Several countries have taken significant measures to try to encourage people to have more children and combat falling birth rates, but the U.S. is not one of them. Although the Department of Transportation was recently directed to give precedence to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” earlier this month.
Now Musk, who President Donald Trump tapped to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has vocalized support for tax incentives for mothers.
What good does it do to have cheaper healthcare by having cheaper labor when that very same healthcare becomes unaffordable at the same time due to that very decrease in wages?
Healthcare, as all things, is not naturally constrained to some maximum amount. You can have as much of it as you want, as long as you are ready to pay the price. Now, whether people can do just that, depends entirely on their average wages, right? So, having fewer people would increase the wages and therefore make healthcare more affordable.
I wasn’t talking about wages, not everything is about that. If there’s less people to train to fill the positions left vacant by people who are retiring then you end up being unable to fill said positions and you have labor shortages not just in shitty jobs that anyone can do, but in positions where your need highly qualified people as well. So you either need people to have enough kids to renew their population or you need migrants, otherwise you end up like Japan where they’re starting to panic and they finally realized that they would need to let migrants move in otherwise the whole country would crash because the birthrate has been so low for so long.
Socio-economic equality and general happiness is highest in countries where there’s tons of incentives to have kids. Maybe it’s about keeping wages low in the US, it doesn’t have to be. Give people incentives by not making it as financially stressful to have them and that means they can afford to send their kids to university. Remove all incentives and that’s how you create a cheap labor population of unskilled workers.