If you personally feel people should be effectively punished for having kids or rewarded for not having them, it's likely you see it as a personal choice and one to be paid for personally.

That's my position, and I think the only reasonable and rational position you can hold unless you are talking about children conceived as a product of rape, incest or some other non-consensual encounter.

It's a fair point, but to me that perspective almost views kids as pets or even objects instead of people. Like it's their own fault for adopting a dog, because dogs cost money and basic income is not meant for dog food.

This is where I think you go awry. Adoption is not the same as giving birth. Adopting a pet or a child is doing a service to that person or animal that already exists. Adoption doesn't bring any added burden to society, it simply shifts it from one place to another for life that already exists.

The decision to bring new life (and all of the resources that new life will require and environmental burden that new life will bring) into the world is completely different. The decision to have a child is akin to the decision to breed new animals - not adopt them.

With our planet in the midst of the The Holocene extinction, or the 6th great mass extinction in earth's history, as a direct result of human activity, its time to take a look at our massive overpopulation issue. From the overfishing of the oceans, to the chemical saturation of the environment, to the destruction of our rain-forests and wetlands, to the desertification of our lands, to global warming, to islands of floating plastic in our seas as big as countries - we are depleting the resources of our planet at an unsustainable rate. We should be encouraging people to have fewer children rather than draining our dwindling resources in an attempt to subsidize efforts to pack even more people on our overcrowded planet.