Slightly unrelated: Of course children should receive BI. Why won't they?
Of course, legal care must be taken so 10% of a family first child's BI, 33% of second child's BI, 50% for thirg child's BI (and so on) go to some special saving account then used to finance housing or education for those children. Or else a "family" collecting BI for their five children, living off it and then give children a boot after they grow up will become a social problem.
Why not demand a savings account for iphones to make apple rich? The fundamental problem is housing and (excessive) education is a non-productive activity.
I don't see any benefit for society as a whole, in a supply/demand situation, to make relators and school administrators wealthy, while making it financially much more difficult / impossible for kids from small families to compete. What philosophical reasoning behind a kid with only one bro/sis has to live in the poor ghetto or be unable to afford college, in comparison a kid with ten bro/sis will have far more money in his account and be better off for his/her entire life merely because his parents were more fertile? There's an obvious financial reason under this system for college admins and housing builders to encourage huge families, because they'll be able to suck more money out of them.
Another interesting effect of inflating higher ed prices would be the elimination via unaffordability for adult education. No more going back to school to learn X if the tuition for X has been exploded such that only children with 18 years of savings and 10 siblings can afford it. I'm not sure as a cultural trend that using the hammer of .gov policy to discourage lifetime learning (insert cliche about the economy being faster than ever, blah blah) is a wise social goal.
This is to avoid inheritance problem: One- or two-kids families usually can conjure more help for grown-up children than big families, while big families receive more financial help but tend to eat thru it saving nothing. We need to defer some of that financial help till children grow up.
The idea is that you can live and eat without the rigamarole of food stamps/qualifying for a benefit program etc. Introducing complexity such as investment programs and sliding scales for families is not productive and, in my view, counter to the underlying principle.
That's a bonus. the main thing that we get by this is discourage child farms by withholding some of BIG. And we can't just take some part of BIG because that would be, like, human rights violation.
Yes, maybe you won't have children born purely as a cynical money-grabbing exercise. But people who actually want children (aka the people you want having children) will have them regardless.
They may have to budget for them or, I don't know, get a job.
What if only 10% of people actually want children in post-job society? What if birth rate plummets to .5? What's your plan?
I politely bring your africa argument down because neither of us live there and you don't want me raising martian examples.
If basic income only for adults did drive people not to have kids (where you don't get as much welfare as a child costs now, so it is still a net negative today, yet parents have kids anyway) then you would have to then conflate with cultrual and societal rejection of those who don't procreate.
Even if you got into a situation where you had a sub 2 natural birthrate and were concerned about your long term population sustainability, you are looking post 2050 at the earliest. Why not just use genetic engineering to create human templates and just grow generations in labs, a la Brave New World? Why not raise them in some collectively researched and agreed upon environment to try to grow them into creatively thinking intellectual socially capable human beings? Do you really need to organize your social reproductive structure around random pair bonding that gets funky and creates amalgams of the parents, who said parents then raise, with 13 years of state funded daycare in a factory environment?
It is worth noting, though, that African birth rates are still high for a competitive advantage reason - without state elderly welfare programs, you heavily depend on having children that reach adulthood with enough productivity to care for you when you can no longer work fields. It is really modern where some countries don't have children as their retirement account.
It is also worth noting that female empowerment and education more directly correlate with lower birthrates than any amount of fiscal policy. US birthrates haven't changed much between 80s monthly check per baby welfare and modern unemployment programs, but European birthrates tanked when women were getting state guaranteed higher education.
And, as far as I understand, birth rates of the "people who you want to have kids" - people with education living near a large city - have already plummeted. Which is compensated by people who don't quite fit the society but instead reproduce to get something from the society.
Why will there be a cultural and societal rejection? A lot of people don't have babies already (or defer it until it's too late) and it's okay for everyone. Anyway, when you've got a nuclear family or a single person, it's not easy to reject or influence them - they'll give you a finger and start a new WoW gaming session.
And when you've got a society where childless family is the norm, it won't be easy to reverse until it's too late.
If you're ready to breeding humans in labs like cattle, why would you object to wiping out human populations we don't like? Surely, humans have rights, but only the wild ones. Humans grown in labs are property. Random pair bonding is what gives you a society. Anything else gives you androids that usually malfunct.
And the only reason we're talking about BI is because we think that people have rights and we have to cope with those.
