The New York Times reported last week the Trump administration is racking staffers’ brains for policies to address the birth-rate crisis in the United States. Reportedly, ideas include $5,000 government checks for mothers a month after delivery, affirmative action for parents, and teaching more women to understand their fertility.
Self-sterilization is creating existential crises the world over because most wealthy nations are social welfare states with dysfunctional armies. Those financially collapse without a growing population. Far more important than money, of course, is cultural collapse.
Western nations importing Third World citizens have discovered humans aren’t as interchangeable as robots. Poorly educated people who don’t speak the language don’t pay for others’ social services, they require more, including law enforcement.
Plus, it’s immoral to import people to pay others’ welfare. That’s indentured servitude. Our welfare state forces it on Americans, too. We shouldn’t want a slave society but a self-sufficient society.
We Need Parented Kids, Not Abandoned Kids
The apparent Elon Musk method also is a terrible idea: no government should pay women to spawn parentless kids for unattached sperm donors. Again, it’s not just that we need more human beings, we need more citizens capable of sustaining themselves and contributing to others. Like unskilled foreign labor, fatherless and motherless children tend to impose more social costs than their taxes relieve. We need more parented children, not feral children who quickly if not immediately become taxpayers’ dependents.
Musk may not consciously recognize this, but he seems to unconsciously, as indicated by the reports he paid $44 billion to buy Twitter because one of his effectively fatherless children was so distressed the son became transgender. There’s a huge correlation between family disintegration and transgender identification.
So any government efforts to encourage childbearing must only encourage married childbearing. This is why the most politically popular of the Times’ suggested options, expanding the child tax credit, should be a marriage bonus: Families should only get the expanded credit if headed by a married heterosexual couple (homosexual couples are naturally infertile and cannot provide both biological parents to a child, creating the same risks as fatherless children). Single-headed households can get the normal child tax credit, but married households should get double, or some other enhancement.
Furthermore, I think it’s entirely legit to exempt parents from taxes completely and raise taxes on nonparents to make up for it. That’s because if we’re going to have a social welfare Ponzi system, parents are paying into it simply by having kids. Child-free people are welfare state freeloaders.
Yes, I know sterile people pay taxes, but not enough to cover their take. If they did, Western welfare states wouldn’t be collapsing.
Subsidies Inflate Families’ Cost of Living
The major thing government can do to encourage fertility is: stop making existing so bloody expensive. Inflation, remember, is caused by government subsidies. So we need not to increase government payments, but to cut them.
Start with health care, because tons of families need a second earner just to pay health insurance premiums. If they don’t have one, they use Medicaid.
In my lifetime, the United States has gone from allowing young, healthy people to have commensurate insurance to forcing us to pay almost a full salary each year for other people who aren’t paying. Medicaid and Medicare are massive hidden taxes, including by reimbursing providers so badly they payment-gouge the minority of self-paying customers. Insurance shouldn’t pay for everything. That’s not insurance, it’s socialized medicine.
It’s fundamentally unfair to force any family to field a second earner to pay for other people’s health care. It should be needless to say that slavery is not good for fertility! If families could simply get the insurance plans available 20-30 years ago plus pay only our own costs of care, we’d have another $10,000-$15,000 per year in our pockets at least.
That and any other cuts to government burdens would go a long way towards letting an overtired, overworked momma work fewer hours and maybe think about gestating another cute little American with her resulting energy. In other words, DOGE is a fertility booster. And so is repealing Obamacare!
Don’t Make Parents Another Dependent Class
The biggest mountain to move, however, is not money, it’s ideology. It’s culture. It’s status and social signaling. We can easily tell because governments have largely responded to the demographic crisis with the only tool most voters don’t oust them for using — future generations’ money.
Nations as different as South Korea, Norway, and Mongolia have larded on welfare benefits for parents to try to generate welfare benefits for the elderly, disabled, poor, and just about every other group besides able-bodied white men (large numbers of which are drugging themselves to death). Years of paid leave, checks for giving birth, housing allowances, and just about every other form of payoff under the sun have so far failed to increase birth rates anywhere enough to forestall financial and cultural collapse.
People like Lyman Stone, a researcher the Times quoted who does some great work, wave away this terrible track record by arguing that even if paying parents for babies hasn’t solved the crisis, it has delayed it a bit. “Ten percent of my idea works” is not a compelling argument, especially since these programs fuel the fiscal crisis they exist to solve by increasing budget deficits. They also make yet another class of people dependent on children’s alleged future tax remittances, the root cause of the demographic crisis!
