00:00:34.000We'll get to that exception in just a little while.
00:00:36.000All of this, because we are not producing enough humans, has led to a migration crisis because you need people to fill the jobs and pay your future taxes.
00:00:44.000And of course, it has led to national bankruptcy.
00:00:46.000We spent all of the money borrowing on a future that doesn't exist, and then we remigrated entire swaths of humans from other parts of the world.
00:00:53.000Where they don't have fertility rate problems.
00:00:55.000So how do we reverse that precise problem?
00:00:59.000Well, according to many people on both the right and the left, the answer is you'll never believe it.
00:01:06.000Never mind that government policies have exacerbated the problems of family non formation and the lack of childbearing at pretty much every step imaginable.
00:01:14.000The federal government has promoted birth control, abortion, disincentivized marriage at pretty much every turn, removed all economic benefits of being involved in social fabric building activities like church, promoted broken kinship networks, I mean, pretty much all government policies have done is to break apart the systems that cause people to actually have children.
00:01:36.000The answer to people not having babies, apparently, according to these folks, is that government needs to pay you to have more babies.
00:01:42.000Now, some of the people who are pushing this are on the right.
00:01:46.000And they are trying to walk in the path trod by Hungary, which we'll get to in a little bit.
00:01:51.000So, over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay at home spouse to collect childcare subsidies.
00:01:58.000A policy championed by Vice President JD Vance using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions.
00:02:06.000The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their kids.
00:02:12.000Apparently, they're going to use an HHS fund created in the 1990s to help low income and working class parents afford childcare so they could go to work or go to school.
00:02:22.000Under the new draft rule, parents who stay home with their kids could benefit from the program, typically providing about $9,000 per child each year.
00:02:30.000So, again, The idea would be that you're paying stay at home moms to stay at home.
00:02:35.000Now, this is very much part and parcel of stuff that JD Vance has been preaching for a long time.
00:02:39.000He said back in April 2021 on Twitter it turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more freedom in the paid labor force.
00:02:51.000Now, again, this is a plausible argument.
00:02:54.000And it turns out that according to the statistics, the plurality of mothers of young children don't actually want to work full time.
00:03:04.000According to the Institute of Family Studies poll from March 2025, about 42% of mothers of young children want to work full time, 39% want to work part time, and 19% would prefer to work not at all.
00:03:18.000Now, those numbers change pretty rapidly, by the way, when you get to unmarried moms.
00:03:22.000It turns out that unmarried moms actually do want to work full time, which is kind of interesting.
00:03:27.000They don't want to be at home, presumably, with the kids.
00:03:30.000Only 35% say they want to work part time.
00:03:31.000But when you get to married moms, then actually the vast majority would prefer to work part time, which Is my personal experience.0.53
00:03:37.000My wife, the doctor, she prefers working part time because she wants to spend a lot of time at home with the kids.
00:03:41.000We can afford to do that, which is great.
00:03:43.000Okay, so let's agree that we need more married couples having more babies in America because we very clearly do.
00:03:49.000We should then ask a couple of questions.
00:03:51.000Is the role of the government to promote this?
00:03:53.000And second, are these policies actually going to work?
00:04:09.000Is a restriction on the power of the federal government.
00:04:11.000It doesn't have to do with state government.
00:04:12.000So just to take an example, the First Amendment to the Constitution tells Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:04:18.000It says nothing about what state or local governments can do.
00:04:22.000It says here's what Congress should not be able to do because the founders very well understood their Montesquieu and they understood that there's a lot of stuff that you can do at the local community level that you shouldn't be doing at the federal level.
00:04:32.000This is why, by the way, criminal law is typically local in nature.
00:04:37.000But if you commit a murder, you will be prosecuted by the state, not by the federal government, because it's not the job of the federal government to be involved in things.
00:04:43.000Now, again, that doesn't mean that we want murder to be okay.
00:04:46.000What we're saying is that different levels of government do different things, which is important when it comes to policies like this one.
00:04:51.000So, if you in your neighborhood want to facilitate the common good by voting for subsidies to new moms, I don't see any problem with that at all.
00:04:59.000In fact, I know a lot of communities that do this sort of stuff, even on a private level.
