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.
I bet it will have the opposite effect.
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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.
Each kid is like a $1m commitment.
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This is exactly the plan. Of course this kind of thing will only ever be meant for white parents.
Give me one year paid family leave and Medicare for all, then we’ll talk.
Seriously, a one time payment that low won’t cover shit. The climate doesn’t support families to begin with like your comment points out.
Also you can’t ask people to have kids and cut funding to Medicaid & be actively dismantling Department of Education… It’s counterintuitive to say we support families and then not support families. Oh but here’s some money.
Maybe a grant for college as well, so I can get a degree so that I might actually be able to participate in society at large.
Serious question, have you considered the trades? It seems that jobs like electrician, plumber, auto mechanic, etc are a lot more secure than white collar jobs are right now, especially STEM. I know at least where I live (Philly exurbs) there’s a shortage of electricians, with only 2 going into the trade as 5 retire. You get paid during your training and through the union you get healthcare and a pension. Something to think about.
I currently work assembling cables. Soldering, crimping, etc. I grew up building stuff, be it with my father at his business or at home. I don’t have no skills, but the skills I have don’t seem to be those that are in demand for high wages. Furthermore, as someone with Autism, I don’t do well in positions where I have to interact with the general public.
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.
Hey non-Americans, fun fact! If you have a baby here, you can expect $15,000+ in hospital bills.
$5,000 should cover that, right?
Im paying $12,000 per year for daycare/preschool just so I can go to work.
You got a good fuckin deal. I don’t have kids but my friends pay between $20,000 and $30,000 for daycare
A C-section will run you $60K easy. With the 80:20 insurance thats $12K owed by the parents. . With the federal out of pocket maximum being $9,450 for the mother. The baby also has a $9,450 out of pocket maximum. So the family will likely owe at least $12k before leaving the hospital
$5K handout is seriously ignorant. It will cost a hell of a lot more to reverse the trend
In order to increase the birthrate above replacement level here are a few things that need to happen.
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Free universal healthcare including dental.
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Rent control for all apartments locked to single income minimum wage.
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Ban on investment properties for single family homes. If the house is classified as single family, you can’t rent it out. It must be sold.
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Free childcare.
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Free education from pre-K to Graduate levels.
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Open immigration policies for countries with higher birthrates.
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Increase minimum wage to make it a livable wage.
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To pay for it all - Increase corporate taxes to 95% for more than $100million income. Increase personal taxes to 95% for more than 1 million in income.
To reverse the trend one should make healthcare more competitive.
9: The outlawing of ghost jobs and heavy enforcement of workers rights.
It’s funny how all of the real solutions for increasing the birthrate are just generally good things for the country.
And also things the party that most wants it to happen will never ever enact because their ideologies conflict with one another
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That’s the most laughable part of this idea. Even with a great insurance plan that $5k is basically a hospital discount. Furthermore, the few people I know that are interested in having more kids and have “uneventful” home births under their belt, thus minimal medical bills, are all Hispanic.
Let’s not spread incorrect numbers, our hmo made the cost of labor about $100 (maybe because of California). Childcare, formula, etc is still way more than $5k but labor is only expensive with bad insurance or no insurance, which is actually kind of more ironic since that applies more to MAGA than the rest of us.
That’s the fucked up part about America. You can walk out of a hospital with no bill or life-crippling debt depending on your age, income level, state, and employer (i.e. employer-based insurance).
Not in California, but we had twins, a couple days stay in the hospital, and have really good insurance. Still got billed 7k for the supposedly 80k total the hospital was billing for.
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You’d also have to subsidize childcare. It’s crazy expensive.
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).
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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.
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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.
Human procreation doesn’t work like that. Those who disagree with you will have children. Their ideas will be carried into the next generation, yours won’t.
And 1.6 for a developed country is just amazingly high. As you might have seen from the previous sentence, I think it should sit around reproduction level of 2.1-2.2, and better more. But that’s ideally, in fact it’s high.
Apathy is death. First of all, no passive resistance will defeat these people. They know you better than you know them. I’ve met some.
Guillotine time
Trump: “Gotta save the government money”
Also Trump: “Just throw money at it, maybe it will fix itself”
There is no plan, just incompetence.
Just what we need… more boomers on the way
$5000? Does Trump still think it’s the 1950s?
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Does Trump still think it’s the 1950s?
Very likely, yes.
YEA! Thats basically the whole thing
I mean with his likely dementia…
Dementia? Likely late stage syphilis.
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It’s treatable, but any damage caused is permanent.
Oh gross this makes way too much sense
It’s just a child, Michael. How much could it cost?
He probably wishes it was still the 50s and is regressing the country as much as possible to return to the"good old days"
90% tax rate for the 1% would do it real quick
Actually, he publicly stated that he thinks the 1870s-1910s was peak America. You know, the Guilded Age.
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Lmao the gilded age is quite insane. I suppose it’s just right given how it came to be named.
I sizable chunk of the populace seems to harbor similar delusions
We will give you FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS! MFer please, diapers alone would be $5000 the first year.
