Daycare cost $2k a month

Wages have not kept up with productivity and GDP increases since the 1970s.
How about making single income middle class families possible again, so you can have one stay at home parent.

It won't even cover the cost of giving birth. This is some real "how much could a banana cost" energy.
- Also, the cost of giving birth will magically jump up by $5,000 as soon as this passes. It was never a function of how much it cost to actually provide that service.

monkey paw finger curls You get free healthcare coverage and half minimum wage for each child just for existing. However, you and your child must renounce your citizenship, forfeit your passport, and accept indentured servant status until you can buy back your citizenship after repaying the government child support in full.

Having a kid will cost you much more than 100grand. Giving you 5k to fuck is such an insult.

The type of person who would think 5k for having a kid is a great deal is exactly the type of person conservatives would bitch about having kids and leeching all the other government resources.
- Coincidentally, it's also the exact type of person conservatives want having kids. They make up the majority of prison labor, military fodder, and wage slaves.

They just cut head start, slashed medicade(51% of us babies are born on this program), no medicade no pediatric care for your baby either, cut hud, slashed the department of education, blocked student loan forgiveness, are dismantling the aca preventative care mandate, gutting worker protections, canceling child labor laws, laid off 275,000 workers and destroyed their livelihood and tanked the economy ……yea the birth rate is going to plummet. 5k lol doesn’t even cover a fraction of the utter devastation coming to American families from these moronic policies. Who in their right mind would want to bring a child into this racist sexist tech bro oligarchy?
- yea the birth rate is going to plummet.
  I'm not so sure. Impoverished countries have the highest birth rates. I can imagine the logic of the wealthy 0.001% being "if we make the rest of the country as broke as Somalia, the birth rate will also be as high as Somalia."
- And all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy - who don’t need them.

It really is a bummer to have such a legitimately retarded man just riding this country into the earths crust all Slim Pickens style.

Wow, two months rent for having a baby. That should fix it.

That's a weird way of wording "You'll only have to pay 95K out of your 100K bill of your hospital stay for giving birth"
5K PER MONTH and paying for the full hospital bill would be a great place start. But of course, they aren't really pro-life to begin with.
Pro-Birth =/= Pro-Life
They don't care what happens after birth.
- $100k wtf? I only remember paying for parking at the hospital...evil socialism!
- In a lot of places 5K a month covers daycare, and not much more

daycare costs $2k a month? are they training the kids to be astronauts?
- No, just extracting the maximum possible amount of profit, it's the American way. And 2k is the low end.
  
  wild. you'd think as a capitalist country that wants to maximize workforce for cheap labor people would be more incentivized to procreate. yet you have insane costs to childbirth alone, no parental leave for either parent (or a pathetic amount on state level), no child support... and this on top.
  
  $2k gets you Jimmy "Boots" McClusky, on day release from the work farm.

Based on data presented here: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-true-cost-of-raising-a-child
It takes a minimum of $200K USD to raise a child from birth to 18; which works out to ~$1K/mo.
If the Government were serious in wanting to address the aging population issue, the best way to tackle it would be to provide family funding at this level for a family’s first ~3 children.
Would it be expensive? Absolutely it would be in the initial term - but the increase in economic activity would arguably more than cover it in the long run.
Would it lead to inflation? Not if the costs were derived from taxes due to the government (which currently get dodged), rather than through national debt.
Would it lead to a positive outcome for the nation? Arguably yes, but there may also be unintended consequences to the negative. Human greed knows no bounds, after all.

That won’t even cover half of the (insured) cost of even the smoothest birth with my plan, and I work for a multi-billion dollar company.
This country, man. Having traveled abroad a bit, you start to realize how tunnel-visioned people stateside can get. Don’t even realize how much they/we are getting fleeced.
- giving birth in a hospital costs $10k, after insurance payback?
  
