Couples should choose to have children because they genuinely want to and can't imagine life without being a parent. It's these kids who are going to be raised in loving homes with _emotionally-invested_ parents.

Paying people off to have kids is just twisted. First of all, it's absolutely no one else's business whether my husband and I have kids (we don't - not yet, anyway). Plus, isn't it roughly $300K to raise a child from infancy to adulthood?? (Ostensibly more if we're talking about a private college.) That'd have to be some seriously BIG financial incentive to help counter that.

I see these articles every now and then and wonder what the impetus is. Are people seriously worried about population levels in the US? Really? Then there's the wacko religious crowd who says that people who don't have kids are "defying God's plan. My final answer: focus on the children who are already here. If 37 million Americans are living at or below the poverty level, bringing more people into the world is hardly the answer!