8mo ago

Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work

www.theguardian.com Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work

White House proposes giving out $5,000 checks to address falling birthrates amid growing ‘pronatalist’ movement

White House proposes giving out $5,000 checks to address falling birthrates amid growing ‘pronatalist’ movement

One of Donald Trump’s priorities for his second term is getting Americans to have more babies – and the White House has a new proposal to encourage them to do so: a $5,000 “baby bonus”.

The plan to give cash payments to mothers after delivery shows the growing influence of the “pronatalist” movement in the US, which, citing falling US birthrates, calls for “traditional” family values and for women – particularly white women – to have more children.

But experts say $5,000 checks won’t lead to a baby boom. Between unaffordable health care, soaring housing costs, inaccessible childcare and a lack of federal parental leave mandates, Americans face a swath of expensive hurdles that disincentivize them from having large families – or families at all – and that will require a much larger government investment to overcome.

190 comments

$5000???
Hahahahaha
Give me a house. Anything short of 1500 sqft, 3br, 1.5ba, on a half acre or more is just not enough for my gf and I to even consider.
And we are both gainfully employed.
- 1500sqft starts to feel cozy with a bunch of teenagers hanging out.
  $5000 probably won’t cover the lost salary from missing work, if adequate recovery time is taken to say nothing of the true developmental needs of the infant. Try 2 years of salary, just to get to a point where daycare can take over for some of the time (and you get to pay that too!).
  I get that “we need kids to grow the economy” but also, humans are killing the planet and if our population keeps growing, we’re going to just keep on killing it faster.
- I get the sentiment here, but a half acre is a lot of land and the development of large suburban lots is a big thing that contributed to the housing crisis in north america. We need to diversify housing and increase the number of 1000-2000 sqft apartments as well. Relatively small homes on smaller lots (1/4 acre and under) should also be being built.
  
  A half acre is nothing. It’s ~20,000 sq/ft.
- Give everyone a house. How is this not a thing in the 21st century
- hes just copying putin, putin promised equivalent to 16k for 10 children from moms.
- Half acre? You don't need that much space for kids 😂
  
  Why would he only be asking for his needs?
  
  You don't need kids either.
  
  True, but kids aren't free-range anymore the way they were when I was growing up in the '80s & '90s. It didn't used to matter if you had a small backyard if you had a big neighborhood to roam. But from what I understand, kids aren't allowed to just get on their bikes and go explore like they used to. Larger yards give kids a place to play, to get some fresh air and exercise instead of being indoors glued to a screen.
  
  he thinks they should be in livestock pens.

$5000? Does Trump still think it's the 1950s?
- I sizable chunk of the populace seems to harbor similar delusions
  
  We will give you FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS! MFer please, diapers alone would be $5000 the first year.
- Does Trump still think it's the 1950s?
  Very likely, yes.
- It's just a child, Michael. How much could it cost?
- YEA! Thats basically the whole thing
- I mean with his likely dementia...
  
  Dementia? Likely late stage syphilis.
- He probably wishes it was still the 50s and is regressing the country as much as possible to return to the"good old days"
  
  90% tax rate for the 1% would do it real quick
  
  Actually, he publicly stated that he thinks the 1870s-1910s was peak America. You know, the Guilded Age.
  Source: https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-gilded-age-mckinley-grover-cleveland-1592dab80ad7159266db51b5baa774b6

Give me one year paid family leave and Medicare for all, then we'll talk.
- Maybe a grant for college as well, so I can get a degree so that I might actually be able to participate in society at large.
  
  Serious question, have you considered the trades? It seems that jobs like electrician, plumber, auto mechanic, etc are a lot more secure than white collar jobs are right now, especially STEM. I know at least where I live (Philly exurbs) there's a shortage of electricians, with only 2 going into the trade as 5 retire. You get paid during your training and through the union you get healthcare and a pension. Something to think about.
- Seriously, a one time payment that low won’t cover shit. The climate doesn’t support families to begin with like your comment points out.
  Also you can’t ask people to have kids and cut funding to Medicaid & be actively dismantling Department of Education.. It’s counterintuitive to say we support families and then not support families. Oh but here’s some money.