What we're not in Africa is a fact. Female empowerment and education is also a fact. Let's think what are our next steps? Hint: it doesn't involve trying to make a few steps back.
And even if you didn't have a cultural reason, incentivizing reproduction is extremely short sighted in an overpopulated world. Uplift Africa rather than reproduce here. The transition to a sustainable population is another topic, but it is an inveitable problem that must be solved, and we are no where near capable of having 8 billion US (or even the less egregous European nations) level of consumption and pollution without running out of resources, livable space, and breathable air well below that threshold.
Do those parents and grandparents really support their grandchildren or they only want them happen and then do nothing about it?
Anyway, children living near a large city are more capable than ever of giving them the finger, and that's what they going to do. See in the concurrent thread, "If they decide to have children" - meaning your default is to not have children.
World may be overpopulated, but is North America overpopulated? I guess it actually isn't. Most of places outside South Asia aren't overpopulated. Having some population growth and economy growth and no fears that social security would implode is better than having decline and being in panic like Japan does.
There's an abstract sense of overpopulated (sometimes described as turn all of texas into Manhattan and abandon the rest of the planet and texas would still only be half full)
And then there's carrying capacity sense of overpopulated. Both food, and west of the Mississippi, water, is actually the limiting reagent (Los Vegas will be simply out of water in a generation or so...). There's already a cultural impedance bump when westerners talk to easterners WRT water "waste".
Mexico is tremendously overpopulated from a carrying capacity standpoint. Canada is in pretty good shape. USA in between.
A reasonable conclusion is making things as simple as humanly possible seems to be reasonable. The longer and more complicated the regs, the more likely to be gamed and screwed up and unintended consequences.
Given that, I'd stick with "Were you breathing this month? Yes, you say? OK here's your basic income... good luck see ya next time". More or less. There are still ways to game it, just much harder.
Children have vastly lower living expenses than adults (or more correctly - the basic marginal cost of adding a child to a household is negligible).
There is no reliable way to ensure that income is actually spent on that child.
It is apparent that some parents (for want of a better word) already see children as a benefits-magnet.
This gives a viable alternative to working a productive job and earning a good wage: pump out 9 kids by the age of 21 and enjoy a sweet $100k salary until they come of age themselves. You may safely neglect them in the meantime and pass any costs thereof, such as incarceration or hospitalisation, onto the state.
I think a much better approach is to limit a basic income to adults (or those financially independent of guardians) and give every child a Finnish-style baby box.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415
Limits the financial impact of a child, and has very minimal opportunity for abuse.
The whole point of what I wrote is avoiding the use of children as benefits-magnet by withhelding part of their BIG into savings. Pumping out 9 kids won't work because you'll get just 3 BIGs for them - the rest will go into savings. Then, having a child or two will actually be very financially rewarding because it's what is good for society.
"or more correctly - the basic marginal cost of adding a child to a household is negligible"
Seriously?? Are we talking about agrarian society or about modern countries?
You won't have your child in a studio, so naturally you'll need a very different home that costs (or rents for) a very different amount of money. And it all goes downhill from here. Mom or dad need extensive period of staying with their child off work, then find a babysitter and pay her, I'd say a first child accounts for more than +50% of a family spendings.
"If a couple wants kids" - we have a problem right here. How is it suddently "if"? Somebody gave birth to both persons in that couple, and to their parents, and before that - why would they be the ones who break this chain?
They should surely have kids when they want to do so and they should not be put in disadvantaged position by having kids - which, well, does happen in almost every developed country and in many less-developed ones. Therefore, BIG for children.
Surely they should also work, but you know, their employer doesn't care whether they have children or not, so it should be compensated somehow.
Heck, I think women should receive BIG from the month their become pregnant. Delivering the baby is very financially-intensive process, no doubt.
In addition, as several other commenters pointed out, if you increase the BIG per child, you risk enabling people who have large families just to get the money. That much, much worse than asking people who want kids to provide for their own.
Nobody asks whether you want to support the ill, the disabled and children, you just do that. You cough up cash because they are already there and you have no alternative.
You really don't.
I've recited my solution of preventing people who have large families to live off their children, it's kind of sad you don't bother to argue with it.
There's also some choice involved in whether you are making enough money to support your children -- but not that much.