Birth rates

The Trump administration has been tossing around the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help encourage young marrieds to have kids. Elon Musk’s Genghis Khan-like IVF efforts aside, the national birthrate is in decline, leading to bureaucratic fears of a population collapse. If this bonus were to happen, it would give fresh meaning to the term “stimulus.” But there will never be a Trumpian baby boom.   You hear all kinds of excuses for our procreative decline: rampant pornography, sex robots, institutionally encouraged gender dysphoria, microplastics in the water. But the major reason that American people aren’t having kids? They’re too expensive. The baby bonus floated this week is supposed to address that, but there’s one problem: it’s not nearly enough.

One sign of moral panic is that when the facts change, the fears remain the same. In the 1970s, the Washington Post, TIME and Newsweek stoked fears of “a new ice age.” As soon as scientists updated their models to show a trend in the other direction, “global warming” became as threatening as global cooling. And when winters stubbornly kept happening and the direst predictions of new-age prophets like Al Gore failed to come to pass, the whole thing was rebranded as “climate change.” Whatever the label, and whatever the underlying phenomenon was thought to be, the moral implication remained the same — human beings were ruining the earth and must curtail their comforts to save the planet. Bad weather used to be God’s punishment for human sinfulness.