There are reports that the Trump administration is considering a $5,000 ‘baby bonus’ payment to new mothers to boost birth rates. While having a baby comes with a lot of expenses, this is just welfare.
And it won’t boost birth rates.
What it will do is transfer more wealth from the people who should be having children but aren’t, to a welfare population of immigrant and minority single mothers in slum areas. They already have children for welfare payments and $5K will only move so much of the needle. This is a liberal policy being spun as pro-natalist.
The birth rate problem is complicated but we can narrow it down to one core problem.
People are not meeting, forming relationships and marrying. Those who do, increasingly do so late in life.
The reasons for this are cultural, social and economic.
If we’re going to provide any kind of financial incentives, they should be structured as tax benefits for the middle class people and two-income families who are not having enough children because of the cost. That along with making IVF more affordable, as Trump proposed, may move the birth rate needle a bit, but only so much.
The underlying issue is that there’s been a collapse in relationships. Social and economic reasons have convinced younger people to postpone marriage and serious relationships. The two-income family makes larger families nearly impossible. And if we’re going to tackle those things, we need to fundamentally rework cultural messaging, including the emphasis on consumerism and the self, and we also need to significantly reduce college education and higher ed in general for much of the population with the aim of creating an economic where younger people can step into jobs and adult personalities more immediately.
Those are big problems and big goals. A $5,000 check won’t cut it. All it will do is make our existing social problems worse.
