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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe $5k is around the average cost (after insurance) to have a baby in the US if you have insurance.
It’ll join the light bulbs up there from the 1st term
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.
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.
And the same people who are likely to vote for whoever his fascist successor ends up being.
The people that would take advantage of this would be the people completely lacking in critical thinking.
Thats mostly what happned in Australia back in the day when we tried it. Mu friends wife was a social worker, she said coercion to have babies was endemic and the money taken off the mother by the asshat father when said money arrived. Not really a lack of critical thinking per se, just desperate :(
What a debacle.
The people that would take advantage of this wouldn’t have the ability for critical thinking skills. I doubt the kids would be much better.
Sadly, I agree
In any case this combined with his dismantling of public education will certainly not help.
Build massive amounts of new housing. Give people paid parental leave, and universal healthcare. Guaranteed baby boom.
You’d also have to subsidize childcare. It’s crazy expensive.
There is no housing shortage, just an abundance of greed. There are 14,000,000 empty homes in the USA and most are owned by corporations who hold them as part of a financial portfolio or hedge funds. Ban corporations from owning residential properties and the housing shortage will vanish without cutting down more trees and burning more fossil fuels.
Idk man, around me it’s sprawling single family homes for miles, when it should be blocks and blocks of condos and town homes. The NIMBYs have prevented construction for decades and now a house costs $1.5m. There is a housing shortage. I think corporations recently taking an interest in buying houses is because the shortage makes their value appreciate so quickly. They’re like parasites taking advantage of the situation, not the root cause.
The corporations buying houses, and property, is exactly the root cause. If they own it all, they set the prices. It’s a cash cow. You pay, or you’re homeless. You pay $2500/month rent, but they won’t give you a mortgage where you would be paying $2000/month.
The root cause is a lack of multi family housing. Corpos buying houses is not the primary issue with housing, though it is also a serious concern.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/federal-social-housing-1.6946376 The Canadian government used to build social housing. We have a real problem with homeless people in Canada. There are only a few places left like this where I live. They are very well run complexes. My Son-in-law’s retired Mom lives in one. She worked hard all her life, but through a divorce and buying a “leaky condo”, she was left without a lot of resources. She was lucky enough to find a placement in one of these places. The rent is a percentage of her income. We need more places like this…
Agreed
Do we really need a baby boom though? I agree we need affordable housing, everything you mentioned and more. At the same time I don’t think the population should grow forever (so education and available birth control).
I don’t disagree. I was just clarifying what would spur one.
Truthfully, we are fucked either way. The truth is having a baby boom would help the economy, but accelerate environmental degradation and the consequences of climate change, which will be extremely destabilizing to society and possibly lead to collapse.
But, if we don’t continue to grow the population, the capitalist world, based on a need for endless growth will falter. We will see less productivity and consumption, which will also be destabilizing to society as the economy shrinks or becomes stagnant. This is also destabilizing to society and could also create a collapse.
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
I’m just looking forward to when I have time to yeet my uterus (get a hysterectomy). It was a pain to find an OBGyn who would do it without asking too many questions, but I still brought my husband to the consultation appointment just in case there was any push back because I’m a woman in her 30’s with no children. I’ve had previous OBGyn’s refuse to even discuss a hysterectomy with me because “what if your future husband wants children” when I wasn’t even in a relationship or dating at the time.
“what if your future husband wants children”
“Then he shouldn’t be marrying someone without a uterus” would be the logical response. Sorry you had to go through that bullshit.
If it makes you feel any better, my wife and I were both 40 and already had two healthy kids in elementary school when I got a consultation for a vasectomy. They still made me do everything short of swear on a bible that I wasn’t going to change my mind before they would agree to do it. They insisted that my wife come in with me and sign a document affirming her agreement with the procedure before they would schedule it. Then they made us both give verbal and written agreement AGAIN right before they started. It was nuts (pardon the pun).
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.
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.
Just shows how out of touch oligarchs are. $5000? Seriously?
What can raising a child cost? 5000?
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 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.
This would come closest to an actual incentive. Babies are not a one time expense.
$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.
Or they could just forgive the student loans haha, they are so stupid.
$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.
Give everyone a house. How is this not a thing in the 21st century
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.
Which could be 10, 2000 sq/ft single story units or 40, 2000 sq/ft apartments in a 4 story building. We cant just keep letting cities build outward and cover farmlands with endless swathes of single family homes and barren lawns.
Yeah. I’m not having kids in those conditions.
Full stop.
Honestly this is super common in many urban settings across the world. I think why this seems so unreasonable from the American perspective US due to the lack of public spaces/infrastructure/services.
Having a private lot seems less of a big deal when there are accessible spaces and easy ways to travel around town.
Like I get it, I also want a yard, but if I had an easy way to access other things and a safe place to recreate it would be less of a desire
Cause it is impossible to raise kids in an apartment. Just look at new york city.
I did not say it was impossible. At all. Get your strawman bullshit outta here. Stick to the point or stfu.
I said am not interested in those living conditions.
Full stop.
plenty of people do stupid shit, doesn’t make it a good idea
Don’t forget parking lots! The suburban strip mall is dependent on them. And since they take up valuable real estate that isn’t providing any tax revenue, it gets subsidized by taxes from neighboring high-density urban areas.
Maybe for any sort of food-supplementing gardening and/or egg-farming. For simple living space, it’s extravagant. I live in the Texas suburbs, and half-acre lots are nowhere near the norm until you get way out into the exurbs. Quarter acre lots are a rather generous and (and resource intensive), and 1/8 would be standard for “starter” homes.
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?
Well people need to make up their minds then. If people keep saying that urban spread is an issue, we need higher density and less reliance on cars we can’t go and ask to have ½ acre lots for each and every parents.
Maybe OP is only talking about what they want in exchange for having kids and well I’m sure they’re able to afford it if they truly want it (since they mention they’re pretty well off) but it will come with moving far from a urban center.
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.
My in laws have an acre and their kids mostly play on about ⅒ of it because that’s where their stuff is, give people parks and they can live with a smaller yard. It’s not sustainable to give everyone ½ an acre.
As a kid I’d spend a lot of time in local forests, go to a local park to play. The benefit of these spaces is you can have all your friends meet up with you. Manhunt in a 1/2 acre backyard would be way more boring than access to various parks and forested areas.
There are also activities like sports, camps, boy scouts/girl guides that kids can participate in to get outdoors time.
True, but kids aren’t free-range anymore the way they were when I was growing up in the '80s & '90s.
Then quit being fucking paranoid cowards and fix that!
Welp I don’t have children and it would be highly weird if I went around forcing other people’s kids to go play free-range so…
he thinks they should be in livestock pens.
