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There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already.

IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (and resulting demographic problems) is that the state has invalidated/replaced all the economical gain that families got from children (cheap "workers" and elder care), but the chld-related costs to families have only increased.

Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers, but economical incentives are not aligned at all; children cost their parents a lot, society reaps all the benefits, but does not compensate parents enough economically.

You are not wrong. But the reality of this government in Germany is that they are also cutting down on the assistance that parents receive.

With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.

I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make.

But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.

Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?

It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.

> Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers

It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.

A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.

All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.

The approach is completely backwards. You incentivise having kids, not punish those who do not have kids or worse, those who can't get kids.
What about taxing the rich instead of putting yet another burden on the young.
Society pays a lot for children as well. Including members without children.
I am increasingly of the opinion that you can either be eligible to vote, or collect pension, but not both at the same time.

By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself from economic production. And unlike a 20yo still in college and not contributing to the economy yet, you don't have 50 more years of your life to worry about. This effectively means it is safe for you to support any short term extractive policies without ever worrying about the longer term consequences.

And demonstrably, this is how pensioners vote — I get to keep my pension, you get to pay more tax. And no we won't let you build any more housing for your beautiful children, we want this town to stay the way it was in 1970. Please come wipe my ass for $15 an hour. And no, don't let people who are actually willing to work that job for that pay immigrate into the country. It's a bunch of feel good policies with insolvable contradictions. Buy because they will not live long enough to feel the backlash, they vote on.

I am basically fan of two approaches:

1. let vote only people who contribute (pay some minimum income tax) at the time of elections - no unemployed, no students, no retired people - regardless the age, so if you pay your taxes at 14 you are eligible to vote at 14, if you pay your taxes at 88 you have right to decide what will be done with your money at 88, actually I would go even so far that EVERYONE regardless of citizenship should be allowed to vote if they are paying taxes, either they are good paying taxes, so they should be good also for voting

2. other approach would not be tied to income tax, let vote absolutely everyone regardless of age, so even children get vote, so family of 4 with 2 kids will get 4 votes, so they can vote for future of their children and not that retired people are deciding (usually selfishly) future of the kids

I am aware of reality that 1st option would cause huge uproar and second option is more realistic with some countries moving that way lowering voting age to 16 for now.

At the same time I would be glad if we would get rid off Pay-as-you-go pension plan and replace it with own savings account (IRA), but it seems no country in the world had balls to switch, even Chile had to backpedal a bit, but they got the furthest. It's the only solution for demographic changes.

> By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself

I disagree. The vast majority of jobs are difficult to work at old age and with medical conditions that typically come with old age. As long as we value keeping people alive for their natural lifespan (I hope we do), then our base assumption needs to be that we every time we pay someone we need to pay them $1 for now and $1 for their retirement. Approximately 1:1 because the actually-productive working age is ~25-65 and the retirement age is ~65-105.

Investment returns are never guaranteed, and shouldn't be factored into that.

We're hiring people here, not robots.

I don't think it's a good idea to eliminate any class of people for the electorate.

But at the end of the day, the point is moot: if non-pensioners can get their shit together enough to enact such a policy, they can surely organize themselves to oppose any poor voting by the pensioners.

The real problem you're facing is that young people: 1. Don't universally agree with you, and so support the policies you're blaming pensioners for, and, 2. Don't vote in large enough numbers to actually make their voices heard.

If you can fix that, you don't need to worry about disenfranchising a vulnerable portion of the population, since you can easily outvote them anyway.

In the US at least, it is also facilitated by a legislature that is older than color TV.
So the plan is to make the cost of living even more expensive for people without kids?

Do they understand the problem in the first place? Many people can't afford to have kids.

I think the thinking is that if you had kids you created future cows for the tax plantation so you contributed more to the country.
> Many people can't afford to have kids

Wrong. Poor people have 0 problems having kids.

People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.

They don't. Chancellor Merz has an approval rating of 13 %. The German population almost unanimously thinks that he is doing a terrible job (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-05/umfrage-bund...)

They have no vision for the future and no idea how to bring Germany forward other that taxing the poor.

Now sure how things are in Europe where there is a bigger social safety net, but in the US, 36% of adults under 50 describe putting off having kids due to financial reasons.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...

The machine needs more tax payers to keep politicians flying around the world in private jets. Produce tax slaves people, produce them now!
It's the cost, but also the higher expectations of living nowadays. Social media, phones, computers, trips, etc.

The actual monetary cost of a child is high, for sure. But many people put that number higher due to lifestyle choices, not need. Social media certainly doesn't help.

Sound like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”
The point is to incentivize people to have kids.
This is a challenging topic to discuss because (rightly) it's very personal. Sadly the fact of the matter is this: we need more children and young people to keep society functioning (and continually improve our quality of life). There is no other known way. So unfortunately the "free rider" problem needs to be addressed somehow. Of course, the "cruel" part is how it affects those who either can't have children, are gay, etc. I'm not sure how to work through that.
If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.

And yes, kids cost that much.

I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.

Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.

