I may not have made myself clear- I don't mean that we should pay people the wage that they were making before they leave to raise their children; a policy like that would give those who least need the help the most money and leave someone struggling to make ends meet before having kids still not having enough after the extra expenses associated with a child are added. What I meant was that we should calculate a reasonably comfortable living wage for a given state or region, add the average additional cost a child would involve for things like food and clothing expenses, and pay a parent from each family that amount. My assumption was that this is probably more than or roughly equivalent to what most people make, and so would if successful mitigate the cost of having children. I suppose it would still make kids a net cost to people who are very well off, but these people less need the help anyway

If you set a per City or per county minimum income and every family that falls under the income level receives the difference as long as at least one person in the family is working a full-time job and there is at least 1 child in the household then that would go a long way to solving the issue.

Sure it would suck for the people that are making $5 a year more than the annual minimums to know that their neighbor that's working minimum wage at McDonald's is making almost as much as they are, but wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world that wasn't littered with abject poverty for no reason other than rich people have no upper limit to how rich they want to be?