Latest news with #PronatalismInitiative
Business Insider
28-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
JD Vance wants women to have more babies. Conservative pro-natalists say cheaper housing is key.
Proponents of boosting the declining US birth rate are targeting Americans' biggest expense: housing. They say what parents and would-be parents need are cheaper homes that would give their families the room and financial security to grow. A recent report by the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank that pushes for policies to increase the birth rate, concluded that housing costs were the single biggest factor stopping Americans from having as many kids as they want. "Housing cost concerns are more influential on young adults' plans than childcare costs, work schedules, job stability, student debt, healthcare access, paid leave, desire for leisure time, personal health, or other care obligations," the report found. In IFS' survey of more than 8,000 Americans 18-54 years old, a quarter of respondents listed housing costs as a concern, while 30% cited the cost of childcare, and 26% said they wanted more leisure time. But housing costs had the largest effect of those three factors on family size. "Housing costs were unique in having a very large effect and being extremely common, so they explain the largest total amount of foreshortening of intentions," Lyman Stone, the director of IFS' Pronatalism Initiative and a co-author of the report, told Business Insider. The group has an ally in Vice President JD Vance, who's among the most prominent faces of the conservative push for more American babies. "Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us," Vance said in 2019. In his first speech as vice president, he told March for Life gatherers, "I want more babies in the United States of America." Are housing costs affecting your family planning decisions? Reach out to this reporter at erelman@ Vance has been critical of subsidizing childcare and expanding parental leave; he favors policies designed to help parents who don't work outside the home. The vice president has also called for building new housing on federal land that would be sold or leased to private developers, and supports cutting red tape, including land-use regulations, that limit housing construction. He and his conservative allies could find common ground on housing with Democrats, who also believe the US needs to build many more homes to bring costs down. A White House spokesperson didn't respond to BI's request for comment. When it comes to housing, conservative pro-natalists have slightly different aims than the typical YIMBY agenda, which focuses on building more dense housing in high-demand urban and inner-ring suburban areas, often around transit hubs. Groups like IFS want to prioritize building more single-family homes, which Americans tend to prefer over multifamily housing. An overwhelming majority of IFS survey respondents — 79% — said they preferred to live in a detached, single-family home, while just 59% live in that kind of home. "There's that desire to give your kids a backyard and have space to spread out when it comes to having and raising a family," Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of IFS, told BI. Wilcox said IFS has had conversations with the Trump administration's Domestic Policy Council, and pointed to the administration's efforts to sell federal land for housing construction as a promising path forward. The group also wants to see a slew of policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels to juice housing construction, including relaxing land-use regulations and legalizing more construction in undeveloped areas. "For a lot of ordinary people, the most preferred and fruitful path to pursue here is to try to figure out ways to make affordable single-family housing more accessible to working middle-class Americans," Wilcox said. Replicating the baby boom The US birth rate has been largely on the decline since the financial crisis of 2008. While many factors influence the choice to have kids, government policy is well-positioned to address the economic drivers. There's evidence that rising housing costs shrink family size. A 10% increase in home prices led to a 1% decrease in births among non-homeowners, economists Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney found in a 2012 paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers also found evidence from the distant past that easier access to homeownership can help boost birth rates. The advent of the modern, low-down-payment mortgage in the 1930s facilitated a sharp uptick in the US birth rate that helped create the baby boom, according to their February 2025 NBER working paper. The loans, backed by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, made it easier for some younger Americans to buy a home by allowing very low payments up front and 30 years to pay off the loans. (Black Americans were effectively excluded from these programs for years.) The researchers found that the two mortgage insurance programs helped lower the age people got married and had their first baby, and led to 3 million additional births between 1935 and 1957, accounting for about 10% of the spike in births associated with the baby boom. "Maybe how easy it is to have kids is less about can they take three months off work versus 'do I have a bedroom to put this kid in for the next 18 years?'" Schettini Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, recently told BI.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Baby boom push meets skepticism in Republican Party
