I agree with you except the part about the policy making a dent. Scandinavian countries have all sorts of "universal childcare" and benefits, and their TFR is still going straight into the shitter. All this talk about expanding the GDP and going towards total workforce participation IMO is why family formation is slowing to a crawl (I mean look at South Korea, where it's all about being a workaholic and they basically will cease to exist in maybe 50-100 years, literally). If we want to continue as a nation or entity of people, I believe the people and the government are going to need to put their thumb on the scale in a way more aggressive way, including both childcare credits for all, paying stay at home parents a salary, major cultural changes (including our own version of the Soviet Mother Heroine/Order of Parental Glory that carry real status with them, perhaps), and economic and cultural pushback on being a DINK or similar. We have no future the way we're going, and these sort of policy interventions have been tried elsewhere and they don't do shit. We really have got to rethink a lot of things, in a way that's probably painful or irritating to the readership here, otherwise we're basically done.

You don’t want just kids, you want well raised kids. Badly raised kids are easily a net negative, so just paying people to be parents isn’t going to work.

The only thing that might incentivize people to think about the long term is getting rid of all old age benefits (including continuous bail outs of broad market assets by the federal government by sacrificing the purchasing power of the currency).

Right now, we take productivity from people who sacrifice to raise kids well and give it to those who don’t raise kids well, or not have them at all.

This obviously leads to an arbitrage opportunity (as evidenced by DINK lifestyles).

I do not see any other way other than to remove this arbitrage opportunity. Which probably will not happen in any democracy due to old people’s voting power.