Tax Credits For Delaying or Not Having Children
June 23, 2026
by William P. Meyers

Site Search

Popular pages:

One Child Families are Good for the Planet and America

There are currently two major camps on the issue of human population. The mainstream media, pushed by corporations and MAGA politicians, tends to run articles saying women are not having enough babies. Or equivalently, family sizes are too small. My camp, mostly environmentalists and realists, recognize that the world is overpopulated, the global ecosystem is falling apart, and that humans need to return to lower global (and U.S.) populations, or at least stop the population where it is now. My own position is that the best long-term global population matches that before the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800 AD.

There have been plenty of discussions, led by the likes of VP JD Vance, on how to get (or even force) women to have more children. Mostly they copy the discussions of other nations that have low birth rates.

My question is: how do we get women to have less children? About 1 child per family, at least for a couple of generations, so the earth is able to green back up a bit? Aside from encouraging the use of birth control methods.

Say "One Child Policy&uot; and most conservatives go into an irrational spiral, repeating (with no analysis) allegations that China's one child policy was brutal and inhuman. Even liberals and leftists don't like the term One Child Policy.

You would think that most people in the U.S.A. would have figured out that most info about China that they see is U.S. propaganda. That is, if it is at all factual, it is spun in such a way as to make the Chinese, and the Communist Party, look bad. So it is with the One Child Policy. Before proposing the details of the Tax Credits For Delaying or Not Having Children plan, let's take a quick look at the Chinese reality.

China estimates its current population at 1.4 billion. It currently has a very low birthrate, even though it discontinued its one-child policy (started in 1979) back in 2015 and currently encourages women to have more children.

There is no reason to think the one child policy was unfair, since it had a large number of exceptions. In rural areas, if the first child was female, parents could have another in hopes of getting a male. The real problem in China was prizing males and dismissing the importance of women. Also, ethnic minorities were largely exempted, so for instance Uighurs were not subject to the policy. The Chinese Communist Party believes without the policy their population would now be 1.8 billion. This would have resulted is severe negative consequences including widespread poverty, hunger or even famine. Instead they became one of the world's most populous nations.

Note that the historical population of China is estimated at 547 million when the Communists took over in 1950 and hit 1 billion around 1982. China has to import large quantities of food in order the feed its current population.

Back in the U.S.A., the current population of the United States is estimated at 332 million. It was 150 million in 1950. At the start of our industrial revolution, in 1800, it was just 5.3 million. In addition to destroying almost all of the natural environment in the U.S. (by converting to cities and suburbs, roads, farms, grazing land, and cutting of forests), the U.S. has been the largest single national contributor to global warming (though now China is the greatest producer of greenhouse gasses).

So what can be done to bring the population of the U.S. down to ecologically sound levels?

Immigration policy, of course, is an issue. The Lefty-Liberal spectrum of people don't want to talk about that. Certainly once families arrive in the U.S., they should have to abide by our national policies. Arrive with children, and no more children, please.

I think that in addition to encouraging families to have fewer children, our demographics improve if they have their children later. A women having her child at 35 instead of 17 is like halving the birth rate.

We have a policy of helping, economically, families with children. This is particularly helpful that families on the low end of our income spectrum are able to raise healthy and well-socialized children. This is done with tax credits.

I think these tax credits should be extended to women of child-bearing age who have not had children.

Say, starting at the age of 16, women are given a tax credit of $5,000 per year if they have no children. The credit could stop at the age of 35.

Women (alone or in a family) would still be able to get a tax credit to help support a child. But I think the tax credit should be only for the first child. Additional children would not get additional tax credits. Though free food an education should remain the standard, so as not to punish children for their mother's anti-social behavior.

If Congress would enact this, women would have an incentive to stay childless as teens and well into their thirties, as they might choose. At 35 a woman should be able to take care of herself economically, and could get a tax credit if she then chose to have a child. Crazy conservative cults would not be prohibited from having multiple children, but taxpayers would subsidize only the first one.

Another question is whether young men should get a tax credit for not having children. I am fine with that. Men often provide the pressure that results in women's decisions. However, in that case a system of genetic testing would need to be set up to make sure men did not falsely claim to be childless in order to get the credit.

Don't like my proposal? Make your own. Change the specifics, if you like. We might still live in a democracy, though it is hard to tell sometimes.