Joy Pullmann of the Federalist pans a proposal to pay American women for having babies.
I think it’s entirely legit to exempt parents from taxes completely and raise taxes on nonparents to make up for it. That’s because if we’re going to have a social welfare Ponzi system, parents are paying into it simply by having kids. Child-free people are welfare state freeloaders.
Yes, I know sterile people pay taxes, but not enough to cover their take. If they did, Western welfare states wouldn’t be collapsing.
The major thing government can do to encourage fertility is: stop making existing so bloody expensive. Inflation, remember, is caused by government subsidies. So we need not to increase government payments, but to cut them.
Start with health care, because tons of families need a second earner just to pay health insurance premiums. If they don’t have one, they use Medicaid.
In my lifetime, the United States has gone from allowing young, healthy people to have commensurate insurance to forcing us to pay almost a full salary each year for other people who aren’t paying. Medicaid and Medicare are massive hidden taxes, including by reimbursing providers so badly they payment-gouge the minority of self-paying customers. Insurance shouldn’t pay for everything. That’s not insurance, it’s socialized medicine.
It’s fundamentally unfair to force any family to field a second earner to pay for other people’s health care. It should be needless to say that slavery is not good for fertility! If families could simply get the insurance plans available 20-30 years ago plus pay only our own costs of care, we’d have another $10,000-$15,000 per year in our pockets at least.
That and any other cuts to government burdens would go a long way towards letting an overtired, overworked momma work fewer hours and maybe think about gestating another cute little American with her resulting energy. In other words, DOGE is a fertility booster. And so is repealing Obamacare!