00:05:03.000For example, in my own Jewish community, there are cities where, for example, there will be a quasi tax as part of your synagogue membership that goes to subsidize childhood education for kids.
00:05:19.000But again, local government, local community is not the same as the federal government.
00:05:23.000The federal government was designed in order to protect particular rights and prevent particular abuses.
00:05:30.000It is a government of enumerated powers and limited jurisdiction.
00:05:34.000It was never instituted for the purpose of generally promoting, quote unquote, the common good, because here is the problem the bigger the polity gets, the bigger the area and population you're governing, the less agreement there is on what the common good actually constitutes, which is why the federal government, traditionally speaking, handled things like border policy.
00:05:55.000Federal defense policy, national debt issues.
00:05:59.000Those are things the federal government was designed to do.
00:06:01.000But when it came to local stuff, you could actually have a lot more government that was a lot more intrusive on the local level.
00:06:10.000Where social fabric is high, government is more appropriate because there's broader agreement, but also government is significantly less necessary because everybody sort of agrees on the standard without the government being involved.
00:06:20.000The more you abstract up the chain, the higher the level of government, the less agreement there is.
00:06:25.000The heavier the hand of government would be necessary to promote a particular vision of the common good, the less legitimate it is because the fewer people even agree on this.
00:06:32.000Now, again, this actually comes from Catholic ideology.
00:06:36.000I mean, you got probably go back to the original Bible where you go to the Old Testament and the tribes actually have their own sort of governance systems, but the Catholic idea for this is subsidiarity, right?
00:06:45.000This is like a basic idea in Catholicism.
00:06:48.000Now, many of the people in government, ranging from Marco Rubio to JD Vance, seem to think the federal government has the generalized capacity to promote The common good.
00:06:56.000Now, the problem there is that there is no actual limiting principle here in a democracy with regard to this.
00:07:02.000Once you say that the federal government is here to promote the common good without defining the common good, you have the left promoting its version of the common good with the gigantic government gun.
00:07:11.000This is why using Rerum Navarum, the Pope's take on economics, as a guide to national politics is a very, very, very poor idea.
00:07:20.000Furthermore, many of the people pushing this policy are, as we will discuss, making a category error.
00:07:24.000They think That people are not having babies, that can be fixed by material circumstance.
00:07:30.000That if they point the government gun at you or the money hose of the government at you, this will make things better.
00:07:36.000But the problem, as religious people should know, is in fact not lack of government subsidies.
00:07:40.000It is a lack of social fabric, patriotism, and spiritual preparedness for having kids.
00:07:46.000That is the reason fewer people are having kids.
00:07:48.000In religious communities, people still having kids.
00:07:50.000Religious Catholics still having tons of kids.
00:07:59.000It will not be solved by shooting money at people from a t shirt cannon.
00:08:03.000Now, again, the best argument that is being made right now for a policy that promotes childbearing and rearing from the federal government is the argument made by Kevin Roberts over at the Heritage Foundation.
00:08:12.000Basically, the argument is that this is the best we can do, that we're not going to be able to dismantle the welfare state, so we should use the power of the ring for our own good.
00:08:25.000As Kevin Roberts tweeted out Vice President Vance's proposal to redirect existing subsidies toward married families is the kind of strategic policy conservatives should embrace.
00:08:32.000The welfare state already exists, the subsidies already exist.
00:08:35.000Conservatives do not have the votes to dismantle either.
00:08:38.000Until that changes, taxpayer dollars should reward family formation, not subsidize its decline.
00:08:48.000You may as well use the slush fund to direct it toward particular better ideas.
00:08:53.000Now, again, what's funny about this is many of the same people who are promoting a pragmatism in government here are utterly unpragmatic about how government actually works and where the votes are right now.
00:09:02.000They're also utterly unpragmatic about the fact that when you maximize the size and scope of government, Eventually, you will lose, and all the people you hate will control that government.
00:09:12.000But again, they're really doing it because they think it's a good idea.
00:09:14.000And it isn't actually a good idea because when you expand the size and scope of the federal government, again, if you think that you can wield the ring of power, usually the next thing to wield it is Gollum.
00:09:24.000Coming up, we'll get to whether this policy really even will work or not.
