There will never be a Trumpian baby boom

The Trump administration has been tossing around the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help encourage young marrieds to have kids. Elon Musk’s Genghis Khan-like IVF efforts aside, the national birthrate is in decline, leading to bureaucratic fears of a population collapse. If this bonus were to happen, it would give fresh meaning to the term “stimulus.” But there will never be a Trumpian baby boom.  

You hear all kinds of excuses for our procreative decline: rampant pornography, sex robots, institutionally encouraged gender dysphoria, microplastics in the water. But the major reason that American people aren’t having kids? They’re too expensive. The baby bonus floated this week is supposed to address that, but there’s one problem: it’s not nearly enough.  

Five thousand dollars is still a nice sum of money, but in terms of raising a kid, it’s the equivalent of a generous baby-shower check from a wealthy aunt. Even assuming a family that lives the most frugally conservative possible lifestyle, with a salaried male breadwinner, a stay-at-home mother, and zero paid childcare, $5,000 still only represents a few months’ worth of groceries and diapers at most. It might not even cover the hospital deductible for birthing a baby.  

The most parsimonious estimates set the total cost of raising a kid, from birth to age 18, at around $300,000, not including paying for college. Maybe it’s less if you homeschool or have a lifestyle inspired by Bree Harrison, the Pioneer Woman. Still, even if you grow all your own food and whittle toys from wood you harvest from your miraculously tax-free property, various bills have still spoken for that $5,000 before you cash your check.  

I haven’t had to take part in raising a baby since the White Stripes still were a band and people used MySpace to connect online. But even in those days, five grand would just have been a crutch. I still don’t know how my wife and I did it, but the vast expense of child-rearing is a primary reason why I no longer have much hair.  

I have a few younger friends currently raising babies. One couple has high-paying tech jobs that offered paid leave for both parents, and the other are kind-hearted old-school bohemians who string it together with bottomless love and an extraordinarily devoted community of friends. And that’s just for one child. While I know some people with larger families, they’re either extremely rich, kind of crazy, or both. If you really, unambivalently want children, you’ll find a way to make it work. But for ordinary middle-class or labor-class Americans, the prospect is financially terrifying. Five grand with Donald Trump’s signature on the check isn’t going to put pizza on the table for very long.  

If American government really wanted to encourage people to make families, it would figure out a way to offer universal daycare, universal pre-K, truly affordable healthcare, and paid paternity and maternity leave for everyone, as well as other progressive-coded programs that exist only in the Euro-Neverland of the mind. To do that, though, you’d have to levy a Scandinavian-style fee of 50 percent or higher on income, a highly unlikely scenario from a government that’s somewhat seriously considering getting rid of the personal income tax for people making under $150,000 a year.  

And then there’s the thorny question of what universal schooling would look like in a country that can’t even agree on basic questions like “can men have babies?” and “did people live at the same time as the dinosaurs?” Will a Republican-run federal government give a federal baby-bonus to a male-identifying “birthing person” in California? I assume not.  

If you really want to encourage people to have kids, you have to offer them a package upwards of $500,000. For that amount of money, even I might attempt to summon up a biological miracle and grow my family, even as the country quickly and permanently went bankrupt. Or better yet, take the money for the $5 million “gold cards” that Trump is offering up to high-value immigrants and create the greatest baby lottery the world has ever seen. You wouldn’t grow the population much – that’s 500 babies at the furthest reach of the financial imagination – but the next generation of Barron Trumps would have some well-fed new roommates at NYU.