Hey non-Americans, fun fact! If you have a baby here, you can expect $15,000+ in hospital bills.
$5,000 should cover that, right?
- That's the most laughable part of this idea. Even with a great insurance plan that $5k is basically a hospital discount. Furthermore, the few people I know that are interested in having more kids and have "uneventful" home births under their belt, thus minimal medical bills, are all Hispanic.
  
  Let's not spread incorrect numbers, our hmo made the cost of labor about $100 (maybe because of California). Childcare, formula, etc is still way more than $5k but labor is only expensive with bad insurance or no insurance, which is actually kind of more ironic since that applies more to MAGA than the rest of us.
- A C-section will run you $60K easy. With the 80:20 insurance thats $12K owed by the parents. . With the federal out of pocket maximum being $9,450 for the mother. The baby also has a $9,450 out of pocket maximum. So the family will likely owe at least $12k before leaving the hospital
  $5K handout is seriously ignorant. It will cost a hell of a lot more to reverse the trend
  In order to increase the birthrate above replacement level here are a few things that need to happen.
  Free universal healthcare including dental.
  Rent control for all apartments locked to single income minimum wage.
  Ban on investment properties for single family homes. If the house is classified as single family, you can't rent it out. It must be sold.
  Free childcare.
  Free education from pre-K to Graduate levels.
  Open immigration policies for countries with higher birthrates.
  Increase minimum wage to make it a livable wage.
  To pay for it all - Increase corporate taxes to 95% for more than $100million income. Increase personal taxes to 95% for more than 1 million in income.
  
  It's funny how all of the real solutions for increasing the birthrate are just generally good things for the country.
  
  9: The outlawing of ghost jobs and heavy enforcement of workers rights.
  
  To reverse the trend one should make healthcare more competitive.
- Im paying $12,000 per year for daycare/preschool just so I can go to work.
  
  You got a good fuckin deal. I don't have kids but my friends pay between $20,000 and $30,000 for daycare

Other countries have tried this, and it was a spectacular failure
His arrogance means that he's incapable of learning from others though, so good fucking luck
- It's not a monetary issue, otherwise the middle class would have more kids than the poor, which isn't the case. It's simply that when given the right and the means to control how many kids they have, people choose to not have enough to renew the population.
  
  Same pattern everywhere as women gain rights over their body and as contraceptives become available. Even in periods where there was a strong middle class, even in countries where socio-economic inequalities aren't as much an issue. Northern European countries and Quebec are some of the places with the most socio-economic equity and their birthrate is down the drain.
  
  Turns out having kids is hard on a body, and I don’t blame any woman for not wanting to go through that.
  
  Down the drain but they are much lower in countries like Germany, Italy, and South Korea where there's massive Hausfrau + Breadwinner cultural expectations. Wealth and autonomy decreases birthrates - letting women have careers and children gives you less of a decrease.
  Reduction in birthrate is a problem when you decide that infinitely growing the human population is how you get prosperity. If you think the birthrate should be 4 so there's always a lot more young people than pensioners.
  Even with a birthrate lower than replacement it will take a very long time to significantly reduce any country's population.
  
  Yes that does tend to be the trend, but there's also cultural effects on that as well. If we made more I would have kids, and speaking to my colleagues many of them would also want kids. But they can't afford to live.
  There of course can be more than one cause for a trend, and I accept this is anecdotal.
- I thought Japans idea to subsidize alcohol was really the low point of this "We need more babies but also want to do the least amount possible to help" trend.

