- As the U.S. fertility rate falls below replacement rate, the White House is asking for baby-boosting suggestions.
- Donald Trump has called himself the "fertilization president" and said he wants to see a baby boom.
- Suggestions so far include money for families that have babies, classes and other ideas.
President Donald Trump has said he’d like to see a baby boom and he recently called himself the “fertilization president.” It appears he’s taking the title to heart. The White House is reportedly soliciting suggestions on how to get more Americans to marry and have children, according to the New York Times.
Will MAHA be followed by MAMA: Make Americans Moms Again?
Before the election that made him vice president, J.D. Vance had trumpeted the idea of a $5,000 per child tax credit, though he didn’t flesh out many of the details at the time, as Deseret News earlier reported. With concern among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about falling fertility, Kamala Harris’ camp had also proposed a hefty per-child tax credit.
The Times is reporting on some of the ideas that insiders said the administration has already received, including:
- A proposal to “reserve 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.”
- Giving a $5,000 “cash ‘baby bonus’ to every American mother after delivery.”
- Government funding of “programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive."
The article suggests that the issue of raising America’s sagging fertility rate — now 1.62, which is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman — is going to become more prominent in coming days. And it’s also perhaps why Vance and Elon Musk have been seen at work with a child in tow.
Why is fertility dragging?
Experts give many reasons why birth rates have declined, from the high cost of housing to women waiting until they’re older to have children. With more people waiting to become parents, the number of children they can have is actually reduced. Demographer Lyman Stone has on numerous occasions told Deseret News that one of the challenges is women may not be able to have a family that’s as big as they had hoped.
Others suggest that the issue is driven by high housing, food and other costs, inadequate access to affordable and high quality child care, work inflexibility and other issues. There may also have been a cultural shift that places less value on parenthood.
The problem with a shrinking population
There are many issues that come with a shrinking population, including economic, entrepreneurial and quality of life issues. So lower birth rates are of concern globally and locally, across a broad swath of political ideologies, occupations and other demographics.
Forbes reported that declining births “drive major global shifts in power over coming decades. ... Many countries like China and Japan have been trying to encourage people to have more kids and a birth rate below the replacement rate signals major demographic shifts on the horizon. In particular, it portends sluggish growth, an aging population and an economy that one day may struggle to find enough workers to fill jobs and pay the taxes required to maintain the state and care for a large elderly population, whose health and other needs often require far more expenditure per capita than younger people."
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, who is director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of the Markets and co-director of The Business, Economic, and Financial History Project, said without a change in the trend, those living in 2055 will see a first: The world population will peak and start declining. Deseret News quoted the professor of economics at University of Pennsylvania, who said declining fertility increases the risk the Social Security system will collapse, the national debt will rise, states will go broke and schools will close, among others.
A variety of experts, including policymakers, demographers and academics say that as births and deaths get out of a balance that keeps population size stable, economies stagnate, schools close and the safety net shreds. It could even be hard for older adults to cash out their assets. Who is going to buy your house when you want to downsize if there are no big, young families coming up behind you?
The other factor that stabilizes population size, which is immigration, is having its own ups and downs globally, as well.
What’s it going to take?
Harvard economics professor and 2023 Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin produced research suggesting that one way to boost fertility is to get men to step up and assume greater roles around the house. “Children take time, and that time isn’t easily contracted out or mechanized,” said Goldin in a presentation of the research to the European Central Bank’s Annual Research Conference last fall. “Therefore much of the change in fertility will depend on if men assume more work in the home as women are drawn into the market, particularly if the home has children.”
She added, “If they don’t, women will be forced to cut back on something.”
Many experts believe that young people have to believe they can afford to form families, and inflation and high housing costs, as well as wages that don’t keep pace, have made that prospect doubtful for some.
Entire countries have tackled the issue of a shrinking population, with limited success.
The Tokyo government, for example, gives its workers a four-day work week to try to boost its record-low fertility while enhancing work-life balance. That provides more family time and less stress, officials said, per CNN. And parents with kids in grades one to three can trade a little salary for the chance to clock out early.
That government also provides paternity leave.
Paid leave, flexible schedules, affordable housing and accessible child care have all made lists worldwide as possible enticements to make couples comfortable with the notion that they can juggle aspects of their lives and have a family.
Singapore has guidelines for employers that “require all firms to consider requests by employees for flexible working arrangements,” the article said.
Korea had the lowest fertility rate in 2022, at 0.78 children per woman. It has tried a number of policy changes to bolster fertility, which still lags badly.
Which comes back to the proposals that would put more money in the pockets of families that are willing to have children, such as some the White House has collected.
Even if policymakers could agree on an approach, there’s room to disagree in terms of implementation. Take creating a child tax credit that offers tax incentives to have children as an example. When that was a campaign proposal to help families, Kiplinger reported on six issues where there was great debate but not consensus, including the amount of a credit, whether income limits would apply, whether families that don’t earn enough to pay income tax would qualify, at what age a child would or would not qualify, whether it should be indexed to inflation and which year’s income would be used, if income was a factor in qualifying.