ask because, to me, the idea that we should be heavily subsidizing the removal of parents from a child's life while considering parents being more involved a luxury feels very backwards.
You seem to have a base assumption that most people are bad parents and kids would be better off being raised by professionals. You also seem to have an assumption that both you and the state have the right to decide what is best for someone else's child. Maybe those are commonly held assumptions, but I definitely disagree with them and would be concerned that both could lead to a society that looks eerily similar to the Soviet Union.
Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off.
There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency
Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time.
Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric.
Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved.
We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options!
But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed)
And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.
Homeschooling can be pooled similarly to public schooling though. Historically it has been commonplace for a local community on the scale of a neighborhood to have their own schoolhouse run by parents in the community. This definitely falls outside of the modern public schooling model but handles the concern of an extremely low student to teacher ratio.
Is it fair to say you'd be on board with this kind of setup, where its effectively home schooling pooled to free up more parents to enter the workforce?
Indeed. But can you supplement a teacher with a focused MOOC, such that children receive a better education at a cheaper overall cost?
I'm less convinced that's impossible. E.g. better general classroom teacher + MOOC for math focus.
I know Khan videos were better-taught than some of my primary math courses...
Having specialized teachers, all being expected to generate their own lesson plans (based on local standards/templates, if existent), on very similar material, all across the country... doesn't seem like an efficient use of their skills.
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.