Lmaooo no shit it won't work. Daycare alone is $20-$40k a year. A pittance one-time payment doesn't change the fundamental calculus of how fucking expensive everything is now
- It shouldn't work, it should give the right publicity. 1/8 of yearly daycare cost is you know what? more than 10% of daycare cost and more than zero. It doesn't matter this is small, what matters is that people will subconsciously remember it exists.
  Propaganda works like that. Various pieces of the right mechanism will be planted into your brain (yes, even your brain) to work in the right moment, when, despite everything having turned into shit, you'll vaguely remember that there are some programs helping someone, not all other countries are perfect too, terrorists exist and should be fought, even though it's done with wrong methods, and your ruling clan is full of dumb thieves, which is what they want you to think. And at some point this will make you defenseless for a full takeover.
  Well, that's what worked with Russia, USA is kinda stronger (not being a stagnating totalitarian state that just stopped breathing helps), but such people improve and perfect their methods too.

My wife and I would consider another kid if the fed wanted to kick us an extra $25k per year.
A one time fee of $5K is hilarious. You'd maybe be able to cover the hospital bill from having the kid with that sum.
- You’d maybe be able to cover the hospital bill from having the kid with that sum.
  If there's no complications.
  
  Seriously! 100K minimum to cover the basics.
- It's not even his idea.
  https://taxfoundation.org/blog/hillary-clintons-proposal-5000-baby-bond-essentially-already-here/
  Sen. Hillary Clinton’s plan to give every newborn a $5,000 bond, money meant to defray college costs when the kids hit 18, continued to draw criticism yesterday from her right-wing rivals.
  “It’s a quick way of trying to buy votes, which is irresponsible when it comes to the economic future of the nation,” said New York Conservative Party chief Mike Long, adding that the White House would have to raise taxes to finance the plan.
  The bonds would cost about $20 billion a year, based on the 4million American babies born annually, according to Time magazine, which last month proposed a similar plan.
- Not even cash, but healthcare, childcare, preschool, more tuition assistance (WTF, FAFSA no longer considers if you have multiple kids in college? Let’s start by fixing that), excessive housing and vehicle cost. Plus give us some hope for the future with investments in the environment and renewable energy, making the world a better place. $5k probably covers first year food, clothes, diapers but not much more
  
  FAFSA calculations have been bullshit for years.
  “Oh, your family was extremely abusive and they aren’t giving you a dime? Well, your stepfather still makes too much for you to get anything other than unsubsidized loans.”
  Like, fuck, my mom stole thousands of dollars from me. I should have had a negative EFC.

They're pretending to offer incentives while their actual policies are why birth rates are declining.
5k won't even cover the hospital costs for the birth. Let alone the child care, continuing to insure that child, food, housing, child care because both parents need to work, education which they've been staying refunding for decades...
- They want people who aren't smart enough to realize this having more babies.

I thought Republicans were against giving people handouts?

At least offer free healthcare and child birth, that’s $30,000 out of pocket if you’re middle class.
- They don't want the middle class breeding, those are the people they want to get rid of. They want rulers and servants. With this, poor people will have more kids for the short term gain because they have to. Parents get money and can feed thmselves for a while. Then the oligarchy gets a influx of child labour they can pay less for and will be indoctrinated from this early age. Those parents will realize having more kids means they can get more income off them and with be incentived to have 12 kids in the factory.

This is how you get Idiocracy. The people that would take advantage of this would be the people you don't want to over-breed.
- In any case this combined with his dismantling of public education will certainly not help.
- And the same people who are likely to vote for whoever his fascist successor ends up being.

"What could raising a child cost? $5000?"
"You've never actually raised a child, have you?"

Just birthing the damn thing is like $50,000. He can shove the $5,000 right up his ass and I hope he gets paper cuts up there too.
- It’ll join the light bulbs up there from the 1st term
- I believe $5k is around the average cost (after insurance) to have a baby in the US if you have insurance.
  
