Last week the Democrats showed us the past and the future of population policy.

Even as they cheered news that a Planned Parenthood mobile van would park right outside their national convention to choke off pregnancies with free abortions and vasectomies, nominee Kamala Harris announced a half-baked proposal to encourage childbearing via tax credits for new parents.

The party’s old, negative attitude toward parenthood and family formation was spurred by (false) 1960s fears of a population explosion that still drive Boomer-era perceptions.

But in fact we now live in an era of population implosion, with birth rates in America and elsewhere well below replacement, and still dropping. “Global fertility isn’t just declining, it’s collapsing,” according to writer James Pethokoukis.

This means that governments are increasingly trying to find ways to get people to have more children, not fewer. 

Other countries are already trying that with subsidies, with very limited results. Turns out you just can’t pay people enough to offset the financial cost of having children.

It’s school clothes, expensive sneakers, ballet lessons and soccer equipment, perhaps private school and public or private college tuition, all on top of the basics of feeding, clothing and amusing a person in the 21st century. 

Not cheap: Adjusted for inflation, the cost of raising a middle-class child to adulthood in this country in 2024 is approximately $312,000.  And that’s not counting college expenses.

Against that, the $6,000 tax credit promised by Harris, as she one-upped a $5,000 credit proposed by Republican veep nominee JD Vance, is chump change — even though many critics fear this sort of subsidy could break the budget over the next decade if enacted. (I should say break the budget more, since the deficit is already unsustainable.)

But nations that have tried such financial incentives haven’t had much success.

Hungary offered forgivable loans to new parents and Poland announced substantial annual subsidies to promote childbirth, but without noticeable effect. South Korea has had the same experience.

China has been frantically, and futilely, trying to undo the catastrophic results of its “one child” policy. France first enacted birth incentives in 1939, but without much luck — birth rates have fallen pretty steadily since.

There’s just no way to ease the cost of raising a child with government spending.   

But there are many other things we can do.

For one, we could minimize the hassle of raising a child. The modern culture of safetyism actually doesn’t provide a lot of safety, but it’s bad for kids’ mental health and makes raising them more expensive.

Excessive car seat requirements, for example, save only a handful of lives, but the rules mean that you can’t have three kids or more without a minivan or large SUV.

A recent study found that state car-seat mandates — which can require even 8-year-olds to be buckled into bulky boosters — prevented 8,000 births in 2017, while saving only 57 lives.

“Free range” kids are mentally healthier and easier to raise, but our culture is so opposed to the idea of autonomy for school-age children that parents get cited for letting their kids play in their own front yards without direct oversight.

And parenting is, let’s face it, a low-prestige activity in our society.

Minivans are generally seen as uncool “mommy mobiles”, and the appeal of an SUV is mostly that they are associated with high-prestige activities like hiking or kayaking rather than low-prestige parenting needs. (Even though for most they’re basically minivans with plausible deniability).

TV shows portray dads as bumbling idiots, moms as exhausted and put-upon, and kids as terrors.

And schools and the government send constant signals that parents are losers who can’t raise their children without outside supervision.

It wasn’t always that way. TV shows once portrayed multi-kid families as normal and happy, and parents as sensible and admirable.

And political conventions of the recent past certainly didn’t feature abortion and surgical sterilization as sideshow attractions.

The overwhelming presumption in decades past was that children were desirable and enjoyable, and that parents were doing a genuine public service by raising them.

It could be that way again, and I predict that it will.

A falling population is an economic, military and social disaster.

A birth dearth leaves us with no way to fund the social welfare programs that advanced nations rely on: Social Security, Medicare and other safety-net systems are built on a demographic pyramid, and when that pyramid is inverted, with more old people at the top than young people coming in at the bottom, it collapses.

Vance’s and Harris’ tax credit proposals won’t work — but the fact that both parties are suddenly pushing pro-birth policies is a sign of change. 

Watch for attitudes toward children and childbearing to evolve, too, in the coming years. It’s about time.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.