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Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work
(www.theguardian.com)
I bet it will have the opposite effect.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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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.
If $5000 is a lot to you, he's really not interested in there being more of "your type" of person.
Actually, I'm sure he's quite interested in there being a nice big class of desperate labor pool ripe for exploitation.
To quote George Carlin, 'living babies make dead soldiers'.
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Just birthing the damn thing is like $50,000. He can shove the $5,000 right up his ass and I hope he gets paper cuts up there too.
I believe $5k is around the average cost (after insurance) to have a baby in the US if you have insurance.
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This is how you get Idiocracy. The people that would take advantage of this would be the people you don't want to over-breed.
And the same people who are likely to vote for whoever his fascist successor ends up being.
The people that would take advantage of this would be the people completely lacking in critical thinking.
Thats mostly what happned in Australia back in the day when we tried it. Mu friends wife was a social worker, she said coercion to have babies was endemic and the money taken off the mother by the asshat father when said money arrived. Not really a lack of critical thinking per se, just desperate :(
What a debacle.
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In any case this combined with his dismantling of public education will certainly not help.
Build massive amounts of new housing. Give people paid parental leave, and universal healthcare. Guaranteed baby boom.
There is no housing shortage, just an abundance of greed. There are 14,000,000 empty homes in the USA and most are owned by corporations who hold them as part of a financial portfolio or hedge funds. Ban corporations from owning residential properties and the housing shortage will vanish without cutting down more trees and burning more fossil fuels.
Idk man, around me it’s sprawling single family homes for miles, when it should be blocks and blocks of condos and town homes. The NIMBYs have prevented construction for decades and now a house costs $1.5m. There is a housing shortage. I think corporations recently taking an interest in buying houses is because the shortage makes their value appreciate so quickly. They’re like parasites taking advantage of the situation, not the root cause.
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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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He’s making everything more expensive, gutting medicade to nothing (50% of babies are born on medicade), taking away food stamps, getting rid of the department of education, gutting hud, gutting head start, getting rid of free lunches in schools, sending us into a Great Depression, stripping worker protections and removing any hope for a future….but yeah 5k sure that will cover your first 15 minutes of delivery. What a joke this man is
And up to 80% of children are covered by Medicaid depending on the state.
and most elderly in nursing homes. That is going to be a whole lot of care work dumped onto women with little to no pay and dire economic consequences for women and families. It would be absolutely stupid to have a baby with this level of uncertainty
I'm just looking forward to when I have time to yeet my uterus (get a hysterectomy). It was a pain to find an OBGyn who would do it without asking too many questions, but I still brought my husband to the consultation appointment just in case there was any push back because I'm a woman in her 30's with no children. I've had previous OBGyn's refuse to even discuss a hysterectomy with me because "what if your future husband wants children" when I wasn't even in a relationship or dating at the time.
“what if your future husband wants children”
"Then he shouldn't be marrying someone without a uterus" would be the logical response. Sorry you had to go through that bullshit.
If it makes you feel any better, my wife and I were both 40 and already had two healthy kids in elementary school when I got a consultation for a vasectomy. They still made me do everything short of swear on a bible that I wasn't going to change my mind before they would agree to do it. They insisted that my wife come in with me and sign a document affirming her agreement with the procedure before they would schedule it. Then they made us both give verbal and written agreement AGAIN right before they started. It was nuts (pardon the pun).
$5000???
Hahahahaha
Give me a house. Anything short of 1500 sqft, 3br, 1.5ba, on a half acre or more is just not enough for my gf and I to even consider.
And we are both gainfully employed.
1500sqft starts to feel cozy with a bunch of teenagers hanging out.
$5000 probably won’t cover the lost salary from missing work, if adequate recovery time is taken to say nothing of the true developmental needs of the infant. Try 2 years of salary, just to get to a point where daycare can take over for some of the time (and you get to pay that too!).
I get that “we need kids to grow the economy” but also, humans are killing the planet and if our population keeps growing, we’re going to just keep on killing it faster.
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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.
You’d maybe be able to cover the hospital bill from having the kid with that sum.
If there's no complications.
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Why can't countries understand quality of life leads to more of those productive babies they really want
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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?
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Give me one year paid family leave and Medicare for all, then we'll talk.
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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.
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Literally cost us $11k in medical bills to have a baby. That doesn't include the cost of actually maintaining it either. $5k is a JOKE
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...
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Lmaooo no shit it won't work. Daycare alone is $20-$40k a year. A pittance one-time payment doesn't change the fundamental calculus of how fucking expensive everything is now
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The fact that formula is now pretty universally behind the counter or behind a locked cabinet door says a lot about the current situation in America.
Or they could just forgive the student loans haha, they are so stupid.
I'm not American. I thought "$5k/month for sure". Lol.
$5k when having a kid costs $3k in insurance copays with a normal birth and average insurance. So you’re down to $2k before even leaving the hospital. This dude has all the intellectual depth and forethought of a mushroom.
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"What could raising a child cost? $5000?"
"You've never actually raised a child, have you?"
At least offer free healthcare and child birth, that’s $30,000 out of pocket if you’re middle class.
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anyone else think this shit is fucking weird?
It makes more sense when you realize that money has solved all of Donald Trump's problems in the past. Get a little too handsy with a woman? Pay her off to keep quiet. Have a business partnership or contract you want to get out of? Pay lawyers to harass them in court until they give up.
Heck, he doesn't even need to use his own money most of the time, he can spend out of one of his companies like it's a slush fund then declare bankruptcy, leaving business partners and banks with the bills.
He is now running the government like one of his privately owned companies, and using our money to try and solve his problems. Give them a pittance to go away, and when they don't, you can say "we gave them a chance" before kidnapping them.
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$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.
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Guillotine time
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