This is an editorial comment disguised as objective reporting:

"But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it."

The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B.

I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack.

Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb...

More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts).

If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem.

The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments.

Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations.

Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family.

If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost.

The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too expensive". But, to repeat the point I made above, the financial arguments are nonsense. If you believe that Germany faces crushing debts in the future because of rising retirement costs, then raising the birth rate is the solution to Germany's financial problems.

But if you believe that the money simply doesn't exist, and that we are, in 2014, unable to do what my great grandmother did in the late 1800s, then the entire narrative of the Industrial Revolution needs to be re-examined, because you are suggesting that we are all poorer now than we were 120-140 years ago. Ask yourself, do you honestly believe that today's technology has left us poorer? Most economic historians would argue that, even with the reduction of child labor, most families are better off today than they were 120-140 years ago. If you assume that more per-capita wealth exists in the world now than circa 1880, then it should be possible to pay families for the cost of raising 3 or 4 children.