  Our deductible was about 6,500. It depends what kind of plan you're on
- Having traveled abroad a bit, you start to realize how tunnel-visioned people stateside can get. Don’t even realize how much they/we are getting fleeced.
  It's the classic of someone having to visit a doctor while in Europe. And they're always shocked at how cheap it is in comparison. Even people who know it's much cheaper tend to think it's like 50% , not 99-100% less. I had an emergency room visit with blood and urine testing, painkiller injection, private exam room, etc.. It took a few hours and was about $25 that you could pay at a machine on your way out.
- I was gonna day $5k is just a handout to insurance companies for just the birth of the baby.
  Which is, well, the end of Republicans giving a shit about babies and children.
- Meanwhile Id kill for those 5k bucks. But thats becausw the right to stay alive doesnt cost me a kidney

They chose to use a stock photo of a million dollars.
$5000 is only 2 and a half of those bundles of $20’s.
These people are trying to run propaganda for Trump, they can’t even keep their fascist bullshit straight.
- Is that a million? They're 20 dollar bills in packs of what looks like it might be 100, so $2000 per pack. There's about 50 of those, so $100.000 in total. Maybe I underestimated the pack size and number of packs and it's actually $400.000, but I think it's unlikely to be a million. (I still agree with the rest of your comment of course)
- but when you look through maga glasses, that's what you see when a black single mom of 2 receives a wic voucher for a couple gallons of milk.
  
  You see, its not one black mom, its the millions of moms getting subsidies!
  Lets ignore the part where we somewhy have a million moms needing subsidies.
- I worked both Brinks type security and for Chase, so the inside and outside. That's not a million. It's probably somewhere between a quarter and a half, but the picture doesn't make it super easy to tell.
  Your point is very valid however, they used a deceiving picture on purpose.
  
  Lol so even if they were $1 bills that wouldn't be an accurate pic hahaha
- Thank you! Maddening!

Free daycare and free healthcare for people under 18 are two social services that would only benefit parents. How about free college tuition moving forward?
This is just a sad attempt making an exclusive version of establishment Dem stimulus checks...
- Idk, it seems like US doesn't even have the basic shit going on, any of that is a good news.
- Additionally, government supplemented/paid for day care is the only way to pay the teachers fairly. Given places often aim for 4 students:1 teacher, you already have a hard cap of 4*monthly fees for salary for that one teacher. I pay 1.2k/ month, so a teacher can get a max of 4.8k/month if EVERYTHING went to them, which we all know it doesn't due to taxes, administrative staff, utilities, facility fees, etc.
  However, if they raise fees, they price people out of a much-needed service at a time when folks typically haven't reached their max earning potential yet.
  
  And folks wonder why parents these days are so old. Earning potential to afford daycare in the first place.

Better Idea, let's fix the economy so people can afford to have Babies.
Or fix the world so we want to have Babies.
Or lower the price of housing so we have a place to put babies.
Or open forced breeding camps, shanty towns and and slave labor...oh wait.
- Or open forced breeding camps, shanty towns and and slave labor...oh wait.
  Mmm yes, Borrasca.
- One of those are more likely than the others. It's the last one.
  And you just know the people coming out of those labour factories will all share a visibly distinct attribute - or tint, god help me for saying that - that makes them recognizable as low-caste now as it did in the 1800s.
  I hate fearing that is right around the corner. Again, fuck.
  
  I'm gonna fucking laugh if it leads to a revolution due to the slaves being the only people actively reproducing
- Look at the historic birth rate in countries where where these things aren't an issue and you'll realize that unless you walk back on women rights and access to contraception, people won't have enough babies to renew the population because they simple don't want to have enough of them to do so.

My personsl hypothesis is that when couples are living in times of prosperity or growth, they can see a future and can comfortably grow a pension, then they are likely to consider having kids. This also happens to be the time they are getting a share of the wealth society generates.
In recession and uncertain times, couples tend to hold of on getting kids, and if they do get kids, they do it much later in life, when they have saved some money.
Of course couples need free time as well. If both parents need to work full time, it's gonna be a lot less palatable to have kids.
I think the global low fertility is the problem of infinite growth self correcting.
- No matter the state of the economy, if you look at birthrate stats in various countries, it goes down with women rights and access to contraception. People just don't want kids.
- You're right, when they have the choice, which is also why the Reich Wing wants to limit abortion and contraception and LGBT+ (non-accidentally-reproductive) relationships.

WE CAN'T DO THAT, IT'S LIKE PUNISHING THE MOMS WHO ALREADY HAD CHILDREN!!!! /s
- This is literally going to be an argument if people start proposing free daycare/child care :/
  
  It's already been done to college students - that's the parallel I was trying to draw
  
  "I had to suffer so you should too!"

