These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
To be clear, I’m not actually against removing the cap, means-testing the benefits, or anything else. However, the political will for that sort of thing isn’t really there, especially because it would represent a non-trivial tax increase on the kind of upper middle class vaguely moderate suburbanites that tend to swing elections.
My main qualm is that Social Security simultaneously attempts to be a mandatory government retirement plan and a welfare system and doesn’t do a particularly good job at either of those things. As a retirement plan, pretty much any generic investment plan outperforms it, while at the same time, its ability to be an effective elderly welfare system is hugely hampered by this political perception of it as an “earned” retirement benefit as well as its less than efficient administration.
My main point here is that it’s not accurate to say that there’s just “one weird trick!” that cleanly solves Social Security forever. Even raising or eliminating the cap would come with very significant political pushback from an annoyingly important and temperamental voting block.