  Remove insurance. I know I was exaggerating but the bottom line is the poor are hit most and there's a higher chance they don't have insurance. Especially if Medicaid gets gutted.

Why can't countries understand quality of life leads to more of those productive babies they really want
- None of the developed countries have a replacement birth rate. Higher quality of life has lead to lower birth rate in all cases.
- because that requires the people in charge facing hard truths about their own lifestyles.

$5k is roughly 1/4 the cost...
... of a birth.
Alone. Just, average medical costs of a birth, without insurance.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-baby/
https://www.uwhealth.org/news/how-much-does-it-really-cost-have-baby
... And they are slashing Medicaid.
If you do have insurance... $5k is about half the cost of a birth.
So... congrats, you can have two kids, and then uh lol have fun paying the cost of raising two kids, which is about half a million dollars.
And that's just to 18, btw, this assumes those kids can find a job immediately after high school and move out into a place they can afford on an entry level income.
Which uh, is basically wildly unrealistic at this point.
Because all entry level jobs require 2-3 years of experience.
And housing costs are insane.
- It costs 20 000 USD to give birth? My goodness that is insane
  
  Yeah.
  The US is indeed, completely insane, compared to the rest of the developed world, but the average person has no other frame of reference.
  Literacy rates in the US are down to 80%, by the way.
  20% of the adult population cannot read or write beyond a 2nd grade level.
  The average literacy ability is a 5th/6th grade level.
  So... something like 2/3 of the country has reading and writing skills below that of what a high school (primary school, before a college or uni) graduate is supposed to have.
  Our school systems are collapsing.
  (And yes, you may notice that proportion of people with sub high school literacy rates is so large that it also includes many people with Uni/College degrees. Yep. That is correct. Many of those also fail to teach basic writing skills before giving someone a degree.)
  
  That's on the low end. My son spent three months in the NICU due to being born premature. His hospital bill ran into the six figures.
  Fortunately, thanks to a hiccup of history in which one of JFK's family members was in the NICU for a similar length of time and experienced sticker shock. She lobbied Kennedy and he lobbied Congress. So now, this bill is automatically covered by Medicaid.
  
  Only if you have complications.

I'm not American. I thought "$5k/month for sure". Lol.

He’s making everything more expensive, gutting medicade to nothing (50% of babies are born on medicade), taking away food stamps, getting rid of the department of education, gutting hud, gutting head start, getting rid of free lunches in schools, sending us into a Great Depression, stripping worker protections and removing any hope for a future….but yeah 5k sure that will cover your first 15 minutes of delivery. What a joke this man is
- And up to 80% of children are covered by Medicaid depending on the state.
  
  and most elderly in nursing homes. That is going to be a whole lot of care work dumped onto women with little to no pay and dire economic consequences for women and families. It would be absolutely stupid to have a baby with this level of uncertainty

Is $5000 gonna resurrect my wife if my shit ass state policies force her to continue a dangerous pregnancy and she dies prior to giving birth? Also, fuck you.
- It would be gods plan for her do die because she is not worthy /s

Trump: "Gotta save the government money"
Also Trump: "Just throw money at it, maybe it will fix itself"
- There is no plan, just incompetence.

Throwing money at people won't cause a baby boom. YOU NEED TO MAKE CHILD CARE AND HOUSING CHEAPER!! GIVE PEOPLE HOPE AND CHILDREN WILL FOLLOW!
I know I'm screaming into a void but I feel like it needs to be said.
- And it's a start. Make public transportation easier to access. Find public education better. Don't sic CPS on parents that let their children play outside.

Hilarious that the only concept he can come up with is UNDER paying for things he wants hahahahaha
- The weird thing is that it's not even his money. Literally can print money here and only gives $5k.
  That said, I fully expect this to come with so many strings attached that not a single person will get money except for the top 1% and they will mysteriously have hundreds of children.

