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Notes -
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
https://archive.is/T6thJ
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):
65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.
Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.
Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.
75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.
Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).
To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.
Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.
For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).
A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.
White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.
For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.
This post kind of comes off as a self-indulgent power fantasy. You'd need God-empress level of political power to enact those policies, so the whole thing is basically implicitly assuming that you're infinitely stronk, and then writing a long detailed list of all the ways you'd use your unlimited power to put the screws on people whose life choices are (in your view) incompatible with the greater good of society.
And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.
Anyway, while I don't expect you to explain how you're planning on becoming God-empress, I'm still curious how would you roll out those policies? Would there be some transition period so for example people who were already old and infertile when the policies came into effect wouldn't get screwed up without any chance to avoid it, or would their unavoidable impoverishment be a sacrifice you'd be willing to make to keep things simple and on track?
That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.
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