“Well, the article certainly has the wrong prescription. More government spending will neither help the economy nor encourage people to have more children. Why have kids just to stick them in government day care centers?”
I agree that more daycare won’t cut it. The writer probably has a couple of kids herself and the NYT doesn’t pay much unless you’re at the very top.
But to rule out government action means to sanction the demographic collapse of the society - since there’s nothing to stop it. That’s the problem...doing nothing doesn’t work in this case, because the forces that are causing women to not have babies has tipped the balance.
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.
So the government would pay the women money to raise their own children? You’ll see more marriage breakups, less marriage in general, etc.
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.