Youre not gonna get the eugenics you want with this. The most likely audience is people with short-sighted need for cash, aka the working poor.
- This cuts out the middle. This is what they want. You need a poor desperate sick and uneducated underclass to serve the super rich. You don't want anyone new in the club.
  
  Fair
- Cheap labor? Pretty sure that's exactly what they want.
- The morlocks, you mean?

Literally cost us $11k in medical bills to have a baby. That doesn't include the cost of actually maintaining it either. $5k is a JOKE

He "could" TOTALLY pay his way into a baby boom.
Step 1: Tax the rich. Lower the pressure on the lower and middle classes.
Step 2: Fix housing pricing so that a single hard-working person can afford a house, a car, and two kids without their partner having to work.
Step 3: Put some guardrails in place to stop the 2-3 companies that are buying up everything. Give medium and small business a chance to thrive without needing to be purchased by a giant company.
Step 4. Fix healthcare so that the family above gets 100% coverage for whatever happens. Pay for it with Step 1.

Guillotine time

Add at least one zero to that, ideally two.
- https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-cost-of-raising-a-child-by-u-s-state/
  Multiply by 18 years, closer to the 500'000 figure.
  
  It depends on the source, but they're all in the "a few hundred thousand" range for raising a child to 18. Collage/university are not included in that.
  
  My thinking was more "what amount might make someone make a financially irresponsible decision" rather than anything related to the real cost.

No amount of money will convince a meaningful amount of people to have kids if they can't reasonably believe their children will have a good life. Climate disasters, pollution, financial struggle, no access to property, crushing work life, unemployment, racism, unfair public policies, regressing social rights. All of these have to be addressed seriously before you can even start dreaming about reaching replacement birth rate. Fascist governments will go for an easier solution: enslave women.

Kind of hard to promote getting pregnant when they are actively trying to take away abortion rights! That's like asking someone to walk a tight rope, but then take away the safety net.
- They're coming for contraceptives next, then it'll be easy to get pregnant
  
  then it'll be easy to get pregnant
  Whether you want to or not...
  
  Other countries tried that. It increased the amount of illegal abortions. A lot of kids got dumped on the steps of an orphanages what gave entire new sets of problems. And the birth rate still decreased.

Wow, look at that! The price of strollers just went up 5k!
Replace strollers with basically anything related to birth or infants. 5k more to spend? 5k more to earn by big business selling wares.
This assumes the hospital doesn't determine that you seem to owe 5k more for that one out of network service provider they slipped in while you were distracted during birthing.
- I hate our healthcare system so much. Individual bills for random doctors you never asked for that are somehow working for the hospital but are unrelated in terms of their insurance policy makes zero sense. How could anyone consent to anything in a reasonable fashion
  
  Preach. I can do nothing but agree, and I have insider info in the insurance industry, pharma and healthcare. It's all a game to make the rich even richer and the politicians are colluding in such a bipartisan fashion you'd think the parties were fully unified.

It's not a baby boom they are after. I used to think it was all about cheaper labor.
Nope. It's to tie up fathers and mothers so they are too busy to pay attention that people start starving, dying of disease, and disappearing.
The added benefit, if they can do it "their way" they kill multiple birds with one stone - A. Prevent the "white replacement theory" (wtf) B. Lower the number of people willing to fight against the Regime, C. Cheaper, younger labor pool hopefully educated enough to go into the military And that's about it.
Soft Eugenics. Genocide through "nature".
Won't work, but they're not the brightest people.

If $5000 is a lot to you, he's really not interested in there being more of "your type" of person.
- Actually, I'm sure he's quite interested in there being a nice big class of desperate labor pool ripe for exploitation.
  
  To quote George Carlin, 'living babies make dead soldiers'.
  
  Well, they say societies grow great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.
  Trump doesn't seem like a man who thinks that far ahead. He's more the Fox News "great replacement" type.