00:09:28.000The answer, spoiler alert, kind of no, but I'll explain why.
00:09:31.000First, I don't think you need to predict the future to understand the appeal of gold.
00:09:33.000You just have to look at what's happening right this moment.
00:10:51.000And this is true in most societies that have lots of kids kids kind of are raised by obviously the parents, but then also the extended kinship network, right?
00:10:59.000If my nieces and nephews step out of line, I'll tell them to cut it out.
00:11:02.000And the same thing is true of my kids, for their uncles and aunts, and certainly for my parents and my wife's parents, right?
00:11:08.000Both of whom live near and live by, right?
00:11:09.000We built our own kinship network that provides a social safety net on the private level.
00:11:14.000All of the government's policies have been designed to eviscerate that kinship network in favor of the government doing the job.
00:11:21.000So, for example, it used to be that grandparents typically, as they age, moved in with the kids.
00:11:27.000And the purpose of that was not just to take care of grandpa and grandma.
00:11:30.000It was also because grandpa and grandma helped take care of the grandkids.
00:11:35.000Well, Social Security basically got rid of that.
00:11:37.000So now grandma and grandma, grandpa and grandma, they have money coming from the government.
00:11:43.000And mom and dad Because they don't feel the necessity to take care of grandma and grandpa, they shuttle grandma and grandpa off to a retirement community or off to a retirement home.
00:11:52.000And so the entire kinship network breaks down.
00:11:57.000The entire welfare state was designed to alleviate the consequences of making poor life decisions.1.00
00:12:01.000So you would get pregnant out of wedlock.
00:12:03.000We're not talking, obviously, about cases of involuntarism, of rape, or something, but large scale welfare was designed to alleviate the consequences of single motherhood.
00:12:32.000But the real issue of why people are not having babies, okay, this is the real thing.
00:12:37.000In every country that is currently not having babies, there is a magic formula for not having babies.
00:12:42.000One, high use of birth control, right?
00:12:45.000Birth control is the one medical intervention that has achieved many left wing goals.
00:12:50.000Because again, the birth control pill was designed to separate off sex from childbearing.
00:12:55.000Now, again, this is not a case that no one should ever use the birth control pill or that people should never be on birth control or anything like that.
00:13:02.000That is, in my opinion, your business.
00:13:07.000I'm not somebody who is anti birth control, even on a total religious level.
00:13:11.000There's some controversy in Orthodox Judaism about various types of birth control and all that.
00:13:15.000As a societal matter, and this is true for lots of things in society that are useful on an individual level, but when applied at scale, have some pretty interesting downstream effects.
00:13:25.000The birth control pill, which separated off sex from childbearing, which means sex and marriage were no longer connected.
00:13:43.000Because you go back to the 1940s, for example, when people were having lots of seven month babies, people would have sex, they'd get pregnant, and there were a lot of preemies happening.
00:14:11.000So, as societies get richer, kids move from becoming an asset class to becoming an economic detriment.
00:14:17.000So, if you go to very poor countries, and again, this is good, right?
00:14:20.000You don't want kids to have to work at the factory.
00:14:22.000But if you are living in a poor society, or let's say America 150 years ago, you're living on a farm, your kids come home and they work, right?
00:15:59.000People don't have kids because they don't have to have kids.
00:16:01.000In fact, they're not even getting married today.
00:16:04.000Now, statistically, what we actually have here in the United States and across the West is not even a childbearing crisis, it is a marriage crisis.
00:16:12.000One of the fascinating things that's happening here is that people are getting married later.
00:16:16.000But as we'll explore in just a second, married couples are still having kids.
00:16:21.000It's just that fewer people are getting married, generally speaking.
00:16:26.000The National Bureau of Economic Research did a study a few years back, a couple of years ago, and they found that across high income countries and increasingly elsewhere, birth rates have fallen to historically low levels.
00:16:37.000Total fertility rates are now below replacement rate in nearly all OECD countries, with many experiencing sustained fertility rates below 1.5, including Japan, Canada, Greece, and Italy.
00:16:46.000Some countries in East Asia, including South Korea, Singapore, and China, now have a total fertility rate at below one, right?
