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If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
There's lots of suggestions, most of them bad. For example, Scandinavian countries have been touted as "doing it right" by offering generous perks to families such as paid family leave. But these efforts, despite outrageous costs, have done little or nothing to stem the falling birth rate. Sweden's fertility rate is a dismal 1.66 as of 2020, and if trends hold, the rate among ethnic Swedes is far lower.
I think that, like everything, deciding to marry and have a family comes down to status.
Mongolia is a rare country that has managed to increase its fertility rate over the last 20 years, from about 2.1 children per women in 2004, to about 2.7 today. This feat is more impressive considering the declines experienced worldwide during the same period. It's doubly impressive considering the fertility rate in neighboring Inner Mongolia (China) is just 1.06!
What is Mongolia doing right? Apparently, they are raising the status of mothers by giving them special recognition and status.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441
In Georgia (the country), something similar happened when an Orthodox patriarch started giving special attention to mothers with 3 children:
https://x.com/JohannKurtz/status/1827070216716874191
Now, raising the status of mothers is more easily said than done. But I think it's possible, especially in countries with a high degree of social cohesion like in East Asia. In Europe, a figure like the King of Netherlands could personally meet and reward mothers. In the United States, of course, this sort of thing would be fraught as any suggestion coming from the right might backfire due to signalling. Witness the grim specter of the vasectomy and abortion trucks at the DNC. But the first step to fixing a problem is to adequately diagnose the cause. To me, the status explanation is more compelling (and fixable) than any other suggestion I've seen.
I stopped worrying about potential dysgenic effects of boosting fertility among lower classes: if elite overproduction is a thing we should be worried about, low PMC fertility is a feature, not a bug.
One thing that's required is a massive propaganda campaign:
I say propaganda, but this doesn't have to be outright censorship, measures like the National Minimum Drinking Age Act can be used to goad companies into compliance.
The propaganda campaign must be supplemented with additional economic measures:
Oh really? Yet we must recognize that even though your policy is phrased in a gender-neutral fashion, the onus is of course going to end up on men (as the onus for everything always does) to organize that settling, even though the other gender is fighting them every step of the way. This type of tax is completely unfair unless you address that.
If you want to get Pigouvian, start charging women 50 bucks every time they want to for example post a picture of their ass online/send it to anyone who isn't their husband, among all of their other anti-familial and anti-civilizational behaviors, and then maybe you'll have at least the rudiments of moral license to tax men for not settling down under the notion that it is their lazy, selfish choice to be freewheeling libertines in a sea of good, wholesome women just waiting to adore them as loyal wives, as opposed to them understandably not wanting to pledge their lives and souls to voluntary pieces of the world's sexual leftovers, rampant social media exhibitionists, misandrist "feminists" who would need cult deprogramming-level interventions to have any chance of being even remotely good wives to men who aren't completely pushovers, unfeminine tattooed oddjobs, etc. (which means you're left in most cases with hundreds of men playing musical chairs with one winner, a situation in which it's hardly fair to tax all of the losers for failing to achieve the impossible of them all winning instead).
You'll still run into a big problem even if achieve success there though: generation vs generation. Perhaps with your new measures you restore a superior breed of valuable female who does not possess a morality (unfortunately so common in modern women) that only 5 decades or so prior would not have been considered superior to your average prostitute. A new generation of 18, 19, 20, and 21 year old girls arrives fresh on the marriage marketplace with a feminine value and virtue unthinkable a decade prior, ready to settle down and have kids as soon as as they are courted in a fashion their based fathers deem appropriate. No thotty Instagrams, tattoos, or excessive drinking here, just quality feminine human capital, good mothers waiting to happen.
Of course men their own age will want them, given that they stand to be taxed if they don't have one anyway. But also of course... so will the millions of men in their late 20s, early 30s, and even beyond who were left behind by the post-60s/70s (and especially post-90s) increasingly twisted feminine Tinder wasteland in which managing to find a good, reasonably marriageable woman, especially a Western woman, became more and more like finding a needle in a shitstack, a small spring in an endless desert. So again, musical chairs.
And what to do with the old, wretched breed of women that is used up and no good? This is millions of people we're talking about here. You cannot justifiably in any sort of good faith punish men for not wanting to "settle down" with a former college party favor any more than you could justifiably punish them for not agreeing to permanently staple a bag of dog feces to their forehead. The limit of public policy is where people would rather accept any punishment you can reasonably enforce than comply, and trying to force men to LARP a happy tradlife with former campus bicycles is definitely past that limit for a not insignificant number of men.
That is, there simply aren't enough women worth settling down with for all the men who want to settle down (as there haven't been for a long time), there can't be even if you fix the women because of older men, and therefore only decades of eugenics favoring female births to dramatically affect gender ratios would change this. (And without a basically totalitarian-level of masculine control over society (that is excruciatingly violent against any wannabe suffragettes or whatever, basically the Taliban and White Sharia), this would inevitably backfire as these women would then use their greater numbers to bring about an even more feminine triflefeels-pandering anti-society.)