This has been tried elsewhere I believe. It ends up being a gift for those who can afford kids anyway, and does not incease the number of couples deciding to have children. A small gift for upper middle class.
Better wealth distribution however; that works.
- It was done in Australia quite a few years back and widely mocked. There was a bit of a bump in "XBox babies", but it was mostly from the kind of people who don't understand that a one-off cash bonus spent on a bigger TV doesn't cover the costs of raising a kid.
  That is Trump's demographic, but he's being very optimistic if he thinks these kids will be going to the polls while he's still alive.

After he rolls this out he'll start pushing to drop the child tax credit arguing, "they already get so much investment up front. They're so greedy."

We had this in Australia for a while, where there was no hospital costs for birth, and almost 20 years ago, so it was a considerable help. The conservatives started claiming people were having babies just to get the money and then spending it on big TV's and other luxuries.
- Sounds like classic Conservative projection.
- Which is hilarious because iirc it was a fucking Howard policy

Clinton Floats $5,000 Baby Bond
~ September 28, 2007
It's nice to know these two are still in touch.
- put into an index fund over the last seventeen years, that $5k is now $30k. it was not a terrible idea.
  
  Of all the people who are so strapped they could receive $5k and not immediately blow it on visa bills and rent, parents aren't even close to the list. $5k into investments? Most of them are either flirting with bankruptcy or engaging in some heavy petting in a corner booth.
  
  Not on its face, no. I think it's still a band-aid attached to a bigger problem of generational inequality. Public housing, education, and a large competitive public hiring sector would have gone much farther in rectifying poverty in the US.
  But the extra insulting aspect of "Baby Bonds" is that they're an idea dangled over a public hungry for economic reforms which never actually gets delivered. When liberals lose, they get to nag centrists and insist "We had all these good ideas but you were too racist and stupid to accept them". When they win, we get an earful about how the federal courts, the super-majority Senate, the prior administration's mid-level bureaucrats, the state legislatures, and two dozen of DC's biggest lobbying firms all have to agree to go along with it or the reforms can't pass.
  Seems like Republicans are getting in on the same act, now that kitchen table liberalism is experiencing a popular resurgence.
  
  It's really gonna help to pay for diapers in an index fund.
- Totally original idea
  https://www.npr.org/2024/08/15/nx-s1-5077776/kamala-harris-child-tax-credit-housing

Why only after the baby is born? Is there something significant about the moment of birth or something?
- Yeah, clearly an embryo/fetus is a child with rights at the moment of conception (/s), so why wait until after delivery?
- Aye. Try and convict them as an adult and then they're free labor.

Remember the stimulus checks that covered approximately 15 days' worth of rent?
- Remember? I'm still living off of mine!
  Oh wait, that was just some right wing delusional bullshit that disappeared as quickly as it materialized.

USA so shit they gotta pay people to make babies here
- clearly this is meant to be read in an Uncle Roger voice right?
  
  Thanks now I can't get it out of my head
  
  I had never heard of him until now

According to my halfassed search engine results, giving birth costs on average $18,000.
Just the cost of epidural, estimates range from $1000 to $3500 out of that cost.
- As someone who lives in a country where giving birth is free that sounds absolutely insane to me. Are these birth costs in the US at least covered by common medical insurance or is it always that bad? It's a miracle that the US birth rate is one of the highest in the western world when the conditions are like this...
  
  After my son’s birth in 2006, we owed $12,000 after insurance. That was a single night’s stay in the hospital. Nothing out of the norm for the birth. We had to refinance the house the following year to pay off his and our daughter’s birth from 2005.
  
  I think my hospital bills were around $5,000. What I didn’t anticipate was the fact that once my daughter was born I was paying hospital bills for me and for her. I think without insurance it was around 30k? So insurance covered 25,000 and we paid the rest
  
  Right? 🇨🇦
  But I have family in Sweden, and I'm not sure they don't have a baby food fund, but I definitely remember that daycare, preschool and all schooling was free of user-fees and also nearby.
  So she's been walking the kids to the schools down the road a bit for 14 years now, on her way to and from work. And it's been free. And I think they get lunch. And their schools are moderately successful and still have programmes. And they graduate kids who can add in their head and speak two languages or more.
  Guys, I think rogue American states don't want to join Canada. Join Denmark or Sweden instead!
  
