They just cut head start, slashed medicade(51% of us babies are born on this program), no medicade no pediatric care for your baby either, cut hud, slashed the department of education, blocked student loan forgiveness, are dismantling the aca preventative care mandate, laid off 275,000 workers and destroyed their livelihood and tanked the economy ……yea the birth rate is going to plummet. 5k lol doesn’t even cover a fraction of the utter devastation coming to American families from these moronic policies
yea the birth rate is going to plummet.
I’m not so sure. Impoverished countries have the highest birth rates. I can imagine the logic of the wealthy 0.001% being “if we make the rest of the country as broke as Somalia, the birth rate will also be as high as Somalia.”
And all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy - who don’t need them.
Are you saying the game of achieving highscores for world’s richest person with ever higher numbers isn’t important? /s
But that is a lot of complicated words, 5k is much easier to make a headline about, and re-elect the same people.
The Headstart cut hurts a lot. I know people that gone to that when they were little and had nothing but good things to say.
Putin did the same thing, he aware 16k equivalent for having 10+ children .
They chose to use a stock photo of a million dollars.
$5000 is only 2 and a half of those bundles of $20’s.
These people are trying to run propaganda for Trump, they can’t even keep their fascist bullshit straight.
but when you look through maga glasses, that’s what you see when a black single mom of 2 receives a wic voucher for a couple gallons of milk.
You see, its not one black mom, its the millions of moms getting subsidies!
Lets ignore the part where we somewhy have a million moms needing subsidies.
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Thank you! Maddening!
I worked both Brinks type security and for Chase, so the inside and outside. That’s not a million. It’s probably somewhere between a quarter and a half, but the picture doesn’t make it super easy to tell.
Your point is very valid however, they used a deceiving picture on purpose.
Yeah looks about right with the hundred stacks in there. I’m not putting a ton of effort in here, but eyeballing it looks about like what I’d expect.
Was gonna say actually you’re probably right because it was probably a couple of suitcases and then the 300 K backpack
Cheers for low effort irrelevant curiosities
Lol so even if they were $1 bills that wouldn’t be an accurate pic hahaha
Honestly… This is kind of on the right track.
I’m not sure what you mean, but if you mean giving people cash, yes I agree. It’s just far too small an amount to make a difference. People have a variety of needs, and while some might benefit from daycare, others would benefit from diapers, while still others could use a decent car seat. Cash is fungible, and people can spend it how they like.
We spend more on preventing fraud and administering social services than we would spend it we simply gave everyone money. A negative tax rate on a sliding scale would do the most good for everyone. Yes, some people would spend the money on drugs or alcohol or other addictive vices, but the effort to stop that costs more than just letting it happen. It’s like we have a swat team at the Dollar Store to prevent shoplifting.
But $5,000 is insultingly ineffective.
Oh yeah, I agree it isn’t enough and agree with all your points.
It costs way more than $5k to birth and raise a child. This is only going to be incentive for the exceptionally poor and extremely stupid, which is likely to be the point because those people and their children are what continues to feed our exploitation model.
According to my halfassed search engine results, giving birth costs on average $18,000.
Just the cost of epidural, estimates range from $1000 to $3500 out of that cost.
As someone who lives in a country where giving birth is free that sounds absolutely insane to me. Are these birth costs in the US at least covered by common medical insurance or is it always that bad? It’s a miracle that the US birth rate is one of the highest in the western world when the conditions are like this…
I think my hospital bills were around $5,000. What I didn’t anticipate was the fact that once my daughter was born I was paying hospital bills for me and for her. I think without insurance it was around 30k? So insurance covered 25,000 and we paid the rest
After my son’s birth in 2006, we owed $12,000 after insurance. That was a single night’s stay in the hospital. Nothing out of the norm for the birth. We had to refinance the house the following year to pay off his and our daughter’s birth from 2005.
Not really, all the third world countries with no real system to pay for old age have high birthrates too.
American here. I don’t remember paying a dime for either of our kid’s birth. Don’t think we even had copays for the doctor.
Right? 🇨🇦
But I have family in Sweden, and I’m not sure they don’t have a baby food fund, but I definitely remember that daycare, preschool and all schooling was free of user-fees and also nearby.