The Root Causes Are Cultural, Not Financial
The truth is, it’s not that Westerners don’t know sex makes babies. It’s that many don’t want sex to make babies, and so use chemicals that can kill babies earlier than they can be dissected to death via abortion. (All forms of chemical contraception can starve embryos to death, including IUDs and variants of the Pill.)
Thanks to feminism, it’s verboten to notice basic biology like this. But someone has to be courageous and honest enough to notice self-sterilization and materialism are huge contributing factors to the global infant shortage. Money matters far less than minds.
Baby-making is not complicated. The fertility facts that matter are not nuanced science. They include: When sex between two healthy-enough 20-somethings isn’t sterilized, it tends to make babies. (This is how my husband and I got five of our six children — just one was conceived on a day I knew I might get pregnant). Men and men cannot make babies together, and neither can women and women. And children are more likely to become productive citizens on every single measure of human happiness when raised by their own biological, married mother and father.
None of this is rocket science. Acting on obvious things everyone’s been shamed into shutting up about is practically Donald Trump trademarked. Policies that would flow from these basic precepts are not that hard to think of, either.
Slash Government-Run Education
Most importantly, governments need to get back to the Founding Fathers’ practice of observing the First Amendment by robustly supporting nonsectarian Christianity. That’s because, as a recent Heritage Foundation study explained, virtually all of the decline in U.S. fertility comes from its decrease of Christianity. That’s because faithful people have population-sustaining numbers of children, but pagans don’t. Government-run education is the chief cause of that decline in faith that is also driving the population collapse, the study found (relying on research from one Lyman R. Stone).
Shoving everyone into college also needs to end, something the administration is working on. The average adult does not need 16 years of full-time deskwork plus college debt to be a cashier, bank teller, glorified secretary, or even begin a skilled trade. It’s cruel to make people delay their lives with this expectation.
Americans do need real health and sex education instead of exposure to vile queer sex manuals. Teen girls deserve to know that feeding their bodies synthetic estrogens and toxic metals throughout their fertile years can destroy their emotional and physical health, including fertility. They need to know that eating processed foods and stressing themselves out with “leaning in” to living like a man can also ruin their health and happiness. This is well-documented by bestselling authors and female health practitioners, including some who happen to be politically left, such as Dr. Aviva Romm and Alisa Vitti.
The NYT claims fertility education is “not based in science,” which is misinformed disinformation. It’s all science, run by researchers and doctors, with an effective track record.
So the feds could field trustworthy studies about the true and long-term health effects of every form of chemical contraception, and ensure women are fully informed about these with every prescription. We could also use more research about the numerous conditions women use birth control to alleviate but not cure.
Don’t Subsidize Family Separation, OBVIOUSLY
The kids of absent parents don’t do as well as the kids of present parents. That’s why separating mothers from small children with paid leave and other inducements to full-time work is antisocial.
So the Times’ suggestion of affirmative action for parents in the Fulbright Scholar program made me want to stab my eyeballs. A Fulbright involves a year of foreign travel to work full time. That kind of stress will more likely result in parents never having another child than more kids! And it affirms women only for working, not if they make the most socially positive choice to pause outside work to mother!
Just observe the ceaseless stream of articles and even books from clueless working mothers who can’t figure out why they’re so tired. It’s because they’re trying to do two full-time jobs! Non-parents read such complaints and hear, “Kids are SO exhausting, I shouldn’t have one” when they should hear, “Working full time while having kids sucks, which is why smart women marry before kids and plan for a kid-friendly life.”
Reducing social expectations on women to work while raising kids will make motherhood a lot easier and therefore more attractive. So will combating antisocial mom-shaming by praising, celebrating, and advertising the amazing, generous, heroic women who prioritize their kids over a career.
People become the most productive and the least destructive when they are raised by biological married parents who personally raise their kids instead of outsourcing 40+ hours a week of childcare. Every sociological outcome shows it.
The unifying theme here is that government is the chief cause of its existential threat. Rather than layering on more policies that will make things worse, government officials should instead focus on root causes: government programs that drive up the costs of living, push women to prioritize careers over kids, and erase Christianity.
