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.
Yeah that’s why I’m showing historical data and mentioning that poorer people tend to have more kids even in first world countries.
Finland was close to 5 in 1900 and it’s a clear downward trend with one bounce after WW2
So even before all the shit we’re living now people were having less and less kids.
Right, but the anthropologist in me does have issues with that kind of data as applied to the US.
Living standards have not been significantly lower in any way to those countries, but we’ve experienced a sharp downturn in birthrates in the past 5 years. We were a 1st world nation by any measure for the past 100+ years, but our rates remained well above replacement levels.
So what is the cause for the downturn now for the US? I don’t believe that can be explained with Finland’s or Canada’s historical birth rates.
The trend is fairly similar but I would think that mass immigration to the US probably stabilized things from the 70s and let’s not act like access to contraceptives/abortion is that good in the US, which probably helped a lot to keep it closer to replacement