  Not really, all the third world countries with no real system to pay for old age have high birthrates too.
  
  American here. I don't remember paying a dime for either of our kid's birth. Don't think we even had copays for the doctor.
- I had a kid three years ago, we decided to get a higher premium health plan that specifically had excellent natal coverage. It's one of the most expensive plans available to us but we didn't pay anything for 9 months worth of prenatal visits plus 3 days in the hospital. The coverage statement said that delivery from the hospital was something like $28,000 but the first bill we actually saw that we had to pay was for a hearing test that was only partially covered.
- Lol, you guys get ripped of.
  A whole hospital stay for a normal uncomplicated birth in Germany with Epidural is just 3600€ (that's what the hospital gets paid, and most of them are for-profit in Germany)

More ineffective Band-Aids.
The core issues never get addressed. Prices keep going up.
And those issues will get worse under a corpo like Trump.

Isn’t it like ~$310,000 to raise a kid to 17? That’s, what, 2% of what is needed after the poor child is born? And some woman is going to decide to let a guy nut in her for $5000?
- This won't even cover the medical costs to give birth
- Even Elon pays better than this

Well, in a couple of years, some countries more than 50% of the population will be retired. Even a perfect democracy would not pass a law to improve young people’s lives so they can have time and money to have kids.
Just like in a perfect democracy, no affordable housing law will be approved because 66% of the population are homeowners.
Its unsolvable.
- Only if every person votes solely in their own immediate selfish interests. A collective mindset is necessary for a functional democratic society.
  
  Correct, a "perfect democracy" requires empathy.

“White babies only please” —Cheetolini
- I know you were half joking but for everyone else here complaining that 5k ain't shit (I agree, it's not), it's because the incentive is not for you. It's for rich people (read: rich white people, since poverty disproportionately affects non-white people).
  5k might not mean shit to you in trying to raise a child but for someone who already has the means to have/raise a kid, it's actually bonus money. That's the incentive.

I sometimes joke with my kids and call them Lamborghini 1 and 2, because that's how much money it was suggested you would need for each kid, and I'm sure that has doubled or tripled by now.

Putin did the same thing, he aware 16k equivalent for having 10+ children .

Add an extra zero to that. Then we might consider

Have 4 kids.
5k is couch money when you have kids. It'll maybe take care of a few months of daycare. Now if you're on gov assistance and make next to nothing? This will be great, but don't expect to get a job or climb out of poverty with 5k. A kid will eat that up super fast.

Let them get braces.

As an atheist baby-eater, sign me up. I could have a lovely dinner party for $5K on Hallowen every year and not have to find a main course.
- That's the only way anyone would financially benefit from this bill. Infanticide. And only if they do a home birth.
  
  I don't think babies are supposed to be profitable.
  If you're already gonna have a baby anyway, the 5k is a bonus. Otherwise it won't do much for you.

I mean I like the direction, but this is far cry from other countries.
Give us UHC, improve working rights, guaranteed housing for parents, daycare.
But Its good they at least bringing it up.

Are these those welfare babies Republicans always screeeched about?

as always, trump's face is in it.
they should have plated the purse in gold to complete the package.

This is a great summary of exactly why I won't have kids. I don't want to spend all my waking hours working so a billionaire can afford a private island.

The USA should copy the Swedish maternity leave.
- USA should probably copy a lot of Swedish things, but we won't

hospital bill will likely be 10x that

instead of DEPENDING on GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS new parents should be GRATEFUL someone is WILLING to be GENEROUS and provide them with such GOODWILL. America is WINNING again under PRESIDENT TRUMP
@BigMacHole@lemm.ee am I doing it right?

