People are not having kids because the middle class cannot afford it. Assuming your household has the average American household income of 80k. This would give the household something like 40k at most after the kid’s associated expenses, which means that each parent would have a whopping 20k to themselves. This is positively fucked because they would have to have a quality of life similar to someone who is eligible for food stamps, but they would not be themselves. Kids are for those who already benefit from government programs, or those who can afford a very expensive pet for a minimum of 15 years.
All this will do is increase the number of children born into poverty, which already accounts for the majority of children born in America.
You want an actual solution? Give parents food stamps up to a yearly income of 120k
I also find the implication that a human life is worth $5,000 disgusting.
It was clear to me that when the gov’t went after reproductive rights, it was because declining birthrates are detrimental to capitalism. The money cannot stop; the money cannot slow down. Capitalism REQUIRES exponential growth in every regard.
Any “moral” reason given by a politician against abortion is a thinly veiled disguise to ensure that the machine always has enough cogs to keep running and growing.
How are you going to say a fetus is priceless and then say a live infant is worth $5,000? Fucking disgusting.
First you need to take out taxes, then you can budget with what’s leftover.
No one making $80k a year has $80k to spend unless they’re a drug dealer.
I don’t see a clear association in saying a baby is worth $5,000 when existing tax law says a baby is worth $2,000 off your taxes. It’s an incentive, not a bill of sale.
Drops back down to $1000 for 2025 unless the increase is extended. A $5000 payout is actually less of a payout than just extending the current CTC.
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Do we get to choose how it’s distributed? Here are some fun options I came up with.
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$13.69 per day for a year. (Nice). About $419/month. Maybe they could round up to $420 because they stale internet meme culture is hip
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$0.76 per day for 18 years. A guaranteed $22.80 per month for an entire childhood
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$5000 lump sum. I can’t find any widely accepted figures for average out of pocket cost of prenatal care, child birth, and infant health visits. I’ll wild ass guess it a at covering 20-75% of those visits for people who have insurance. For people without insurance, looks like an uncomplicated vaginal birth averages $14k. But again huge variations in price
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You can have practically free housing. Just buy this for 18500 euros.
https://www.rumah123.com/properti/batam/hos19254242/?price-unit-type=metersquare
Or do you want… free stuff while also having people invest capital in your area?
I don’t think it works that way.
Best we can do is tax your labour and redistribute it.
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Your great grandfather lived in a place worse than the house I showed you. Batam in Indonesia is a pretty nice place. Been there, liked it quite a lot.
It’s not really housing material that is expensive. It’s labour, taxes and the land to build on.
The building land in my and my brother’s portfolio is valued at 400k euros. Just a piece of land. Good investment right? Belgium’s economy could have gone to utter shit the past few decades and it would be a worthless piece of land.
Can you force us to sell it? Perhaps. It’s used as a garden.
Imagine we put an apartment on it and have economic immigrants rent in it. Then randomly these economic immigrants would own the place?
Well, aight. Then I go to Switzerland and go rent a place and own it as well. I don’t think it will work out well. Basically it would halt globalisation and migration would no longer be viable.
Which sucks, because nobody here wants to have kids anymore.
You’re saying extremist things so you need to think them through.
Aight. Renting is outlawed. You can’t speculate on building land anymore. What happens now?
Developments halt because these people have a lower amount of capital. Lower amount of capital means lower economies of scale. Lower quality buildings. Worse for energy usage. Bad usage of space.
Maybe if the world people were raising their kids in didn’t look so fucking gloomy thanks to some fascist fucks, they’d want to have more kids.
He is rich and has no reference for the price of everyday items
It’s one year of daycare, Michael. What could it cost? $5000?
Think of how many bananas you could buy with $5k.
“It’s raising a child for ~20 years, Michael. What could it cost? 5k?”
It costs $40k/year for daycare. Start handing out $5k to moms, daycare now costs $45k/year.
They already hand out 3k a year for kids, up to 6k, as well as up to 5k in credits available based on how much you spend and your income level. And I live in Jersey, where everything is expensive, and we were ranked fifth most expensive place to have kids in daycare, and even with two kids in I didn’t pay 40k. Not sure we even cracked 30k, but it was probably close.
EDIT: Info is dated, good thing I have an accountant. Looks like it’s 2k per kid, and the 3/6k is for dependent care credits, which applies from 35% to 20% based on your tax bracket (goes down the more you make).
It blows my mind that so many people don’t understand this concept.
Maybe they should improve the quality of life for working families to get them to be confident enough to have more babies naturally?
…nah, it’s obviously the queers fault!
“What could a childcare cost, ten dollars?”
In Canada, yes.
As of February 2025, eight provinces and territories are delivering regulated early learning and child care for an average of $10-a-day or less, and all other jurisdictions have reduced parent fees by at least 50%.l
Wow way to rub THAT in XD
Just kidding, I love that for y’all. Every parent should have that (or better!)