So she’s been walking the kids to the schools down the road a bit for 14 years now, on her way to and from work. And it’s been free. And I think they get lunch. And their schools are moderately successful and still have programmes. And they graduate kids who can add in their head and speak two languages or more.
Guys, I think rogue American states don’t want to join Canada. Join Denmark or Sweden instead!
Estonian here, similar, but two languages wasn’t actually an option at least earlier this century. I started my first foreign language in 3rd grade and the other one in 6th. Could’ve added a 3rd one in high school but didn’t feel like it personally.
Daycare isn’t entirely free but the fee is very small.
Hospital visits are 2.50 per night for inpatient or 5 euros a visit for outpatient I think. Without insurance most tests are still double digits, but major surgery can go into the thousands. Insurance is tied to having employment - but being in school, raising a child under 3, etc counts too. And so does registering as unemployed. Pretty much the only time you have no health insurance is if you’re a NEET and don’t register for unemployment.
And you can walk to places. In my hometown, we could just walk or cycle to the next town over. There’s a separate light traffic road next to the car road.
Lol, you guys get ripped of.
A whole hospital stay for a normal uncomplicated birth in Germany with Epidural is just 3600€ (that’s what the hospital gets paid, and most of them are for-profit in Germany)I had a kid three years ago, we decided to get a higher premium health plan that specifically had excellent natal coverage. It’s one of the most expensive plans available to us but we didn’t pay anything for 9 months worth of prenatal visits plus 3 days in the hospital. The coverage statement said that delivery from the hospital was something like $28,000 but the first bill we actually saw that we had to pay was for a hearing test that was only partially covered.
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They are good with proposing a thing that sounds good to a portion of their voting base, not with following through.
“White babies only please” —Cheetolini
I know you were half joking but for everyone else here complaining that 5k ain’t shit (I agree, it’s not), it’s because the incentive is not for you. It’s for rich people (read: rich white people, since poverty disproportionately affects non-white people).
5k might not mean shit to you in trying to raise a child but for someone who already has the means to have/raise a kid, it’s actually bonus money. That’s the incentive.
They are rich, why would they have a kid over snack food money?
Supposedly they’ve done the cost benefit analysis, so this wouldn’t even appeal to them, less so even…
Spending money on families hasn’t been shown to help in any way whatsoever in increasing the birth rate. You have countries with close to free day care and generous monthly child subsidies with the same or even much lower fertility rate as countries that give just about nothing at all. I still support these kinds of policies just for the sake of helping families and their kids, but doing it for the only purpose of helping the fertility rate is futile. Honestly I don’t think the government can do much at all to help the fertility rate. It’s a cultural issue first and foremost. And the government can’t (and I think shouldn’t!) do much to change the culture of our society. You see people living in poverty with 9 kids just because they belong to a certain religious or ethnic group who values children above all else. That’s the main issue. How important is children to the culture? Is it prestigious to be a dad or a mom? Is personal success measured in how you’ve built your family or is success measured in how much money you make?

It’s a work culture issue. People need free time to socialise meaningfully. Notice how Iceland and France are as high or higher than Colombia?
Not sure how exactly fertility rates are calculated but with countries like Japan the age of the population might play a role too.
Fertility rate is calculated by dividing every age group in the country into groups and multiplying them by how many children that age group are currently having to estimate how many children a woman is going to have during their lifetime. So if today’s women have on average 1 kid in their 20s and 1 kid in their 30s, and none after, that will give a fertility rate of 2.0, no matter how many women are actually in their 20s or 30s. So there being a lot of old people does not change the results. Fertility rate is dependent on how many children women have during their reproductive years. Birth rate however is affected by their being a lot of old people because birth rate numbers are just the number of children born per year per a 1000 people. So the birth rate of Japan would look comparably much worse than the fertility rate. Fertility rate is therefore considered to be a fairer metric.
Latin American countries have recently had a collapse in birth rate, even since that chart from 2017 was made. Colombia has dropped to 1,2 in 2023. Fertility rates are collapsing almost everywhere and I think it’s because of how globalisation is spreading anti natalist culture around the globe. It’s so drastic and so consistent in nearly every developed country.
Ironically, comically, higher education leads to more lefty leaning politics with more peogrammes and you know it leads to reduced birth rates.
So - and it’s probably minor - the easier it is there to have and raise and educate a child, the less likely its people need as much help.