If you want people to have children make it an attractive life choice, or even a viable option. A centrally located apartment in a desirable city with the space to house a family of 3-4 is out of reach for a very large part of the population, financially. That’s _before_ you even consider all of the other costs of having children. Meanwhile our chancellor talks of 70h+ work weeks, while spending hundreds of billions on special military budgets, and also cutting health care funding..
A good way to work through that is by not framing people as free riders in the first place.
For reference, health insurance + care insurance is super expensive in Germany already (compared to most European countries) and both insurances are mandatory and generally combined. But the system is also super inefficient so a lot of the money is simply wasted on bureaucratic nonsense, making insurers rich, pointless referrals between "specialists" to make them rich, etc. The system actively stimulates waste, if you are privately insured, you get preferential treatment. Which means that if you aren't you get treated like dirt. I've been both private and public insured. I've experienced both.

My own country the Netherlands got rid of the private/public distinction. Everybody is insured via a private insurer. They can't reject patients and patients are allowed to switch insurer up to once a year. Insurers also work with health care providers to make sure money is spent more efficiently. Meaning hospitals can't just offload their inefficiencies onto insurers. And insurers can't just offload that onto patients. Because the patients switch to the insurers with the best relation ships with healthcare providers and the best deal. They all have to provide the same base coverage but you can insure for stuff on top of that.

The Dutch system also has its flaws and deficiencies. But my parents together pay much less than me by myself in Germany. And as far as I can see from their recent experiences, they are well looked after. It seems the Dutch system has a lot less bureaucratic nonsense, better information sharing, more modern hospitals, etc. It also has underpaid nurses, issues with some types of medication not getting covered, and a few other issues. But compared to the expensive German mess; much better.

Germany is mainly legislating to kick the can down the road instead of addressing any of it's structural economic issues: a government bureaucracy that stifles innovation rather than promoting it, a pension system that is essentially a underfunded slow moving train wreck at this point, broken physical and energy infrastructure that will take decades to fix, and a hopelessly inefficient health care system.

Wow, once again older generations pulling up the ladder on advantages they had that no longer exist for younger generations.
As a resident of Germany: I have two kids and would do anything for them, but from a financial point of view, you're way better off without kids in Germany, even if you have to pay these "extra fees". The public pension has already been higher for years for anybody without children.
Two important things for this discussion:

1. the difference for the (public) elder care (Pflegeversicherung) is already there: a fee of 2.4% vs. 1.8% with kids (or much less with more kids). And it was now proposed to slightly increase the fee to 2.5%, i.e. +0.1%. But as it was recently increased several times (nearly every year) this is a strange suggestion and looks helpless.

2. this small increase (<1 billion €) does not fix the existing financial gap of approx 4 billions. The gap will increase a lot for the next years.

"The bill would have contributions from childfree adults increase by 0.7% over a period of years, meaning they would pay 2.5% of their income each month. Their employer will be expected to pay 1.8%. For adults with children the rates will remain the same: 1.8% for people with one child, 1.55% for people with two children, and 1.3% for people with three or more children."

I don't have children and this doesn't seem inherently unfair to me. It's an acknowledgement of the care labor these households are doing.

That said, I'd prefer to see it be progressive by income as well. A couple without children in the bottom income decile shouldn't be paying more than a couple with children in the top income decile.

Because the elders haven't extracted enough wealth from younger generations? Because economics has nothing to do with people choosing not to have kids? I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.
An excellent, apolitical(*) video from Kurzgesagt about the current situation in Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gYFcVx-8Y

It explains how we got there, the problems we are facing, the problems inherent to the proposed/possible solutions, etc.

(*) as in, they really try hard to stay neutral on the topic until the end, in the clearly marked conclusions and opinion section.

The alternative is to increase immigration, which is a giant glowing "easy" button that will solve 100% of problems with domestic fecundity. re: birthrates.
Still a draft bill, nothing final yet.
I wonder if we'll eventually see a backlash as population growth continues slowing. In a society composed largely of old people being supported financially (and otherwise) by the younger people, it would be very possible for the younger people to decide they're simply tired of spending their lives subsiding the old people who just put the burden on them instead of fixing the system.
Every rapidly aging country (most of them) will need to either do something like this, or deal with a total collapse of social services.
This is nothing particularly new. People above a certain age without kids are paying a higher percentage from their income into the social security since 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor, and that's more than twenty years ago.

What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.

Remember we borrow from future.
Makes sense since they don’t produce future taxpayers. They should also adjust retirement age based on life expectancy -of course people won’t like this but you can’t overcome the math. Separately, I also think airfare should be in part based on weight.
Do children that are the product of sexual assault count?
Good. But I'd also like to see corporations punished for bias towards Childfree people. If you don't have a child your labor is equivalent to child labor.
Fake kids incoming in three, two, one ...
basically "you WILL have children so ours can have slaves to exploit (and if you don't we'll just exploit you more now)", lol, lmao even
Ah yes, let’s funnel more money to pensioners!
This is very cruel towards people who want to have children but can't.
This is very unfair for people that cannot have children. On one side we have the people that can't for biology reasons, on the other those who don't have the economic stability to support a functional family. Also, adopting costs can be very high so it is not an option for many. I won't definitely be voting political parties promoting these measures. There must be other ways.