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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

I love the brainstorm. However,

1) Enslaving your own children is a loser.

2) Cutting retirement benefits for the childless (or low fertility) is a loser.

I predict the political viability of this plan as negative 5000%. I think it would also cause massive strife within families (imagine how much money grubbing tiger parenting we will get when your children are literal slaves who have to pay you).

All of that said, I support the general thrust. Here is a much simpler and more politically viable change:

1) Current SS benefits go completely untouched because they are the third rail of politics.

2) Current payroll taxes are increased on people who have fewer kids and lowered for people that have more kids. Basically, raise the X% that SS/Medicare collects but give a Y% payment per kid. If you have a lot of kids Y% can even be greater than X%.

Trying to align premiums and claims on retirement insurance is a lot easier to do by changing premiums and changing claims. The insurance justification is that kids are future taxpayers and so people taking the expense of raising them are paying payroll taxes in another form. People who don't take on this expense need to subsidize those that are so they can collect when they are older.

The other big thing that would help fertility is to get school choice whoever we can. We already spend a lot on children but unfortunately we fund systems and not students which means we get a lot less fertility benefit out of each dollar.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

The main difference I had in mind is to create a transferable asset out of parents' right to a transferable % of their kids future tax payments. So parents could sell part of those rights to pay for parenting expenses.

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