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Comment by IG_Semmelweiss | Hacker News Reader

Do.you have kids?

"Having space and feeling like they can give them a better future" is about 1 thing.

Money

If you eliminated any of income taxes, or a combination of SS + reducing deficit spending (inflation), or the % of income going to heakthcare by eliminating its employee and employee subsidies (Medicares), there would be a populatiom boom.

All you need to do is free people from having to make money, to meet basic needs. And people Will have children again.

Instead, we have a social policy that everyone just needs to work in order to pay for the sins (and pleasure) of their previous generation.

Yes. Those Caribbean cruises , FL homes & racetrack bets, are paid by the empty silence of hospital newborn wards across the country.

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> All you need to do is free people from having to make money, to meet basic needs. And people Will have children again.

This meme needs to die. People in poorer countries have more children than people in rich countries. Within countries poorer communities have more children than richer ones. There might be some exceptions but this broadly holds true across the world.

two words

opportunity cost.

the opportunity cost of a parent in the 3rd world is negligible. income is very low as it is. theres not.much to do to make $$.

therefore, the benefit of parenting is MUCH higher, and the cost of raising a kid itself is low to zero , and in some cases positive (kids work on fielda or take care of siblings, therefore ROI is positive).

contrasts this with USA, where the opportunity cost of a developer to raise a kid is in the 200k level. ok so now what about alternatives for parenting?

well everything is regulated (daycare, schooling , extracurriculars), or hyperinflates (real estate), and every activity carriea an institutionalized bloat of an effective ponzi...to the benefit of the prior generation seniors in every activity.

So now what do you do? If raising kids is negative ROI and doing it yourself has a huge opportunity cost?

Is it a coincidence that wealthy families in wealthy contries like in Singapore, have more kids on average?

How do you explain that aberration?

I think we need to change the income tax code to massively incentivize people to get married and have kids. I’d support increasing the tax rate pretty massively and then introducing a tax deduction of like $20k per kid.

For instance a couple with 3 kids and a home would have around $70k-$100k in deductions (60k kids, 10k-40k in state/local taxes etc). If they had an income of $120k it would be adjusted to like $30k and they’d pay essentially no taxes.

It’s a deduction and not a credit specifically so people that the state isn’t incentivizing clients of the state to have kids.

Why stop there?

Since you believe that human reproduction is a de-facto property of the state, simply calculate how many women should have babies, for optimal society, and force them to?

No need to muck around with some tax incentives. Redistribute the true source "commodity".

As a bonus, if you're high up enough, you might even get to choose who mates with whom.

There might be a pretty huge gap between incentivizing responsible people to create families and own property (these are very good things for a country and society) and forcing women to reproduce and with whomever the government assigns to them.

"Responsible people"

What I mean by that is using a deduction, not a credit. You aren’t paying people to have kids but rather incentivizing people that are financially independent by lowering their current tax burden while they have kids <18. Their surplus of kids will more than make up the tax revenue down the road.

For poor people you continue to focus on helping with basics (food and shelter), family planning measures, and up-skilling towards becoming independent. Since a deduction probably isn’t helpful in these cases, a tax credit would continue to exist.

Hungary tried exactly that (basically 55-60k EUR/USD free to each couple that said they want 3 kids plus 0% income tax for life for mums) but it didn't work. It was a 0.8% blip but that's it. Maybe it would be different in the US because in europe healthcare and education is already "free".

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