My friends are paying $1400 a month, I don’t think this is working in Ontario.
Ontario has been extremely stingy on paying out their share of the fees (Program is part funded by federal, rest by provincial), leading to most daycare centres still not registering for the full reduction to $10/day. But most are still reducing their prices from what they were at previously.
That’s the goal. Maybe I’m in an exceptional area, but I’m not aware of any parents who are effectively paying $10/day unless their income is low enough to trigger additional benefits.
Still HUGE improvement over the last few years though. I think we had an option for 18$/day if we packed our kid a lunch. Our daycare would feed them for an additional 3$/day. I think overall average care costs have practically halved in the last few years so even if it’s not perfectly universal and perfectly $10, it’s HELLA better. Strong improvement. Honestly a MAJOR factor in trying to figure out the feasibility of having more kids for us.
There’s literally been bipartisan efforts to expand the child tax credit ($1000 per year baseline, expanded to $2000 for 2018-2025 and expiring this year, plus COVID era provisions or up to $3000 or $3600 for 2021), and the bills to do so keep dying without a vote.
If they were serious about this they’d expand the 2021 program to where parents were getting $300 checks every month, and make that permanent and indexed to inflation.
So much of the Trump presidency is announcing a new program that sounds good, but isn’t even enough to make up for a program that he already killed.
300$ a month is already way below index.
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Well we already lost that in 2022, when it dropped back down to a $2000 annual credit you get when you do your taxes the year after, and after this year it’ll drop again to $1000 unless the law is changed.
Still waiting for healthcare to be “fixed”. Definitely going to be any day now…
Longest two weeks of my life.
y’all understand why they want conservative christians to have a ton of babies, right? the only reason that american conservatives have become as atrocious as they are is that they have the big, dumb numbers. they need another generation of idiots - forcefully uneducated - to continue their legacy of shit.
The irony is that these conservatives often can’t afford large families without welfare, the exact things Republicans are cutting. Those give a lot more than onetime 5k payments.
They have to ensure that the large families are also poor, thus flooding the armed forces with young people in need of a paycheck with no alternatives.
That’s why they’re getting rid of child labor laws. Make them kids earn their way!
and of course to be wage slaves
sure, if you need to throw some 4chan jaron into the jumbo that’s fine.
Yes, we’re aware. But they can’t even do that right. They’re still too greedy to properly implement their own plans
Japan has an aging population and tried a lot, with not much success…
Prosperity = less kids, so we shouldn’t be surprised what Trump is going to try…
lol at one point I was paying more for daycare than my mortgage.
5k, these people are 🤡
Like I’d take it if I’m planning on having a baby anyways. But yeah, it’s an absolutely pathetic amount. And childcare is only going to get more expensive with this fucking administration
Yeah childcare is gonna be more expensive, but they’ll loosen the regulations so that anybody can be a childcare provider, without any background checks or anything, so more people can charge more money. And no vaccine requirement, so more kids can go. It’s win/win/win. /s
Anybody but trans people you mean
It might be enough to cover the delivery hospital fees!
FWIW the delivery of each of my children cost roughly $1800. We had no complications and I have pretty good insurance. That said, 3 days after my first was born we had to take him in for UV treatment. That cost $7000 for the pleasure of sitting under a UV light for 2 days.
It’s really not, and might not even cover your deductible.
Oh you sweet summer child
Are you telling me that hospitals actually charge you for delivering a child?
There are some hospitals that charge for you holding your baby
Yep, quite a lot too. Once baby is out they start getting separate billing too. No, you aren’t reading that wrong. Since we don’t have single payer healthcare the doctors, nurses, drugs, etc are all to be paid for by the patient. Therefore health insurance but insurance wants to make money which means they don’t want to pay so unless you give them more money they have a pretty high limit before they cover things.
This is after improvements by Obama but he compromised too much so not nearly enough has gotten better.
lol, look at this person who doesn’t even US.
Seriously, though, yes. Tens of thousands of dollars. You also have to pay just to get a ride to the hospital (ambulance). You pay for everything.
19000 dollars on average without insurance. Healthcare is a racket. A scam. Don’t trust any of those rat fucks. Get everything in documentation. Kaisers tried to charge me hundreds of dollars at random and when I called them out on it they basically just said “oh our bad”.
Damn fucking right your bad Kaiser. Stupid fucks.
It’s not even gonna cover your ambulance ride to the hospital because your water broke while you were at work.
My experience is that an ambulance ride is in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands. Still terrible but not as terrible
Average ambulance trip in the US is between $950-1300.
Sounds like you got a deal.
Guess so.
May barely cover the hospital bill for those many without health insurance. But of course the proposed bonus is intended for middle class white babies
Average cost for an uninsured birth is 19,000.