Spending money on families hasn't been shown to help in any way whatsoever in increasing the birth rate. You have countries with close to free day care and generous monthly child subsidies with the same or even much lower fertility rate as countries that give just about nothing at all. I still support these kinds of policies just for the sake of helping families and their kids, but doing it for the only purpose of helping the fertility rate is futile. Honestly I don't think the government can do much at all to help the fertility rate. It's a cultural issue first and foremost. And the government can't (and I think shouldn't!) do much to change the culture of our society. You see people living in poverty with 9 kids just because they belong to a certain religious or ethnic group who values children above all else. That's the main issue. How important is children to the culture? Is it prestigious to be a dad or a mom? Is personal success measured in how you've built your family or is success measured in how much money you make?
- It's a work culture issue. People need free time to socialise meaningfully. Notice how Iceland and France are as high or higher than Colombia?
  
  Latin American countries have recently had a collapse in birth rate, even since that chart from 2017 was made. Colombia has dropped to 1,2 in 2023. Fertility rates are collapsing almost everywhere and I think it's because of how globalisation is spreading anti natalist culture around the globe. It's so drastic and so consistent in nearly every developed country.
  
  Not sure how exactly fertility rates are calculated but with countries like Japan the age of the population might play a role too.
- Ironically, comically, higher education leads to more lefty leaning politics with more peogrammes and you know it leads to reduced birth rates.
  So - and it's probably minor - the easier it is there to have and raise and educate a child, the less likely its people need as much help.

This is such a classic fascist play, get your bingo cards out ladies

The government giving people stuff they didn't earn? Sounds kind of progressive. Is that really the image pure fucking evil vile narcissistic scum really want?
- (frantically waves hands in the air) b-but WE NEED BABIES

Nobody can afford health care and they want us in the office no remote work making it even more difficult. It's almost like they want to run us all into the ground while they sit on gold toilets and enrich themselves beyond all measure of reason. Oh and they're building bunkers in New Zealand, the billionares pulling the strings so when they get us into a nuclear war you won't hear from them again.

Considering also, how much they all complained about handing out checks during the pandemic...this just makes no sense. Now they're fine handing out even bigger checks, just to replace the people they're obsessed with deporting?
- They are good with proposing a thing that sounds good to a portion of their voting base, not with following through.

We don't have a population shortage so I'm confused? The only reasoning I can see is to use as meat on some front lines somewhere he can use in his 7th term in office.
- Do people really think he'll be alive in 20 years? He'd be nearing 100.
  
  Every week I'm amazed - and other feelings - that he's still 'round.
  
  Trump probably thinks so at least, fuckers like him think they'll live forever
  
  Didn't think I needed /s for that one.

Honestly... This is kind of on the right track.
- It costs way more than $5k to birth and raise a child. This is only going to be incentive for the exceptionally poor and extremely stupid, which is likely to be the point because those people and their children are what continues to feed our exploitation model.
- I'm not sure what you mean, but if you mean giving people cash, yes I agree. It's just far too small an amount to make a difference. People have a variety of needs, and while some might benefit from daycare, others would benefit from diapers, while still others could use a decent car seat. Cash is fungible, and people can spend it how they like.
  We spend more on preventing fraud and administering social services than we would spend it we simply gave everyone money. A negative tax rate on a sliding scale would do the most good for everyone. Yes, some people would spend the money on drugs or alcohol or other addictive vices, but the effort to stop that costs more than just letting it happen. It's like we have a swat team at the Dollar Store to prevent shoplifting.
  But $5,000 is insultingly ineffective.
  
  Oh yeah, I agree it isn't enough and agree with all your points.

$5,000 will easily cover diapers, food (even if not breastfeeding), clothes, etc. for a year and more.
We can play with adding other costs, but kids can be way cheaper than paying "retail". FFS, toys, cribs, car carriers, all that shit is free, all day long. What we did pay for amounted to change, and then we sold it for change or donated it.
People have a kid, acquire all that stuff, and in a very short window suddenly have no use for it. You just about can't give it away. LOL, how many babies can wear the same one-piece until it's worn out? 10?! Our landlord's wife worked a charity for baby stuff. Gave us tons of goods, we gave it back.
- You're delusional if you think the average person spends $5,000 for the first year of their newborns life. Ask any new parent, or Google it. The average cost of a baby's first year can range from $16,905 to $28,166, depending on factors like location, income, and lifestyle. The main cost drivers are diapers, clothes, food, child care, and health insurance.
- It costs about 300k USD median to raise a kid from birth to 18. By no measure is 5k enough for a year of anything in that period.