Don't count on Republican lawmakers to light the fuse to a new baby boom just yet. The pronatalist movement may be having a moment as it pitches policies that seek to increase the nation's birth rate — with the latest boost being President Trump saying a $5,000 baby bonus 'sounds like a good idea.' But after some poking around on the prospects for the pronatalist policies that seem to be gaining steam, I found skepticism from Republican lawmakers on multiple fronts, as well as fractures in the pronatalist movement itself. Some don't buy into the core premise that fertility rates need a boost to prevent catastrophic economic consequences caused by population collapse. (There were 1.6 births per woman in 2024, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last week — slightly higher than 2023, but well below the below population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.) 'With a significant housing shortage and the growing potential for AI to displace jobs, it's difficult to justify aggressive federal incentives aimed at fueling population growth at this point in our nation's trajectory,' one GOP lawmaker told me. Another Republican lawmaker had not thought deeply about population issues, but was more inclined to support policies to increase legal immigration. The latest burst in the pronatalism movement came from a article on the Trump administration fielding ways to encourage women to have more children, including the $5,000 baby bonus idea or reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for those who are married or have children. But baby bonus incentive programs in other countries have been criticized as largely unsuccessful. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, estimated that a $5,000 baby bonus would have a small effect on births. 'I would say that would probably increase fertility less than 1% — which doesn't mean it's not worth doing, because families with a new kid could use a windfall,' Stone said, adding that he prefers an increase to the Child Tax Credit (more on that later). The various policy ideas are the latest example of how the pronatalist movement has been gaining steam in the last few years. The second Natal Con took place in Austin, Texas, in March and included a number of right-wing speakers, including the Trumpworld-connected commentator Jack Prosobiec. Many of them are encouraged at friendliness to their cause in the Trump administration. Vice President Vance, who famously chastised 'childless cat ladies' (and later expressed regret about that phrasing), has long voiced concern about the nation's birth rate. Trump adviser Elon Musk, a father of at least 14 children from four different women, is the most prominent and connected voice for spawning a 'legion' of children to combat declining birth rates, as the recently reported. But Musk's 'harem drama' — as one of the mothers of his children, Ashley St. Clair, put it — not only makes family-values traditionalists squirm, but his focus on pure births has gotten criticism from others interested in boosting the birth rate. Stone and Brad Wilcox wrote in last week that 'no matter how many tutors you hire or compounds you build, evidence suggests children are more likely to struggle if one of their parents is absent.' Aside from Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalists are Simone and Malcolm Collins, parents of four who have invented a religion called Techno-Puritanism 'designed to combat fertility collapse' and have been profiled many, many times. Simone Collins wears 'techno-puritan' clothing that she told NPR was 'intentionally cringe.' Even for some Republicans who would like to see more babies and larger families, the whole pronatalist push is cringe in a bad way. 'I think the term pronatalist is a little odd,' Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) told me. 'We should just be talking about being pro-family. There's nothing in my core belief system [that] would suggest that we should just be having babies. You need to have families. You need to have dedicated parents in all these situations.' 'It's not a numbers game. It's a strength in numbers game,' Moore added. When it comes to policy, the idea related to boosting birth rates that has the most traction among Republicans is adjusting the Child Tax Credit, currently set at $2,000 per qualifying child. Asked about the pronatalist policies being explored by the Trump administration, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) pointed to his Family First Act, which would in part expand the Child Tax Credit to $4,200 for kids under 6 and $3,000 for other children, as well as creating a new one-time $2,800 tax credit for pregnant mothers. Moore is leading the legislation in the House. 'Getting married and starting a family are key to the American Dream. But for too many young people, that dream feels out of reach,' Banks said in a statement. 'Congress has a role to play in fixing this and we can start by putting money back in the pockets of hardworking parents.' But in a party full of deficit hawks, the politics of getting such a proposal through is dicey. Republicans opposed a temporary expansion that Democrats ushered through in 2021. 