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.
Why can’t countries understand quality of life leads to more of those productive babies they really want
because that requires the people in charge facing hard truths about their own lifestyles.
Most of these kids watched their parents struggle to pay the bills and sometimes basic things like food. They think they can overcome that amount of generational experience.
I’m not American. I thought “$5k/month for sure”. Lol.
Guillotine time
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.
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.
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.
I thought Republicans were against giving people handouts?
Only if Democrats are the ones doing the handouts. Trump was very happy to sign all those stim checks during covid. Didn’t hear them bitching about socialism and communism then.
He held up pandemic aid for his signature on them btw.
Trump has no respect for anything
They’re pretending to offer incentives while their actual policies are why birth rates are declining.
5k won’t even cover the hospital costs for the birth. Let alone the child care, continuing to insure that child, food, housing, child care because both parents need to work, education which they’ve been staying refunding for decades…
They want people who aren’t smart enough to realize this having more babies.
“What could raising a child cost? $5000?”
“You’ve never actually raised a child, have you?”
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.
$5k is roughly 1/4 the cost…
… of a birth.
Alone. Just, average medical costs of a birth, without insurance.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-baby/
https://www.uwhealth.org/news/how-much-does-it-really-cost-have-baby
… And they are slashing Medicaid.
If you do have insurance… $5k is about half the cost of a birth.
So… congrats, you can have two kids, and then uh lol have fun paying the cost of raising two kids, which is about half a million dollars.
And that’s just to 18, btw, this assumes those kids can find a job immediately after high school and move out into a place they can afford on an entry level income.
Which uh, is basically wildly unrealistic at this point.
Because all entry level jobs require 2-3 years of experience.
And housing costs are insane.
It costs 20 000 USD to give birth? My goodness that is insane
Yeah.
The US is indeed, completely insane, compared to the rest of the developed world, but the average person has no other frame of reference.
Literacy rates in the US are down to 80%, by the way.
20% of the adult population cannot read or write beyond a 2nd grade level.
The average literacy ability is a 5th/6th grade level.
So… something like 2/3 of the country has reading and writing skills below that of what a high school (primary school, before a college or uni) graduate is supposed to have.
Our school systems are collapsing.
(And yes, you may notice that proportion of people with sub high school literacy rates is so large that it also includes many people with Uni/College degrees. Yep. That is correct. Many of those also fail to teach basic writing skills before giving someone a degree.)
A big problem is that we stopped teaching phonics. School districts spent hundreds of thousands on a terrible curriculum (and this model of teaching reading had already been tried and showed not to work in the 70’s). Teachers were forced to use this shitty “whole reading” model.
The other big problem is that high school English classes don’t have students read entire books anymore. They read short passages with multiple choice questions, because that’s what the standardized tests have. When you think about what media literacy is - that’s what the point of reading books in English class is! Thinking about the point and purpose of long texts!
While we certainly need to do much better, this is a bit alarmis: I don’t believe we’re that different from other developed countries. I don’t believe it’s that low depending on what you mean. However I’m pretty sure you’re comparing numbers in different definitions.
One article that I won’t link because I don’t know the sources, though the numbers are consistent with good sources, stated it like
- The current literacy rate in the U.S. is approximately 99.0%, placing it among the higher echelons of global literacy rates
- 21% of adults aged 16 to 65 score at or below the lowest literacy level based on the PIAAC study
- 54% lack literacy skills above a sixth-grade level
So we have at least three definitions of what literate means, and very different numbers.
‘Functional Literacy’ is generally defined as 2nd grade and up.
By that metric, yeah, 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.
Technically, they can read and write at a very basic level… but not ‘functionally’, as in, they could not function in society. They couldn’t read a news article and understand all the words. They have a very limited vocabulary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
Wikipedia is currently going with an 86% literacy rate for the US, and I’d be willing to bet the discussion page is full of arguments about how to reasonably compare different metrics.
