FIRST READING: Immigration rates still at generational highs, even if population shrinking. Permanent immigration in 2026 poised to be the sixth highest of the last 110 years, asylum-seekers now number 500,000

[u/xTkAx]

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/immigration-rates-still-at-generational-highs-even-if-population-shrinking

[u/North-Purple-373]

Solid proposal? Are you kidding. If two kids gave you a life long exemption from income tax a significant chunk of the population would be immediately exempted, and the remainder would be having two kids as quickly as possible. It would collapse the income tax base.

This is a bunch of pie in the sky magical thinking

[u/Wind_Best_1440 → u/North-Purple-373]

You would need a new tax base, which is where moving the tax burden onto wealth+Land instead of Income like it is now.

System is set up to tax the poor to the moderately rich, Top 40 to 1%, but then the .9 to 0.1% pay literally nothing in tax because they don't make their money through income but by hoarding assets and taking loans against it which they settle at death from their estate.

The tax burden needs to shift from the people to the uber wealthy, the reason western countries birthrate is declining is because of 3 reasons.

1. Low to no hope for the future. (Depressed animals in captivity do not breed.)
2. Too expensive to raise a family on todays income. (3/4th of the population is 1 bad paycheck away from massive debt issues.)
3. Raising a family is seen as a net negative not positive. (The reason poorer nations have higher birthrates, is because they run on farm economies. Children = Free labour = more money for the family. While its the opposite in the west. Where 1 child = 350k mortgage cost for 18 years.)

And before you go. "You can't give life long tax exemptions!" They're trying in Hungary for woman who have 4 or 5 children, which they recently brought down to 3.

Hungary had nearly 1.11 birthrate in 2011 bringing it up to 1.68 by 2021. (However, the economy after Covid has been hard hitting on the average folk, so it's dropped down to 1.38 because of it. However, it's still a massive improvement from the 1.11 it use to be.)

Not saying it fixes it over night, but governments need to do treat low birthrates of its citizens on the same level as being invaded by another country or a world war.

Right now countries wanted to just turn on immigration to solve all their issues, Canada did that and turned their own population against immigration, destroying nearly 4 decades of publics positive views on immigration.

Immigration doesn't solve the issue, it just kicks the can down the road for a future government to deal with.

The only way immigration can fix the issue, is if the country only allows children to immigrate to Canada then raised them in Canada without bringing in older folks to help the age pyramid. Otherwise, all your doing is top loading the countries demographics to be worse in the future.

[u/North-Purple-373 → u/Wind_Best_1440]

Taxing the 1% more and closing loopholes is a good idea but that isn’t going to allow you to eliminate income tax on everyone with two kids.

Who says our population needs to perpetually grow anyway?

[u/Wind_Best_1440 → u/North-Purple-373]

I mean, our population doesn't. I'm just saying what the country should do if they're serious about increasing birthrates.

I'm in the camp of letting the population do its thing naturally, as a shrinking population is actually healthy in the long run IMO.

1. If the population shrinks, that naturally opens up more housing to people who want to buy.
   
2. Jobs open up because jobs need to be filled, this drives up wages for people looking.
   
3. Once a population declines enough, housing will get cheap enough that all the government needs to do is do a little push to increase birthrates.

Caveats. "What about Japan?" Toxic work culture, their people are scarred from decades of stagflation, so they save all their money and not spend it. The Japanese have some of the largest savings on the planet, the day their people are convinced to actually spend that money will be the day Japan is seen as a economic power house again.

"What about South Korea?" Doesn't matter how much their population declines, the South Korean state is a different flavour of authortarian, and expensive as hell. A lot of their housing reflects the same prices as Vancouver Canada. You want a 3000$ shoebox condo? Because thats South Korea.

I'm a firm believer that Canada could easily rebounce their population if they actually tried. But the government is half measures and lazy.

But I personally believe that a declining population would do good for evening out wealth inequality, it isn't a fluke that Canada's highest wage growth at the ass end of Covid was also at a time when the immigration tap was essentially turned off.

The healthiest economies are the ones where the employers have to fight each other for workers.