'The guys that are most likely to prioritize family formation are Republicans, obviously, but they really don't like increasing the Child Tax Credit,' explained Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project and father of seven. He is more optimistic about prospects for education reform initiatives that can help families. Schilling added: 'It's incredibly important that all of the things that we discuss — all the economic incentives around children — are tied to marriage, because we don't want to get into a situation like we did with the Great Society programs, where you create, inadvertently, these loopholes that incentivize fatherless homes.'SCRAMBLE ON TAX CUT CRAFTING: Free-market advocacy groups are consumed with the biggest activity dominating Capitol Hill right now — the partisan tax cut bill that will serve as the vehicle for Trump's ambitious legislative agenda. Advancing American Freedom, the group founded by former Vice President Pence, is out with a memo warning that 'not all tax cuts are created equal.' Its ranking: 'Best bang for buck' are individual income tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, and reinstating full expensing; expanding the Child Tax Credit is 'dubious'; and 'actually harmful' are exempting tips and overtime from taxes (two campaign promises from Trump), as well as increasing the State and Local Tax deduction. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity is up with a new ad the Washington, D.C., market calling to eliminate green energy tax credits enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden — which the group calls 'Green New Deal giveaways' — as a way to pay for extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cuts signed into law during the first Trump administration. The ad says of the idea: 'It's simple.' That will be politically difficult, however, given more than a dozen more moderate Republicans have called to preserve the tax credits. 1. TRUMP 2028 WATCH: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), who is leading a longer-than-a-long-shot constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term, joined the Republicans for National Renewal's Third Term Project on an X space this week to talk about the push, which was a longtime goal of the group. Ogles claimed he's gotten 'overwhelming' support from Republicans on the proposal, but it still doesn't have any cosponsors. 2. CRYPTO CRINGE: While the cryptocurrency industry is optimistic about the environment for crypto under Trump, my colleague Miranda Nazzarro reports that they did not appreciate the meme coins launched by the president and his family: 'The Trump family's various crypto projects, specifically the launch of two personalized meme coins, led to some frustrations from the industry given concerns about how the coins could benefit the president's family.' They worried 'it could undermine industry's attempts to be taken seriously in Washington.' 3. WORLDS COLLIDE ON WHCA WEEKEND: Rising star Natalie Winters of Bannon's War Room snapped a pic with a masked Taylor Lorenz — the subject of near-constant hate from the right — over the weekend. Who had that on their bingo card? Not 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
01-05-2025
- Business
- The Hill
Baby boom push meets skepticism in Republican Party
Don't count on Republican lawmakers to light the fuse to a new baby boom just yet. The pronatalist movement may be having a moment as it pitches policies that seek to increase the nation's birth rate — with the latest boost being President Trump saying a $5,000 baby bonus 'sounds like a good idea.' But after some poking around on the prospects for the pronatalist policies that seem to be gaining steam, I found skepticism from Republican lawmakers on multiple fronts, as well as fractures in the pronatalist movement itself. Some don't buy into the core premise that fertility rates need a boost to prevent catastrophic economic consequences caused by population collapse. (There were 1.6 births per woman in 2024, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last week — slightly higher than 2023, but well below the below population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.) 'With a significant housing shortage and the growing potential for AI to displace jobs, it's difficult to justify aggressive federal incentives aimed at fueling population growth at this point in our nation's trajectory,' one GOP lawmaker told me. Another Republican lawmaker had not thought deeply about population issues, but was more inclined to support policies to increase legal immigration. The latest burst in the pronatalism movement came from a New York Times article on the Trump administration fielding ways to encourage women to have more children, including the $5,000 baby bonus idea or reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for those who are married or have children. But baby bonus incentive programs in other countries have been criticized as largely unsuccessful. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, estimated that a $5,000 baby bonus would have a small effect on births. 'I would say that would probably increase fertility less than 1% — which doesn't mean it's not worth doing, because families with a new kid could use a windfall,' Stone said, adding that he prefers an increase to the Child Tax Credit (more on that later). The various policy ideas are the latest example of how the pronatalist movement has been gaining steam in the last few years. The second Natal Con took place in Austin, Texas, in March and included a number of right-wing speakers, including the Trumpworld-connected commentator Jack Prosobiec. Many of them are encouraged at friendliness to their cause in the Trump administration. Vice President Vance, who famously chastised 'childless cat ladies' (and later expressed regret about that phrasing), has long voiced concern about the nation's birth rate. Trump adviser Elon Musk, a father of at least 14 children from four different women, is the most prominent and connected voice for spawning a 'legion' of children to combat declining birth rates, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported. But Musk's 'harem drama' — as one of the mothers of his children, Ashley