Economist David Goldman at First Things says our failure to reproduce enough children to sustain our society will make us poorer. Excerpts:
Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.
What could we do to promote natalism at the policy level? Goldman suggests:
Numerous proposals for family-friendly tax policy are in circulation, including recent suggestions by Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam. The core of a family-oriented economic program might include the following measures:• Cut taxes on families. The personal exemption introduced with the Second World War's Victory Tax was $624, reflecting the cost of "food and a little more." In today's dollars that would be about $7,600, while the current personal exemption stands at only $3,650. The personal exemption should be raised to $8,000 simply to restore the real value of the deduction, and the full personal exemption should apply to children.
• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.
• Make child-related expenses tax deductible. Tuition and health care are the key expenses here with which parents need help.
• Change the immigration laws. The United States needs highly skilled, productive individuals in their prime years for earning and family formation.
We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together. A generation of Americans has grown up with the belief that the traditional family is merely one lifestyle choice among many.
[snip]
Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.
Philip Longman has covered this ground before, from a secular liberal point of view. Last November, Longman and his New America Foundation colleague David Gray proposed a new pro-family "social contract" (PDF form here) to address the same problems David Goldman identifies. Excerpt:
Americans instinctively revere the family as an institution that helps facilitate all other aspects of life. The family fosters attachments across generations, provides a nurturing environment in which to raise children, and is a means of transmitting values from one generation to the next. It is the foundation upon which our social contract has been built.Historically, public discussions of the social contract
have largely ignored the role of families. In a pre-industrial
world in which children both performed economically useful
tasks while young and, as adults, offered vital support
to their aging parents, it was easy to assume that the family
as an institution could be relied on to take care of itself.
Today, however, the economic basis of the family is
largely eroded. Children are no longer economic assets to
their parents, but costly liabilities. Due to the growth of
Social Security, Medicare, and private pension schemes,
support in old age no longer depends on an individual's
decision to raise a family, but on other people bearing the
burdens of parenthood so as to produce the vital human
capital to keep the system going. Meanwhile, the widening
life options of a secularized society raise the opportunity
cost, for both men and women, of nurturing the next
generation.One result of these changed circumstances, in all
advanced nations, has been a dramatic fall in birthrates,
often to well below replacement rates, and rapidly aging
populations. At the same time, the state of family life has
become deeply problematic, with high rates of divorce and
out-of-wedlock births, and increasing downward mobility
among parents.Other sectors of society have effectively appropriated for
themselves much of the value in human capital created by
families, contributing to the strain on parents and a decline
in overall fertility rates. Public policy and current law stacks
the odds against those who choose to raise children.
We need to make major adjustments to the social contract
in order to allow parents to retain more of the return
that comes to society through their investment in children.
Because stable families make a great difference in the lives
of children, the next social contract should support them.
Because having and raising children is a public good, the
next social contact should focus on supporting parents and
children as early in life as possible.