No amount of financial incentives is going to get the birth rate up significantly, the 3 factors that determine birth rate are: the age at which people marry, the divorce rate, and female labor participation rate.
Unless those factor change, nothing else matters. If women wait until their 30s to get married, they won’t be having many children, even if they want to, and if women focus on their “careers” and have that settled before they get married, they won’t be getting married until their 30s.
By lowering government spending we lower a main factor in inflation. Thus it'd cost less to raise kids. And by lowering entitlements, the main people who'd be taken care of in their old age are the people who'd either financially prepare for it, or the people who raise kids with the kind of family values to take care of their elder parents.
My parents, from The Greatest Generation, had three children. They were able to do so because my father’s income was sufficient to feed, clothe and house them with enough left over they gave us each one million dollars when they died. My mother stayed home and raised us. Various policies have kept labor rates low since their time and prices much higher. Gone are the days when filling the gas tank was something you did without thinking of the cost. Same with the electric bill, insurance and dozens of things that nickel and dime people into poverty. Let’s not even mention the cost of a college education. If people don’t feel financially secure, if they both work, they won’t have many children.
“No amount of financial incentives is going to get the birth rate up significantly”
I do not agree. High enough incentives will work.
We need to find ways to encourage people to marry young: 18-22
The main factor is the willingness of women to have and raise stable children with a husband.
Riding the carousel, career-seeking until one’s eggs have dried, coal-burning, multiple abortions, or saying no to all men while preening over the attention of simps online, while only banging chads who are not husband material and would not commit anyway, son’t do it.
And family and divorce courts are discouraging most of the men who would dare, as if the entirled you women of the West would give them the time of day.