I doubt it will 'burst' the way people tend to think of that. I would anticipate in the not too distant future access to those loans will become a lot more contingent on circumstances like field employability or grades.

Because for the most part those people having children are acting logically to their circumstances, based on both what they have and what they know. Why would a poor illiterate farmer in Africa with no TV or radio care about our foster system? To him, the US is simply a very distant and wealthy place that he might be able to locate on a map. If he isn't illiterate then odds are he was taught to read by Christian or Muslim clergy, neither group is famous for concerns about population control.

As to in the west itself, regarding foster care, we don't foster foreign kids we adopt them, and we have a shortage of supply. Fostering is what we do with kids who are already too grown up to be easily incorporated into an existing family and may have parents who are simply in jail or run off. We tend to have a supply problem for adoption, rather than a demand shortage, but fostering is a whole different nightmare. Of the various problems we have with that issue, resources isn't one, it is a tiny fraction of our economy.

FYI, outside of alarmists and poor/unimaginative researchers and reporters, I haven't seen anything indicating we'd have problems supporting 9-10 billion people. We don't use most of the worlds arable land, outside of the west most of it isn't used efficiently, and 'arable' is a very subjective term anyway. Ultimately if it gets enough light it can be made arable at cost beneath the total productivity of the people fed by the calories it produces. Got a spot that gets half the rainfall it needs? Slap something water repellent and sloped on half of it and problem solved. What is really meant by arable is 'competitive', can a given location and method produce food as cheaply as others? If the answer is no, that only means it isn't effective while demand remains at the current stable dynamic. Double the population and suddenly it doesn't matter if it can produce as cheaply, it just matters if it can produce calories per unit cost under what the new demand supports.

For a good while still I imagine. What we mostly need is confidence of stability. Economic confidence or a lack there of tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways. I am of the opinion one of the major techs hovering on the edge of realization or profitability will tumble over and create a decent enough shove to get the car moving out of the mud but currently we got stuck in the mud and we've spun our wheels so much they're hanging in the air.

Lower the price of energy, that's basically the magic cure all since it hits everything, and ultimately it, not housing, is what tanked the economy. Housing essentially is what wounded confidence in investment, energy costs are what are strangling things. You need both, confidence and cheap fuel/food/material/etc but confidence is a lot more ethereal. Increasing the supply of raw materials is probably the fastest fix, fuel/energy being the most critical one at the moment.

Honestly #2 is the one I found most interesting.

As to #5, I've a simple philosophy about experiments, you don't perform them on people without their individual permission without extreme need and justification.

Socialism lost all moral credibility the moment it was born by picking a definition that required not everyone enter in willing. Right form the get go it could have said "A group of volunteers get together and agree to share their resources with the intent of seeing to it that everyone has a basic minimum." and that would be a moral approach and not at odds with capitalism. Even today a thousand liberals could get together and agree to tithe half their wealth to the common pot for even or by-need distribution and even write up contracts that forbid exiting if you were doing better without some ghastly penalty. The reason those of us who don't like socialism regard it with such contempt is that these all-volunteer groups never seem to arise and be able to wave around great success to prove their experiment, rather they always seem to demand we accept conscription into their system, which wouldn't be acceptable to me even if it could trumpet successes, except it never seems to have any clear ones.