The Trump Baby Bribe
Donald Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work.The 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 healthcare, 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 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 ageing 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.
Read more at The Guardian