Bill's Eugenics Proposal
Some persons call eugenics a pseudoscience. This is clearly false. Eugenics is merely applying the techniques of animal husbandry to human beings. The techniques are prehistoric, literally older than writing. Animal husbandry obviously works. So does eugenics.
Now, that says nothing about whether eugenics is a good idea, or whether it is humane. I think that should be determined by the techniques used. For example, it would be an abomination to breed humanity for blond hair by exterminating all dark haired babies. On the other hand, I think it's a good thing that potential carriers of Tay–Sachs disease get screened before they get married. (This is an actual program.)
Here is a program that is humane, strongly eugenic, and would have several ancillary benefits:
Make the initial insertion and replacement of intrauterine devices (IUDs) free to all reproductive age women in the United States, that is, paid for by the government.
Encourage healthcare providers, including Planned Parenthood, to recommend IUDs by giving them a reasonable subsidy (bounty, bribe) for every one they insert. Say a hundred dollars.
That's it. Unplanned pregnancies decrease with intelligence and conscientiousness. By making IUDs free and bribing healthcare providers to push them, the number of less intelligent and less conscientious women using long term contraception will go up. Therefore, they will have fewer children.
Intelligence in adulthood is about .80 heritable. Conscientiousness is about .5 heritable. If women of lesser intelligence and conscientiousness have fewer children, the average level of intelligence and conscientiousness will go up. It could be by a lot, because I suspect there are many unplanned pregnancies. The Guttmacher Institute puts the number at forty-five percent.
As added benefits, fewer unplanned pregnancies imply fewer abortions and fewer unwanted children.
Cost: Googling around, it looks to me that IUD insertion and follow-up visits cost around $1000 total. Adding in the bribe increases that to about $1100. There are about 75 million women between the ages of 15 and 50. So the initial cost of the program would be something like $83 billion in the first few years, if every fertile woman got one, dropping down to maybe a fourth of that after the initial rush.
That's a lot of money, but the cost would be offset by fewer abortions, fewer special education students, less crime (the less intelligent and conscientious commit more crime), fewer prison inmates, fewer accidents of all kinds (intelligence and conscientiousness influence the accident rate), and so on. Just in terms of dollars and cents, the net long term savings have to be large.