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Not sure that covers two month’s rent for the kind of space you need for the 5 women to average a baby every 2 months.
How about some of that socialism for the rest of us, and not just for breeders and soybean farmers?
Paying desperate people to produce corpo slaves is the furthest thing from socialism.
I was being a bit facetious, but yeah. It’s a pretty transparent ploy to get the birth rate up for as little money as possible. God forbid line doesn’t go up always and forever, for all eternity.
you clearly haven’t met many tankies
Well, in a couple of years, some countries more than 50% of the population will be retired. Even a perfect democracy would not pass a law to improve young people’s lives so they can have time and money to have kids.
Just like in a perfect democracy, no affordable housing law will be approved because 66% of the population are homeowners.
Its unsolvable.
Only if every person votes solely in their own immediate selfish interests. A collective mindset is necessary for a functional democratic society.
Correct, a “perfect democracy” requires empathy.
People blame boomers, but really we only have ourselves to blame sure to lack of voter turnout and everyone voting strategically, instead of who they actually want to win.
Free daycare and free healthcare for people under 18 are two social services that would only benefit parents. How about free college tuition moving forward?
This is just a sad attempt making an exclusive version of establishment Dem stimulus checks…
Additionally, government supplemented/paid for day care is the only way to pay the teachers fairly. Given places often aim for 4 students:1 teacher, you already have a hard cap of 4*monthly fees for salary for that one teacher. I pay 1.2k/ month, so a teacher can get a max of 4.8k/month if EVERYTHING went to them, which we all know it doesn’t due to taxes, administrative staff, utilities, facility fees, etc.
However, if they raise fees, they price people out of a much-needed service at a time when folks typically haven’t reached their max earning potential yet.
And folks wonder why parents these days are so old. Earning potential to afford daycare in the first place.
Idk, it seems like US doesn’t even have the basic shit going on, any of that is a good news.
It really is a bummer to have such a legitimately retarded man just riding this country into the earths crust all Slim Pickens style.
I’ve never thought Trump was smart. He sounds stupid when he talks. He doesn’t seem to have a grasp of even basic things. But, now I’m thinking that somehow as stupid as he sounds, he’s actually even dumber. Like, he’s fooling people like me into thinking he has an IQ of 80 when it’s more like 60. In a way that’s impressive.
Clinton Floats $5,000 Baby Bond
~ September 28, 2007
It’s nice to know these two are still in touch.
put into an index fund over the last seventeen years, that $5k is now $30k. it was not a terrible idea.
It’s really gonna help to pay for diapers in an index fund.
In Bill Clinton’s defense it was intended for the child, not the parent.
From the article: “I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time,” said Clinton, “so when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to put that down payment on their first home, or go into business.”
Personally I think the policy is a good idea, especially since it doesn’t encourage unwanted children from a short-term desire for cash. It would be great along with medicare for all, free tuition, a livable minimum wage, government housing for all, UBI…
Of all the people who are so strapped they could receive $5k and not immediately blow it on visa bills and rent, parents aren’t even close to the list. $5k into investments? Most of them are either flirting with bankruptcy or engaging in some heavy petting in a corner booth.
Don’t judge me. I got kids to feed.
Not on its face, no. I think it’s still a band-aid attached to a bigger problem of generational inequality. Public housing, education, and a large competitive public hiring sector would have gone much farther in rectifying poverty in the US.
But the extra insulting aspect of “Baby Bonds” is that they’re an idea dangled over a public hungry for economic reforms which never actually gets delivered. When liberals lose, they get to nag centrists and insist “We had all these good ideas but you were too racist and stupid to accept them”. When they win, we get an earful about how the federal courts, the super-majority Senate, the prior administration’s mid-level bureaucrats, the state legislatures, and two dozen of DC’s biggest lobbying firms all have to agree to go along with it or the reforms can’t pass.
Seems like Republicans are getting in on the same act, now that kitchen table liberalism is experiencing a popular resurgence.
Totally original idea
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/15/nx-s1-5077776/kamala-harris-child-tax-credit-housing
Isn’t it like ~$310,000 to raise a kid to 17? That’s, what, 2% of what is needed after the poor child is born? And some woman is going to decide to let a guy nut in her for $5000?
This won’t even cover the medical costs to give birth
Even Elon pays better than this

