00:16:53.000Which means their population is going to have.
00:17:08.000There are a lot of reasons for that, which we'll get into in just a second.
00:17:14.000Now, again, they say the National Bureau of Economic Research the broad based decline in fertility across the industrialized world, reflected in both higher childlessness and lower completed fertility, is less a response to period specific costs or policies.
00:17:27.000And a widespread deprioritization of parenthood in people's adult lives.
00:17:31.000This deprioritization reflects a complex interplay of changing norms around work, parenting, gender roles, and leisure, shaped by evolving social and economic influences and an expanded set of non child activities and consumption.
00:17:42.000In other words, people aren't having fewer kids because they can't afford it, they're having fewer kids because they don't want as many kids.
00:17:48.000They say we refer to the set of dynamics as shifting priorities.
00:17:51.000It does not reflect a simple change in preferences or a direct response to prices or constraints, but rather a deeper transformation in how successive cohorts are choosing to orient their lives.
00:18:00.000And again, Look at the radical decline from the 60s to now in terms of total fertility rate.
00:18:06.000And again, the United States is not an outlier here.
00:18:08.000We're actually slightly higher than a lot of these other countries like Canada, Norway, Portugal, Japan.
00:18:14.000And now, again, the West has trashed all of the factors that have led historically to high fertility rates.
00:18:22.000So, as you can see, when you look at US fertility rates starting in 1800 to 2025, right, what you can see here is that total fertility rate.
00:18:34.000Is in sort of steady decline up until you hit, you know, about 1925.
00:18:40.000It boosts again into 1950, and then it totally dumps after the birth control pill.
00:18:50.000One of the kind of, as societies become richer, then you have fewer kids.
00:18:55.000This is just a normal thing that happens.
00:18:58.000The reversal that happens because of the birth control pill is pretty obvious on this chart, right?
00:19:02.000You hit 1960, birth control pill hits.
00:19:04.000And you start to see a radical decline, and then it basically sticks around at just below two for a while.
00:19:10.000The bigger issue right now in the United States and across the West is that the percentage of women never getting married is rising rapidly.
00:19:20.000And in fact, married women, there was a decline in the number of pregnancies completed for married women, but it's been basically stagnant in the United States since the 1980s.
00:19:30.000So married women are still having babies.
00:19:32.000It's just that fewer women are getting married.
00:19:34.000According to the Institute for Family Studies, Both marital and non marital first birth rates have declined on the whole.
00:19:41.000Marital first birth rates remain very similar to where they were at any point between the 70s and today.
00:19:46.000A whopping 75% of the total fertility decline since 2007 is attributable to the shifting likelihood that people are married.
00:19:53.000When Americans today get married, they have babies just like married people at their ages did in the past.
00:19:57.000Explanations for falling fertility that place the blame on couples choosing not to have kids probably can't explain much about declining fertility since changes within couple behavior are not the main story.
00:20:06.000So, in other words, much of the policy that is currently being developed, right?
00:20:10.000The policy that says you're a married couple, we want you to be able to stay home with your kids.
00:21:36.000Again, I have been thinking ahead about my family for years, but you should do the same because there's only one inevitability in life, and that is that, again, your family is going to need help.
00:21:45.000If something happens to you, go check them out right now.
00:21:53.000So, over the weekend, a big story is that over in Britain, St. Paul's Cathedral signed a four year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside St. Paul's Cathedral.
00:22:07.000Under the partnership, Fabric will be the cathedral's exclusive partner for such events until 2030.
00:22:13.000Silent discos held at Canterbury Cathedral in 2024 were dubbed a rave in the nave by critics.
00:22:20.000Its organizer said at the time such events would not bring young people closer to Christ and would instead suggest entertainment deserves our attention more than God.
00:22:27.000Fabric in Farringdon had its license revoked in 2016 after Islington Council found what it described as a culture of drug use at the venue.
00:22:35.000Two 18 year olds had died of drug overdoses and now they're playing gigs at St. Paul's Cathedral.
00:22:41.000Naturally, Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London is super happy about this quote.
00:22:45.000Fabric, St. Paul's Cathedral, name a more iconic duo.
