Excellent article Jason.

Maria-lee asks; “How do we balance helping mothers raise their kids while preventing the money being used as a kind of incentive for mothers to have more children? We can’t, that’s the point.”

We can’t entirely. But we have had this sort of support in Australia for decades; ongoing financial support that is, not the ridiculous lump sum baby bonus type, during which time the fertility rate has greatly declined. So it is not a significant incentive to have more children.

There is a huge difference between well-intentioned incentives, provided throughout the childhood period, and the atrocious one-hit-wonder baby bonus, which is the most despicable Australian government policy ever.

No matter how you look at it, the bb is rotten to the core.

The last thing we need is to increase our fertility rate. The national (individual) fertility rate is 1.76 or thereabouts, but even with net zero migration our population would still continue to increase for decades. About half of our population increase is from births and half from immigration, roughly speaking. This means that the effective national fertility rate is quite a bit above 2. The individual rate suggests that without immigration the population would rapidly decline. This is a huge furphy, which Howard and Costello, and Beazley, and even Brown, are quite content to let the populace believe.

The approaching proportionate increase in retirees is nowhere near as big a deal as our politicians make it out to be. There are much bigger things to worry about in the near future such as peak oil, our rapidly declining resource base, rapidly increasing demand on that resource base by way of an ever-larger population, etc.

The bb is a bribe to produce more children. It is also a blatant vote-buying exercise. It is not designed to help parents make ends meet with child-care, it is simply designed to dupe them into having a child where they would not have otherwise had one, and there is absolutely no requirement that it be spent on the baby!! It is a staggeringly bad piece of work

Ludwig/slasher,
Collectively you had said what needed saying, however I would really like to know in monetery terms, cash dollars, how big a problem this is, women having extra babies after they qualify for a single mothers pension.

Is it more for example, than an extra 1% tax on those who can afford to pay [multi-millionaires, billionaires]could cover. The reason I ask is that the children of these families, will be the employees of the wealthy, along with workchoices legislation, which will over time lower these employees wages, would it not be suitable for those who will gain the benefit of employing these people on starvation wages, pay fot the upkeep of the families, untill their employees can be exploited.

Is the baby bonus a 'social security rort' or another example of 'middle class welfare'?

While I don't approve of such a simple-minded thing as the $500BB - which, if it had the intention of increasing our population rather than merely buying votes, would not be an effective way of achieving this questionable result - I would rather see some hard statistics than rely on a basically moralistic, ideological rant against single mothers.

It is hard to see how anyone can justify negative gearing, for example, as an 'incentive' for the well-off to buy more property, or the 30% private health fund rebate that could surely also encourage certain people to have more children, while decrying the possibly socially detrimental effects of a flat $500 payment on 'single mothers'. There is an implicit moralism about doing so, and an underlying assumption about what constitutes a socially and economically acceptable motivation. I don't know if Brecker looked at this aspect, but Falinski represents his ideas as rather behaviouristic, mechanistic, easily to be adapted by governments to whatever their political purpose.

I have not found any information in Falinski's article or the comments concerning the actual rate of occurrence of the effect that Becker's theory posits. Guessing in an 'educated' fashion, I contend there would be few women who would be lured by what many would consider a paltry 'incentive', given the physical and emotional duress of childbirth and child raising (Falinski doesn't even consider that side of it). This is not to deny that the having of even more children by single mothers, for whatever reason, might contribute to some social problems.

Falinski's piece reflects the way the ideological 'right' assume the already well-off must be offered 'incentives' (how often have obscene managerial/CEO salaries been justified by variants of "if you pay peanuts you'll get monkeys"?) while the poor or disadvantaged must have their behaviour modified by disincentives. Beneath the window dressing is the unconscious belief that 'top' people may justifiably be motivated by greed, while the poor may not; they need fear and deprivation to get them cracking

I would tend to agree with Jason and his source, Gary S Becker, people do make cost benefit decisions based on any set of given circumstances.

However, whether some will simpky pop out children or decide crime “does pay” depends on their comprehension of the ensuing timeline used for calculating the "return" on the "cost benefit" decision.

Those who use a very short time-horizon in which to consider the consequences of a present act may readily accept that more children, more baby bonus is just as cost beneficial as assuming their crimes will not catch up with them.

Making any real “cost benefit analysis” can only be reasoned by considering the longer term lifetime consequences which for a crime might be produce consequences to being barred for certain job opportunities and for children at least an 18 year commitment to their development (and possibly longer with the added benefit of grandkids down he track).

Jasons observed, the tendency and desire for some types of governments to pervert the tax system and try, haplessly, to use it as a medium to pursue social engineering objectives is, accurate and an appropriate in the context of “child production bounties”.

Robert – I wholly and totally agree with the entire content of your first post. I am not sure if you are being reflective or speaking of personal experience of the single parent father role but I can (speak from personal experience) and would suggest you have it exactly right in every detail.

Slasher and Shonga. I can't understand why your posts are always critical of the Howard Government and contain some derogatory reference to to the rich folks on the North Shore or higher earners in general. If I remember rightly it has been the ALP that founded wedge politics, dismissed work for the dole and still maintains that ALL Australians should be university educated.

I think you'll probably find that all women are capable of having children regardless of their household income. In my opinion any concessions to mothers should be directed at every tax bracket. A professional woman who leaves the workforce to have children should be no less encouraged to work again than a factory worker etc! The situation as it stands is that hundreds of thousands of women are effectively retired prior to their 35th birthday.

The point that everybody is missing is that a cost benefit analysis is an economic not social tool. Talking about women and children as 'commodities' is immoral. However talking about skills/ labour shortages and recognising that women can fill some of these gaps is a reality. Herein is where a cost benefit analysis should begin.

Surely given the relationship between oil and industrial agriculture, and the imminent end of “cheap oil”, we should be financially rewarding families to have LESS children not more? Once oil peaks and then goes into an irreversible decline it will feel like the 1970’s oil crisis, only this time it is permanent. According to some geologists this all starts as early as 2008. Just like the 1970’s oil price rises will lead to inflation. This time we will combat inflation with monetary policy, raising interest rates to lower demand. However, this will happen while the airlines are going bankrupt due to the higher oil prices. The flow on effects to international tourism will create a crisis of unemployment, and combined with the higher interest rates will bring on the next Great Depression!

Where is the money going to come from to pay parents to have more children? Why do we want more babies to join us for this crisis? Industrial agriculture is so dependent on oil that our very food is going to cost more! A larger population will ultimately make the problem that much worse.

This is the latest from Robert Hirsch whom the US DOE commissioned to report on peak oil.
"This problem is truly frightening. This problem is like nothing that I have ever seen in my lifetime, and the more you think about it and the more you look at the numbers, the more uneasy any observer gets. It's so easy to sound alarmist, and I fear that part of what I'm saying may sound alarmist, but there simply is no question that the risks here are beyond anything that any of us have ever dealt with. And the risks to our economies and our civilization are enormous."
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/615

Isn’t paying parents to produce more babies just like subsidizing tickets to the Titanic?