St. Clair, put it — not only makes family-values traditionalists squirm, but his focus on pure births has gotten criticism from others interested in boosting the birth rate. Stone and Brad Wilcox wrote in The Atlantic last week that 'no matter how many tutors you hire or compounds you build, evidence suggests children are more likely to struggle if one of their parents is absent.' Aside from Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalists are Simone and Malcolm Collins, parents of four who have invented a religion called Techno-Puritanism 'designed to combat fertility collapse' and have been profiled many, many times. Simone Collins wears 'techno-puritan' clothing that she told NPR was 'intentionally cringe.' Even for some Republicans who would like to see more babies and larger families, the whole pronatalist push is cringe in a bad way. 'I think the term pronatalist is a little odd,' Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) told me. 'We should just be talking about being pro-family. There's nothing in my core belief system [that] would suggest that we should just be having babies. You need to have families. You need to have dedicated parents in all these situations.' 'It's not a numbers game. It's a strength in numbers game,' Moore added. When it comes to policy, the idea related to boosting birth rates that has the most traction among Republicans is adjusting the Child Tax Credit, currently set at $2,000 per qualifying child. Asked about the pronatalist policies being explored by the Trump administration, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) pointed to his Family First Act, which would in part expand the Child Tax Credit to $4,200 for kids under 6 and $3,000 for other children, as well as creating a new one-time $2,800 tax credit for pregnant mothers. Moore is leading the legislation in the House. 'Getting married and starting a family are key to the American Dream. But for too many young people, that dream feels out of reach,' Banks said in a statement. 'Congress has a role to play in fixing this and we can start by putting money back in the pockets of hardworking parents.' But in a party full of deficit hawks, the politics of getting such a proposal through is dicey. Republicans opposed a temporary expansion that Democrats ushered through in 2021. 'The guys that are most likely to prioritize family formation are Republicans, obviously, but they really don't like increasing the Child Tax Credit,' explained Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project and father of seven. He is more optimistic about prospects for education reform initiatives that can help families. Schilling added: 'It's incredibly important that all of the things that we discuss — all the economic incentives around children — are tied to marriage, because we don't want to get into a situation like we did with the Great Society programs, where you create, inadvertently, these loopholes that incentivize fatherless homes.' I'm Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill, here with a weekly look at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. Tell me what's on your radar: ebrooks@ SCRAMBLE ON TAX CUT CRAFTING: Free-market advocacy groups are consumed with the biggest activity dominating Capitol Hill right now — the partisan tax cut bill that will serve as the vehicle for Trump's ambitious legislative agenda. Advancing American Freedom, the group founded by former Vice President Pence, is out with a memo warning that 'not all tax cuts are created equal.' Its ranking: 'Best bang for buck' are individual income tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, and reinstating full expensing; expanding the Child Tax Credit is 'dubious'; and 'actually harmful' are exempting tips and overtime from taxes (two campaign promises from Trump), as well as increasing the State and Local Tax deduction. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity is up with a new ad the Washington, D.C., market calling to eliminate green energy tax credits enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden — which the group calls 'Green New Deal giveaways' — as a way to pay for extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cuts signed into law during the first Trump administration. The ad says of the idea: 'It's simple.' That will be politically difficult, however, given more than a dozen more moderate Republicans have called to preserve the tax credits. Further reading: GOP stares down crucial stretch to pass Trump agenda, from my colleagues Al Weaver and Mychael Schnell. THREE MORE THINGS… 1. TRUMP 2028 WATCH: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), who is leading a longer-than-a-long-shot constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term, joined the Republicans for National Renewal's Third Term Project on an X space this week to talk about the push, which was a longtime goal of the group. Ogles claimed he's gotten 'overwhelming' support from Republicans on the proposal, but it still doesn't have any cosponsors. 2. CRYPTO CRINGE: While the cryptocurrency industry is optimistic about the environment for crypto under Trump, my colleague Miranda Nazzarro reports that they did not appreciate the meme coins launched by the president and his family: 'The Trump family's various crypto projects, specifically the launch of two personalized meme coins, led to some frustrations from the industry given concerns about how the coins could benefit the president's family.' They worried 'it could undermine industry's attempts to be taken seriously in Washington.' 3. WORLDS COLLIDE ON WHCA WEEKEND: Rising star Natalie Winters of Bannon's War Room snapped a pic with a masked Taylor Lorenz — the subject of near-constant hate from the right — over the weekend. Who had that on their bingo card? Not me.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Women could be paid $5,000 to have babies under Trump
