Nothing, and I mean nothing, can convince me to have a child.

This isn't how you get me to have a kid. This is how you get me to dodge taxes.

We have this already. It's called dependant deduction.

Families and having dependents already gives you tax breaks, ergo not having kids already is taxing childlessness.

Counterpoint to JD:

I am autistic.

Surely you don't want me generating more autists, right?

Ok. So let's talk about the two scenarios here if you can't afford kids.

1. You're taxed for childlessness, likely at an amount above the cost of a child or two, to "encourage" you to have children. You are now unable to afford that tax and thus, risk jail.

2. You have a child when you can't afford it to avoid the tax, and now have to bring up a child you cannot afford to raise in a government that actively doesn't want to help you in any way.

In short. You're fucked either way.

Ahh. Lebensborn. I should have made a bingo card with all the keywords of Nazi Germany. The Trump administration has it all. Censorship, GeStaPo, apartheit against minorities, Reichsparteitag, ignoring the law, using emergency laws to ursurp the rule, concentration camps...

Stop paying taxes altogether, you say?

Small government in action.

When the communists got the same idea in Romania, it failed spectacularly, filling orphanages with abused orphans

This sort of America-centric analysis neglects the fact that birth rates have also dropped to well below replacement in other countries with governments and cultures very different from those in the USA, and that neither expanding the welfare state nor attempting to restore traditional values has reversed this trend in the countries that tried that. Thus a discussion of either potential causes or potential solutions which focuses specifically on the USA is fundamentally incomplete.

Can’t wait for my government assigned trad wife

Taking a page from Putin's playbook. Anything but to alleviate the cost of living crisis, which is the main reason for people not having children. It is also a thinly veiled attempt to reassert dominance on women.

You know who this punishes more than just childless heterosexuals?

That's right. Couch fuckers. Unless his Chesterfield gets pregnant with an ottoman... 🤔

They need everyone to pop out a ton of babies so we can have child labor replace the migrant farm workers they deported.

I've always thought it's insane we pay people to have children, but sure let's take that even further and tax those who don't.

Been done before

Losing the incel vote will for go well for them

It makes political sense for them to demonise certain groups. The childfree movement has been quite vocal (or at least well publicised) of late, and it's super-easy to cherry pick some of the more extreme viewpoints from that 'community' and weaponise it against 'normal' people, conflating those opinions with the so-called left (as if deciding wether or not you have kids defines who you are politically). It's easy fodder for the media and, as always, successfully distracts much of the population from the fact that they're being bled dry by billionaires.

The article is worth a read and is not about jd Vance. That's just a anecdote from the article. They touch on the different approaches and motivations behind the pronatalism movement. The article ends on a non-apocalyptic and non-proscriptive note.

Fun fact: humans are capable of parthenogenesis. No cases have been known to survive to birth, but they can induce miscarriages like sexual fertilization does. Since most early miscarriages happen before you are aware and would not be distinguishable from normal periods, there's no way to tell if you are experiencing one of these events at any given time. Therefore, I will be filing my taxes to reflect the 12 dead children I lost over the year. Does it matter that I have no fallopian tubes, and therefore would never have an egg implant into my uterus in the first? Not if every conception is sacred!

Did JD Vance have kids by fucking his couch before his wife sat on it?

Look- just because he went through all that work and finally had an ottoman doesn't mean he can push those unrealistic expectations on the rest of us.

If only people could afford to have them…you dumb fuck.

We need homegrown cheap labor to replace the immigrants we kicked out.

White babies?

Really good article, imo. A quote I liked:

"When people see phenomena unfolding in plain view being denied…their reaction is not to turn away from the phenomena," as Anastasia Berg, author of What Are Children For?, noted in April. "Rather, it is to turn away from the deniers and toward those whose starting point is acknowledgment, regardless of their motivations or political ends. What this might look like in the case of denialism about birth rates is not hard to imagine."

Same in Texas, wanting to reward married heteros with children. I respond by not buying anything extra, depriving the economy of my single person dollars.

And if you are infertile through no fault of your own? Surely they would be thoughtful enough to recognize that taxing you would make no sense, correct?

You are already taxed on not having children because you cannot write them off if you don't have them.