>Would you have preferred the only other choice: a rapidly dropping population that would have killed the economy?That mythical "the economy" that's just the stock market and the top 10% wealthy business owners and has no trickle down to working class people who still suffer financially but now have to deal with the second order effects of that like expensive housing and safety on the streets?
How long must this gaslighting go on? That people must tolerate unpopular policies with negative consequences, all for the sake of "the economy"?
If governments actually cared about solving declining birthrates they would have tackled that, but they don't. Population replacement with conflicting cultures is much better solution for governments who then sell you the solution to that problem they created: privacy invasive chat control, digital-Euro, digital-ID, police-state, surveillance-state etc. and now also have a new voter base loyal to the government for citizenship and benefits, unlike anti-government local gen-pop, kind of like the mercenaries during Rome's collapse.
Plus, even if you were to somehow "solve birth rates", infinite population growth is unsustainable since resources on the planet are finite, and nobody in the west wants to live in places with high population growth like India, so why not build a society that can function on stagnating population instead?
Building a financial system with expectations of constant growth till infinity plus the expectation that every future generation will get to have the same prosperity boomers had, was the real mistake here from the start, which is unsalvable unless we go through another world war that kills tens/hundreds of millions and resets the monopoly board for the generation of the survivors' kids.