Name: Why The U.S. Government Can’t Convince Americans To Have Kids
Uploaded: 2025-06-02T03:20:38.000Z
Duration: 11 min 38 s
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America's fertility rates are hovering around historic lows, with approximately 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime.

This is below the level needed to sustain the population, which is 2.1 births per woman.

We're actually projecting that about one in four young adults today will never have kids.

There are plenty of us out there who are kind of concerned about the falling birth rate, both for kind of its impact on people's ordinary lives, as well as for the ways in which it will affect our economy and our government.

And we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.

Our population will in the not too distant future start to decline.

And so that's why this is an issue for governments and for the economy.

And politicians are starting to pay attention.

The concern here in the U.S. is that if we see kind of dramatic declines in fertility, we will eventually see also kind of a drag on our economy and our capacity to cover all sorts of government programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Our population is sort of getting older on average.

And what that means is we have the baby boomers who are, you know, in their older age years.

So they are drawing Social Security and they also have quite a bit of medical and care needs.

And so the question is, how will we care for our aging population?

It's very hard in modern U.S. society to combine work and having kids.

We have very little by way of support to families in this country.

Here's why the government can't seem to convince Americans to start families.

When birth rates fall, it affects the entire economy.

One of the big drivers of economic growth is just having more people in your society, more consumers, more workers, more taxpayers.

In East Asia and countries like Japan, for instance, that have seen low replacement fertility for a long while and are now actually just shrinking demographically.

Both in terms of the Japanese economy, there's been signage, but also in terms of Japanese government having greater difficulty kind of paying the tab for the challenges they face in terms of quickly supporting an older population that is relying to an important degree on the Japanese government.

With the worker to retiree ratio shrinking, Social Security and similar programs could struggle to remain financially sustainable.

The Social Security trustees put out a report about how long they expect Social Security to stay solvent.

What's interesting, though, is that the lever that we are trying to force on people now is people should have more children so that then eventually 20 years from now or so, we'd have more workers who would then be paying into it.

It doesn't seem like a very efficient system to me because it doesn't solve the short term solvency problem.

Leaders across the U.S. political spectrum have proposed ways to address the birth rate decline.

You've got Elon Musk, who is essentially having the ear of the president and in the White House, and he's very much interested not only in increasing birth rates, but this notion that the best and brightest should really be reproducing.

So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.

You have, I would say, a more sort of religiously or conservatively oriented bent about this.

So it's not just about increasing births, but it's about increasing births within sort of a traditional family.

So marital status is really important to this group.

We have the Democrats pushing really hard for an expanded child tax credit.

Now, the Republicans come out with something called a baby bonus.

That would be $5,000, allegedly, at the time a child is born.

This is a pretty common policy in other countries, that there's some extra child allowance, child tax credit, baby bonus sent to parents when they have a newborn.

Both political parties have proposed policies that provide money to families, either in the form of direct cash or tax refunds.

But experts say one-off proposals are not likely to move the needle for families.

The kinds of financial incentives or benefits that we're providing just really aren't enough to change the calculus of a tradeoff of bringing a child into one's household or family.

In particular, the $5,000 baby bonus that's being sort of bandied about is not likely to budge fertility rates.

The United States lacks key policies that other comparable nations have that could potentially encourage family formation, such as federal paid parental leave, flexible work and some fertility care access.

The U.S. offers less cash and services than the average OECD country.

However, it is above average when it comes to providing tax breaks for families with kids.

Research suggests to us that these are family studies that markedly increasing like the child tax credit can have a modest but noteworthy effect on births.

What we estimate is that if we were to increase, for instance, the child tax credit to $4,500 per child, it's about $2,000 right now.

That would lead to an increase in fertility of between 3 and 10 percent.

On the one hand, that's a pretty modest number.

On the other hand, if you kind of look at that effect over the course of the century, we're talking about millions and millions of extra kids being born because of this additional financial incentive.

But even wealthy countries with stronger social programs continue to struggle with low birth rates.

France really has been spending a lot on pro-family policies.

They now have one of the higher fertility rates in Europe.

How much of their policy emphasis actually help sort of stall out the decline so they're in better shape than some other countries is a really difficult, empirical question to answer.

But I do think it might be a glimmer of, you know, optimism on the policy front, suggesting if we really do a lot to support families, we at least might be able to stall out the birth rate decline.

Many governments have attempted to influence or even limit their citizens' family formation practices, such as Japan's recent pro-natalist campaigns or China's one-child policy.

But studies have found that these policies may have unintended consequences.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where the government can say to people, we just really need you to have kids because it's important for our country.

Sort of a take one for the team, patriotic kind of exhortation.

Like, that's not probably going to happen.

America's birth rate used to be higher, but it was partly driven by unintended pregnancies, especially among teenagers.

We've actually spent years, decades and millions of dollars from the federal government trying to reduce our teen pregnancy rate, which was much higher than other industrialized countries.

The downside is births at older ages have not risen enough to offset the declines we're seeing at these very young ages.

And so that has driven our overall fertility rate lower, although we all are seeing increases in births to women in their 30s and even in their 40s.

I think this timing issue is also another question.

Has this sort of delay in adulthood, the delay in people feeling like they can find a partner, they can afford a house.

Is all of that pushing childbearing to such a late age that people are going to wind up having fewer children than they intend or than they would like?

Is there anything policy can do about that to make people feel like they don't have to wait until their 30s to get started having a family?

And this isn't to say people should start having kids earlier if they don't want to.

But are there people who would start having kids earlier if it weren't at the same time that a lot of work demands were placed on people?

If it were easier to afford a house before you got to your late 30s, are there policy and institutional changes we could make there?

The Trump administration has vocally supported increasing access to IVF.

However, it also cut funding for IVF research.

The White House did not respond to CNBC's request to participate in this report.

In thinking about the role of IVF in increasing fertility.

We have companies telling young women, work like crazy during your 20s and don't worry, we pay for you to freeze your eggs because you can do IVF later.

I'm not sure that that's actually going to lead these women to have more children.

I think in some sense we're really forcing the trade off to the extent we're setting up an expectation that people can delay childbearing to their late 30s.

In the end, it might actually exacerbate the low fertility rate for people having fewer children than they sort of ex-ante would have liked to have had.

It's common for fertility to decline during economic uncertainty.

But birth rates did not recover after the Great Recession.

And that kind of caught a lot of demographers around the world flat footed because it also didn't happen in other countries.