U.S. birth rates have been on the decline in recent years, and there are indications that President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to do something about it, such as offering $5,000 bonuses to every American mother after delivery. This week, the Marc Cox Morning Show team discussed their thoughts on the idea.
“Would that encourage some women to have children? Maybe. A lot of women – in fact, I was watching videos about this yesterday – were complaining about, well, what you really need to do is to fix the fact that we don't have enough maternity leave and all these things,” said Kim on a Whim host Kim St. Onge.
She also pulled up data from the Pew Research Center. Last summer, the center found that 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to. Another 44% said they wanted to focus on other things, such as their career, 38% said they were concerned about the state of the world and 36% said they couldn’t afford to raise a child.
“The share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023 (from 37% to 47%),” said the Pew Research Center.
A few months before Pew released the survey results, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that the general fertility rate in the U.S. had dropped 2% from 2022 to 2023, a historic low. It also marked the second year in a row of decline after a 1% increase from 2020 to 2021. From 2014 to 2020, the U.S. birth rate decreased by 2% annually.
While St. Onge and Cox said the concept of incentivizing more people to have kids in the U.S. is interesting, they weren’t sold on the $5,000 plan or some other plans that have been proposed to the White House, as reported by The New York Times. Cox suggested a credit to offset the cost of day care, and St. Onge noted that any government incentives such as expanded maternity leave could out stress on taxpayers and small businesses – options she wasn’t keen on.
“If you force a mom and pop shop, the average mom and shop to offer – let’s just throw out a number – 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave. I would… venture to guess a good majority of them could not handle it.
They would never want to hire women. Then they’d be viewed as discriminatory,” she said.
According to the Times, “baby bonuses and menstrual cycle classes,” were among the ideas pitched to Trump aides as ways to reverse the declining birth rate in the U.S. It said this could be an “early sign that the Trump administration will embrace a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the right to reverse declining birthrates and push conservative family values.”
Vice President JD Vance and Trump advisor Elon Musk are both supporters of plans to increase the U.S. birth rate, the Times noted. At the same time, preliminary data from the CDC indicates that births actually increased last year, by around 1%.
“I don’t think it's a terrible idea,” said St Onge of the potential $5,000 motherhood bonus. “Maybe you could say it’s a step in the right direction. I do not know if this is ultimately going to fix the problem, but you have to do something.”