You may also notice that 86% puts us as neighbors with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
This is what happens when Ya’llQaeda takes over a country.
We had considerably better literacy rates a decade or two ago, more like 95%.
High school would be mostly secondary school I think.
Primary is like from ages 5-11, with secondary being 11-16.
College/sixth form 16-19 and Uni 18+
(In context of the UK)
… All Im really aware of as far as terminology goes is that basically its different everywhere, even inside the US.
What it was for me: grades 1 - 5 are elementary, 6-8 are middle school and 9 -12 is high school.
But different areas … either don’t do a middle school, or call it something else, or its only 2 grades instead of 3… it varies.
By the time you are done with all this, you are 18 yo.
So… 2nd grade is basically the schooling level of an 8 yo. 6th grade is the schooling of a 12 yo.
After that, you’re going to a college, community college, university, something like that, to get a 2 or 4 year year degree (associates or bachelors), then another 2 after a bachelors for a masters, roughly another 2 after that for a PhD (doctorate)… but there is also variation in terms of exact education track and how long it actually takes to complete them vs how long its ‘supposed to take’.
Public education in the US generally stops at grade 12, and then any college/etc after that is ‘secondary’, as in ‘optional’.
EDIT: Adjusted age dates. I just woke up from a nap, blarrrgh.
That’s on the low end. My son spent three months in the NICU due to being born premature. His hospital bill ran into the six figures.
Fortunately, thanks to a hiccup of history in which one of JFK’s family members was in the NICU for a similar length of time and experienced sticker shock. She lobbied Kennedy and he lobbied Congress. So now, this bill is automatically covered by Medicaid.
Sorry your kid and you and your partner went through that… that must have been just cripplingly stressful in so many ways…
But uh… yeah.
You understand got lucky by basically random chance, at least in the monetary cost part of that situation… but of course, there are so, so many other nonsense ‘exceptional’ scenarios which… well actually millions of people end up in each year, and they just get to be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, for things that happened to them which would generally have been impossible to precisely predict or prevent.
We are ruled by idiot, corrupt nepobabies who just actually cannot theoretically grasp things that do not specifically, personally affect or traumatize them.
Throwing money at people won’t cause a baby boom. YOU NEED TO MAKE CHILD CARE AND HOUSING CHEAPER!! GIVE PEOPLE HOPE AND CHILDREN WILL FOLLOW!
I know I’m screaming into a void but I feel like it needs to be said.
And it’s a start. Make public transportation easier to access. Find public education better. Don’t sic CPS on parents that let their children play outside.
It’s not a baby boom they are after. I used to think it was all about cheaper labor.
Nope. It’s to tie up fathers and mothers so they are too busy to pay attention that people start starving, dying of disease, and disappearing.
The added benefit, if they can do it “their way” they kill multiple birds with one stone - A. Prevent the “white replacement theory” (wtf) B. Lower the number of people willing to fight against the Regime, C. Cheaper, younger labor pool hopefully educated enough to go into the military And that’s about it.
Soft Eugenics. Genocide through “nature”.
Won’t work, but they’re not the brightest people.
At least offer free healthcare and child birth, that’s $30,000 out of pocket if you’re middle class.
They don’t want the middle class breeding, those are the people they want to get rid of. They want rulers and servants. With this, poor people will have more kids for the short term gain because they have to. Parents get money and can feed thmselves for a while. Then the oligarchy gets a influx of child labour they can pay less for and will be indoctrinated from this early age. Those parents will realize having more kids means they can get more income off them and with be incentived to have 12 kids in the factory.
$5000? Does Trump still think it’s the 1950s?
I mean with his likely dementia…
Dementia? Likely late stage syphilis.
Oh gross this makes way too much sense
¿Por qué no los dos?
Does Trump still think it’s the 1950s?
Very likely, yes.
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.
It’s just a child, Michael. How much could it cost?
YEA! Thats basically the whole thing
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.
Lmao the gilded age is quite insane. I suppose it’s just right given how it came to be named.