I just don't get why you people never address this with your pontificating about singles taxes. The gender ratio of births is basically the same as it ever was, and yet modern culture has rendered anywhere from 70%-95% of Western women as totally unacceptable marriage partners. What do you expect men to do? Sure, the non-Western world offers somewhat of a relief valve here (as this policy's most prominent supporter yet JD Vance shows with his own exotic import wife), but we're rapidly exporting Western whore culture to them to the point that that well is soon to dry up too. How can you justifiably tax 100 men for not being able to snag one of five available slices of cake? Why not just have states issue limited edition golden licenses/IDs, enough for 1% of the population, and then tax people for not owning those too? Same principle.
Here's some modifications to these kinds of proposals that are absolutely necessary (without which they would be wholly immoral and invalid and should only deservedly lead to responses like this from aging men who had already been born into one of the worst time periods ever in human history to be a man seeking the traditional birthrights of all men and then had even more injustice from a sneering society blaming them for its own failure heaped upon them):
Men born during a reasonably defined wasteland period for finding a good, stable, marriage-material wife must be exempt from any singles tax forever. (This is the least society could do for them. Realistically they deserve straight-up reparations, but one step at a time.) The only exceptions will be men who have engaged in above a certain threshold of sexual promiscuity (perhaps we'll say more than five sex partners in 20 years, which is fairly generous), who will be deemed to have contributed to the problem and taxed considerably.
Age gap relationships will be monitored, and so long as younger women are going for the again many older guys left behind by the wasteland, the singles tax on young men will be pushed back to around 26 or so. (Or rather, to make it more general: no man will be singles-taxed in a situation where there are too few marriage material women marrying men in their demographic to go around. Men will be singles-taxed for their choice to remain single, not merely being the unfortunate victim of a mathematical reality.)
The promiscuous men mentioned above will be banned from courting, marrying, etc. the newer breed of superior, chaste female as an additional punishment for their behavior. Instead, they will be expected to take their wives from the older breed of damaged goods women that they created. They will be expected to take multiple wives too. Their breeding however will be restricted to avoid promulgating genes that induce promiscuity and immorality. (Many of these men are already married with children, and of course you're not going to break up their marriages and kill their kids, so this won't be a punishment for those.)
These are just a few small modifications I thought of off the top of my head though. Realistically, if you're going this far you might as well just institute a straight up anti-"feminist" reactionary reign of terror. Anything below that is probably a half-measure that won't actually accomplish much anyway.
Point is, you can't just demand people couple and reproduce by presuming to tax them for not doing so, any more than you can just demand a square peg fit into a round hole and think it'll have to fit eventually if you tax it enough. You have to address the tens if not hundreds of millions of women who have destroyed any reasonable marriage/reproductive value they might have once had and the millions of men who have thus been left without reasonable prospects. (After all, what's the point of having kids just to have kids if it's with a whore? To raise whore kids and make society's problems even worse? Part of the problem here is that birthrate fanatics don't seem to understand that a higher birthrate is not always better and therefore a declining birthrate is not always a problem, but often rather just a naturally homeostatic process regressing to a more reasonable mean, returning to the baseline its current surrounding conditions can comfortably support.) That would require nothing less than a complete transformation of society, and even then you'll still be undoing the damage of the previous regime for longer than the likely lifespans (assuming no longevity takeoff or whatever) of most of those men affected (unless maybe if you find a way to buy nice virgin 18 year olds from Asia by the millions).
Consequently, our present society (or even one that makes any sort of effort to return to sanity) is (or would be still) already walking a tightrope of hoping that porn and video games sedates so many men so much that they don't effectuate a collective realization (which so many of them have already come to, even if they aren't moving to implement it in its most literal form yet) that realistically the better option for most of them is to burn it all down and see what treasures might be found in the ashes (dignity, for one). (I mean I say they're not implementing it yet, but again that's only not literally, as they actually are, albeit indirectly: They're for the most part not openly literally burning down anything yet, but they are quiet quitting, lying flat, whatever you wanna call it, overindulging in the porn and video games (as it turns out, when you use drugs to pacify people, you get addicts) and leaving the working, leading, and innovating parts of life that strong societies have always needed men to take the lead on to the "strong powerful womyn" who they've been told are better than them anyway, which predictably has led to the "competence crisis", a heretofore unknown malady in the West's post-industrialization history. This may not burn anything down ever, but it is quite likely to leave it to rot.) Punishing them with an unfair singles tax that charges them for society's failures is unlikely to help this goal.
The only real quick fix I see for this issue is wonderfully truly feminine AI/robot waifus (which realistically at this point will come from China unless you get US government funding for a counterinitiative, introducing its own national security risk that will need to be dealt with) with artificial wombs capable of baring biological children. Introduce this technology, and I think you will very quickly find that it was not ever your average man who was the one standing in the way of family formulation. (This would definitely introduce some new issues with a generation of children where a large percentage of them have artificial mothers, and yet this would still be superior to the potential "motherhood" offered by ruined wasteland women, if not just for the fact that it would satisfy the basic necessary criterion of actually inducing men to make mothers out of these women, artificial or not, in the first place. After all, if men won't play ball, it's not going to happen no matter what. Whatever deficit in open rebellion modern man has developed he's more than made up for with an expertise in slacking and shirking what authorities insist is his "duty". See: Chinese coronavirus lockdown/masking/etc. policy)
Okay, my answer to the problem you've outlined is: I don't care. The tax might be unfair towards incels, but both they and the veterans of cock carousel will both have to pay up, social security doesn't grow on trees. Some of them might even enjoy the findom aspect of this.
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