Donald Trump proposes "baby bonus" to help improve birthrate.

 

Donald Trump. White House portrait 

Donald Trump has proposed a "baby bonus" to help improve America's lagging birthrate. Politico. The bonus would give money to young couples to encourage them to have children. Trump says that this could lead to a baby boom and reverse America's sagging birthrate, which is well below the replacement rate. The idea might have bipartisan support as it was also used as a plank of Democrat Corey Booker during his 2020 campaign run. 

#AGENDA47: @realDonaldTrump's plan for a QUANTUM LEAP in the American standard of living:

➡️BUILD FREEDOM CITIES
➡️REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICAN TRANSPORTATION
➡️LOWER THE COST OF LIVING
➡️MAKE AMERICA THE WORLD'S MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
➡️LAUNCH A GREAT MODERNIZATION CAMPAIGN pic.twitter.com/NTTGfjL9mG

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) March 3, 2023

(Trump makes the comments about baby bonuses at 2:50 in the above video. 

My Comment:

There is very little information about what exactly Trump is proposing here as he only had the short mention in the above video along with a few comments at his speech at CPAC. Mostly he talked about other big shot ideas like building new cities or (finally) making flying cars a reality. Those mostly seem like long shots to me but the baby bonus seems like something that would be fairly easy to pass and possibly even with Democrat support. 

I have written about the birth rate before and it is a major concern of mine. Generally speaking, population loss is never a good thing, especially when it comes to paying for things like social security. You need a larger, younger generation to pay for the older ones after they retire. If you don't have that you have only two options, neither of which are good. You either cut off the old folks, thus breaking the promises you made to them, or bring in a huge number of immigrants, which has its own severe problems. So far the country has appeared to go with #2 and it has not been working out for us to say the least. 

Of course, the question is why people aren't choosing to have children. Part of it is cultural, after all women are putting off marriage until after college and putting their careers ahead of having kids. This dramatically reduces the amount of children that can be had. And there is some feminist hostility to having children period for reasons I don't pretend to understand. 

But I think the major problem is cost. When you look at all the things you need to buy when it comes to having kids it's absurd. Spending thousands of dollars on medical costs, housing, food and everything else it prices a lot of people out of the market. Of course that doesn't stop poor people having kids but a lot of people in the middle class have to choose between having another kid and paying the mortgage and when that happens most people choose the mortgage. 

Reducing that cost might be a good way to encourage people to have children. It's been tried in the past and from what I understand it has mixed results. It really depends on how Trump wants to execute the policy. Tax breaks might not be enough because families with children already get pretty decent tax breaks (I was pretty shocked to learn how much more my married with three kids coworker gets compared to my single unmarried status tax return). Still, I think part of the problem is the huge cost of having kids and anything that reduces that cost might help.

However, I do think that Trump's idea to encourage low cost housing might be even better. As someone that looked for a house for awhile but gave up after realizing that even in a relatively cheap part of the country home ownership was out of my reach, I can tell you the market is insane right now. What houses that do go up now are huge McMansions that are far out of the reach of first time home buyers. Almost no small two bedroom houses, which are perfect for a small family, get built anymore and it's a major factor as to why people are putting off having children. 

Regardless, I am happy to hear Trump talking about this as it is an issue that is largely getting ignored. People need to get together and have kids and I don't think that has ever been more difficult to do in history. And it's not just people deciding that it's too expensive to have kids, it's the fact that a lot of people aren't getting married or even dating at all. That's a subject for another post but it still means there is a lot of work to do on this aspect of American society.