Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show that despite a 1% increase in the birth rate, people are still not having enough babies to prevent the U.S. population from declining. President Donald Trump acknowledged the problem Tuesday, saying he wants to reverse the trend in a welcome change from the last administration. Unfortunately, one of the ideas being floated by the White House, a $5,000 “baby bonus” for every mother after she gives birth, won’t make fertility great again.
The New York Times suggests the falling birth rate is a good thing, as it is being driven by a decline in teenage pregnancies. This is simply false. Teenage pregnancy rates are falling, which is a good thing, but even at their height in the 1970s, they accounted for just 6% of all births, and they’ve accounted for less than 3% of all births since 2000.
The decline in overall birth rates is actually being driven by women between the ages of 18 and 33, and it is not due to women wanting smaller families. They don’t. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. According to Gallup, more people want big families today than in 1971, and women are more likely to want three or more children than men.
What is really causing the birth rate to collapse is the decline of marriage.
The birth rate among married women under the age of 44 is almost three times as high as the rate among unmarried women of the same age, which is understandable. Raising a child is hard work, and it helps to have a husband who can earn money and provide care for both the mother and her child or children.
The problem is that married women make up a much smaller percentage of the population than they used to. As recently as 2007, when women were having enough babies to sustain our population, 55% of women between the ages of 20 and 44 were married. Today, just 45% are, and the fall has been steepest for women under 30.
If Trump, like Vice President JD Vance, wants more babies born in the United States, his administration should focus on helping young men and women get and stay married. A $5,000 check after birth won’t do that.
What would help women get married is ensuring men can be the providers women need in a husband. While wages for college-educated men and women of all education levels have risen since 1970, wages for median and low-income men have fallen. This has been at a time when spending on means-tested government programs that often punish women for getting married, such as Medicaid, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, has soared past $1 trillion a year.
Fixing marriage penalties would be a huge step toward helping young people get married, and so would raising male wages. Women prefer husbands who make more money than they do, so the more men can secure a wage sufficient to support a family, the more marriages there will be.
While Trump has made progress on this front by securing the border, thus making it harder for employers to undercut native wages by paying illegal immigrants less, other aspects of Trump’s agenda aren’t helping.
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Trucking is the No. 1 job for non-college-educated men in the U.S., and the industry is getting hammered by tariff chaos. Truckload volumes are dropping to COVID-era levels, and costs for new rigs are also rising because of tariffs on steel and aluminum. Due to market uncertainty from Trump’s tariffs, Mack Trucks recently announced layoffs at its Lehigh Valley Operations center.
Former President Joe Biden had no interest in reversing our nation’s population decline (Decline was his thing, and he set an obvious example). His response to falling fertility was to force more mothers into the workforce to make up for the lost production of an aging population. Trump at least wants America to reproduce itself into the future. But baby bonuses are not the answer. Helping young men and women get married is. Unfortunately, Trump’s trade war isn’t helping.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
