[PapaBear3625]

So what to do? In my opinion you make child-raising a career-choice for married women. In other words you pay them a decent amount of money, maybe something like $10k for the first, $20k for the second, $30k for the third, $20k each for the fourth through 8th (maybe a bit less, who knows). These women make up for the ones that don’t want to be bothered by kids. Oh yea, and you only apply to the type of women that you want having kids (that’s the hard part to implement). As to what I mean by that - it’s an exercise for the reader.

Easy solution: rather than pay cash, have it be a tax credit, and make it able to be taken by the parents OR the grandparents. If you have kids, you effectively pay no taxes, and get money off the grandparents taxes. Effectively, you tax middle-class people for being childless.

[BobL]

The dirty little secret is that most people with kids already pay next nothing in federal taxes (unless they’re in the 5%)...so giving a credit won’t amount to much, relative to the cost of raising kids.

Like it or not, it’s going to take activist government to deal with this issue - something that Japan can still do, even if we cannot.