$5k when having a kid costs $3k in insurance copays with a normal birth and average insurance. So you’re down to $2k before even leaving the hospital. This dude has all the intellectual depth and forethought of a mushroom.
- And The 2K is gone pretty quick purely from adding the baby to your insurance. Boo.

That’s not even diaper money for their first year. Donald, you should know this, ya shit stain wearin’ convict.

$5k a month, right? Right?
- Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).
  If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they'll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).
  But they're not, so here we are.
  
  Yeah I've been saying stuff like this for a while. I just didn't want to get into the weeds, thus the Star Wars meme quote lol
- This would come closest to an actual incentive. Babies are not a one time expense.

I was told this was communism. And that this is bad.

There's already an annual child tax credit: https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-child-tax-credit
I'm sure they didn't even check if birth rates are influenced by this...

It really makes no sense of why they want to increase the population.. when close to 5% are unemployed, as more people is ready to work soon.
The only thing I can think of is they’re trying to sink the usd more, make it a country like China that is like manufacturing, and many Americans lost a huge chunk of salary (like what happened during the Great Depression).
- There's not enough white babies for them. You're looking for financial logic when it's closer to white supremacy being out-birthed.
- What you're missing is that, in ~10-12 years or so, those babies will have grown into a massive labor demographic. I wish this was hyperbole.
  
  It’s like they have in charge some nerd who’s only experience with planning and development is 4X games.
  
  They want a slave class. That's all.

Just what we need... more boomers on the way

Most of these kids watched their parents struggle to pay the bills and sometimes basic things like food. They think they can overcome that amount of generational experience.

It is true that the US is seeing declining birthrates and has been for some time. While fertility rates bounced around what demographers call “replacement level” the rate at which the population replenishes aging people with new ones in the decades that followed the post-second world war baby boom, they have been on a steady downward trend since the 2010 Great Recession, so that now, US fertility rates sit at about 1.6 births per woman.
News like this, is what makes me smile and want to wake up. Seeing that the fertility sits at 1.6 in US.
| Country | Total Fertility Rate (TFR) | | South Korea | 0.72 | | Hong Kong | 0.77 | | Taiwan | 0.87 | | Singapore | 1.04 | | Italy | 1.24 | | Spain | 1.25 | | Japan | 1.26 |
If they keep up with the horrific nature and state of economy, I hope we are less then South Korea, so that the top oligarchs and the rich billionaires die and self implode while they have nothing to retain or keep their wealth. Because what can a rich filthy greedy bastard going to do when he has no slaves to profit off of? Our fight to get our economy back to how it was on one single working individual needs to come back. To where one working individual can own a house, afford food and the necessities/provisions to obtain a good and healthy and sustainable life not for that one individual but for a wife or husband with four kids.
If we don’t get that, then we fight back with no kids for the future to be taken advantage of, for profit to just be enslaved and barely making it by. The greed of these parasitical demons will be fought with not producing off of what they feed off. Let’s take it all the way down until change happens.
- Human procreation doesn't work like that. Those who disagree with you will have children. Their ideas will be carried into the next generation, yours won't.
  And 1.6 for a developed country is just amazingly high. As you might have seen from the previous sentence, I think it should sit around reproduction level of 2.1-2.2, and better more. But that's ideally, in fact it's high.
  Apathy is death. First of all, no passive resistance will defeat these people. They know you better than you know them. I've met some.

If hes following the century initiative he will cap money supply growth at 3% or so, which will drastically bring down home prices.

Australia tried this approach already - https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-baby-bonus-generation-is-starting-to-turn-18-has-it-saved-australia-s-population-20220624-p5awfg.html

I bet it will have the opposite effect.

Each kid is like a $1m commitment.

The fact that formula is now pretty universally behind the counter or behind a locked cabinet door says a lot about the current situation in America.

5k is better than nothing of course but not really enough with all the fees and costs associated. Especially the initial costs that you get from hospitals. Maybe regulate those?

I read that as "baby room" and still was not surprised.

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