The U.S. national debt is now officially $33T, but add in promises to pay social security, medicare, etc, and I find estimates of $100T, $147T, and $245T for what the U.S. has promised to pay out somehow via future taxes. Divide these by the current U.S. population to get a debt per citizen ranging from $300K to $730K. We should thus be willing to pay up to these huge amounts to induce the birth and raising to adulthood of a single child who would then pay average levels of future taxes to repay this debt.

Clearly such big rewards could induce big changes in fertility, maybe inducing a cultural change multiplier effect, which tougher might get us up past replacement fertility levels, and thus preventing my default dark scenario. My main reason to keep that as my default is that this winning strategy has been possible worldwide for many decades without any nations even considering rewards this large. But still, we can hope; hence this post.

My other nextbigfuture plan was to start paying $300,000 per baby no win places like Korea, China and Japan with big shortages of babies. The countries would start checking in 9 months to immediately see if every month there was no longer a shortage of babies. In Japan the number of babies every month is 70,000 but they need 120,000 each month to be at replacement. China is at 800,000 babies per month but they need at least 1.4-1.5 million per month.

I would suggest adding the monthly verification component into the Hanson fertility debt and tax-free plan.