Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work
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.
It's a way of funneling money to the fundies and ultra-reactionary Catholics.
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.
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...
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
"What could raising a child cost? $5000?"
"You've never actually raised a child, have you?"
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
$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.
I'm not American. I thought "$5k/month for sure". Lol.
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.
Or they could just forgive the student loans haha, they are so stupid.
Guillotine time
It should be 1 penny. It has the same exact effect on childbirth rates, has a greater demoralizing effect on Democrats who understand policy, and allows more money to be siphoned to billionaires in tax cuts, all of which are the real goals here.
When you want to piss off a waiter on Sunday morning after church, you don't leave a 5% tip. You leave a penny.
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.
I bet it will have the opposite effect.
We don't even have to ask the experts. Just look at Japan that tried something similar in the past. Of course it was a complete failure... This is basic reality, right? Families that don't have money simply can't afford to raise a child even if they get a bit of cash at the start. Pay them more than a living wage if you want them to have kids.
Trump has no respect for anything
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?
Each kid is like a $1m commitment.
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.
If hes following the century initiative he will cap money supply growth at 3% or so, which will drastically bring down home prices.
I read that as "baby room" and still was not surprised.
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
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
Why do I have a feeling the administration would still try to find ways to not pay nonwhite families having kids?
Trump was propped up by people who believe this bogus "Great Replacement" theory and I don't think they would be willing to back down from that stance on account of a generally declining population.
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.
That’s not even diaper money for their first year. Donald, you should know this, ya shit stain wearin’ convict.
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).
Just what we need... more boomers on the way