Women could be paid 'baby bonuses' of $5,000 as part of plans by the Trump administration to drive up birth rates. Donald Trump's aides are mulling a series of incentives to encourage women to have more children and push conservative family values, according to the New York Times. Proposals include a 'National Medal of Motherhood' to mothers with six or more children, and giving every American mother $5,000 after delivery. Also discussed was funding for programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles so they can better understand when they are ovulating. The behind-closed-doors discussions come amid a vocal push from key figures in the White House, including JD Vance, the vice-president, and Elon Musk, after the birth rate hit a historic low, with 1.62 births per woman in 2023. Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, who has pitched several policy ideas to Mr Trump and his team said the administration was 'soliciting input'. 'I think they're still having a conversation about what they want to do,' she told The Times. The plans are not expected to be made part of Mr Trump's policies any time soon. Mr Trump told reporters that the baby plan 'sounds like a good idea to me'. Mr Vance has advocated boosting child tax credit to $5,000, to help with the cost of raising children, and warned of a 'civilisational crisis' in the US if birthrates continue to fall. 'We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed,' Mr Vance said in 2021. 'The fact that we're not having enough babies, the fact that we're not having enough children, is a crisis in this country,' he added. Most recently, he told thousands of anti-abortion campaigners at their march for life that he 'wants more babies', which was met with rapturous applause. Meanwhile, Mr Musk, a close confidant of the president, is said to be taking matters into his own hands. The billionaire is alleged to be so eager to build his 'legion' of children he once offered a woman $15 million to have his baby and keep it a secret, the Washington Post reported. According to Ashley St Clair, who claims to have mothered one of Mr Musk's children, the billionaire also uses X to recruit potential mothers and suggested to a former girlfriend they hire surrogates to have as many babies as possible. Mr Musk's ever-growing brood of children grew once more, after he confirmed the arrival of his son, Seldon Lycurgus in March. The baby is believed to be his 14th child and the fourth he has fathered with Shivon Zilis, a Canadian executive at Neuralink, his neurotechnology firm. The billionaire also shares children with his ex-wife Justine Wilson and the pop singer Grimes. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Women could be paid $5,000 to have babies under Trump
Women could be paid 'baby bonuses' of $5,000 as part of plans by the Trump administration to drive up birth rates. Donald Trump's aides are mulling a series of incentives to encourage women to have more children and push conservative family values, according to the New York Times. Proposals include a 'National Medal of Motherhood' to mothers with six or more children, and giving every American mother $5,000 after delivery. Also discussed was funding for programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles so they can better understand when they are ovulating. The behind-closed-doors discussions come amid a vocal push from key figures in the White House, including JD Vance, the vice-president, and Elon Musk, after the birth rate hit a historic low, with 1.62 births per woman in 2023. 'Civilisational crisis' Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, who has pitched several policy ideas to Mr Trump and his team said the administration was 'soliciting input'. 'I think they're still having a conversation about what they want to do,' she told The Times. The plans are not expected to be made part of Mr Trump's policies any time soon. Mr Trump told reporters that the baby plan 'sounds like a good idea to me'. Mr Vance has advocated boosting child tax credit to $5,000, to help with the cost of raising children, and warned of a 'civilisational crisis' in the US if birthrates continue to fall. 'We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed,' Mr Vance said in 2021. 'The fact that we're not having enough babies, the fact that we're not having enough children, is a crisis in this country,' he added. Most recently, he told thousands of anti-abortion campaigners at their march for life that he 'wants more babies', which was met with rapturous applause. Musk's children Meanwhile, Mr Musk, a close confidant of the president, is said to be taking matters into his own hands. The billionaire is alleged to be so eager to build his 'legion' of children he once offered a woman $15 million to have his baby and keep it a secret, the Washington Post reported. According to Ashley St Clair, who claims to have mothered one of Mr Musk's children, the billionaire also uses X to recruit potential mothers and suggested to a former girlfriend they hire surrogates to have as many babies as possible. Mr Musk's ever-growing brood of children grew once more, after he confirmed the arrival of his son, Seldon Lycurgus in March. The baby is believed to be his 14th child and the fourth he has fathered with Shivon Zilis, a Canadian executive at Neuralink, his neurotechnology firm. The billionaire also shares children with his ex-wife Justine Wilson and the pop singer Grimes.