00:22:50.000Bringing together these two institutions will create a one of a kind experience, pairing world class music with one of our most special landmarks.
00:23:03.000Bishop Robert Barron, frequent guest on our program, he says, Word has just come down that St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the second most important church in the Anglican world, has imitated Canterbury Cathedral in permitting raves, nightclub like entertainments to take place in its confines.
00:23:15.000The usual reasons for acquiescing to this have been trotted out, reaching out to the young, trying to get with the times, etc.
00:23:20.000But this development simply shows that the leadership of the Church of England has lost any sense of the crucial distinction between the sacred and the secular.
00:23:27.000Across the centuries and across the cultures, our ancestors seem to have intuitively grasped the importance of this demarcation.
00:23:33.000Whereas the secular is the arena of ordinary experience and activity, The sacred is another realm, a different dimension.
00:23:38.000Accordingly, in the properly sacred space, one is lifted out of the conventional and introduced into the numinous.
00:23:43.000This is why Christian cathedrals are filled with images of the saints and angels, and why their interiors are meant to first disorient us and then to reorient us toward the divine.
00:23:50.000It is also why, in the initiation rituals of primal peoples, a young person is purposely ripped out of the ordinary and introduced into the mythic and mystic dimension.
00:23:57.000And it is why, throughout the Bible, sacred spaces are carefully set apart from common spaces.
00:24:03.000He says the contemporary West is quite literally the first culture in human history that is in danger of collapsing the sacred into the secular, or better, losing any sense of the difference between the two.
00:24:12.000Now, again, I think that's actually being kind of flattering to the secular.
00:24:15.000I think what you actually have is a merger of the pagan and the religious, which has happened over human history and doesn't end well.
00:24:20.000He said this is doing enormous damage, especially to young people whose lives have been flattened into a preoccupation with money, worldly success, and material things.
00:24:27.000I mean, honestly, I actually don't think that's why people are going to raves.
00:24:30.000I think they're going there for the sex and the drugs.
00:24:32.000The church, indeed, should go out into the secular space to find those who have wandered away from God, but it should then lead those wanderers back to the holy.
00:24:38.000Having raves in the nave, one of the most sacred spaces in the Christian world, is, I'm sad to say, another sign of our pitiful surrender to ideological secularism.
00:24:46.000I mean, that last part is certainly true.
00:24:47.000Douglas Murray made a point, and he said, London Central Mosque is also an iconic venue.
00:24:58.000Now, again, once your society has fewer kids, for all the reasons mentioned above, ranging from religious decline to economic reasons to birth control, delayed marriage, once your society has fewer kids, you get a social death spiral.
00:25:13.000Having lots of kids, or almost no kids, is a social thing.
00:25:20.000On planet Earth, with higher than replacement fertility rates, like significantly higher than replacement fertility rates, and those rates are going up, not down.
00:25:28.000There are a bunch of reasons for that.
00:25:31.000One, the country is basically built around kids, extended kinship networks, family, friends.
00:25:36.000The social fabric favors large families.
00:25:38.000The isolation that you see in the rest of the West does not.
00:25:40.000So if you ever walk around in Jerusalem, you will see kids just getting on buses at the age of five and just riding around because the bus driver will take care of them.
00:25:58.000Like, there are certain fancy restaurants where obviously it's not a thing, but the spaces in Israel are filled with kids and everybody gets it and nobody is upset about it.
00:26:07.000And again, a large part of that is sort of religious principle.
00:26:11.000One religious principle in Judaism is that, for example, even if your religious observance, particularly you have to hear something, right?
00:26:19.000So, quick word on the last Bible portion.
00:26:25.000So, the last Bible portion that we just read from the book of Deuteronomy talks about the idea that once every seven years, the leader of the Jewish people has to get up and do something called Hechel, which is you read out the entire Torah.
00:26:37.000And they still do this, by the way, in Israel once every seven years.
00:26:39.000The president of the country, Bouji Herzog, Isaac Herzog, will get up and do this.
00:26:43.000And one of the commandments in the Torah is that everyone has to attend women, children, men.
00:26:48.000And so the question is well, if the kids come, aren't people going to be distracted?
00:26:51.000And the answer is that you want the kids to be present because the kids have to learn the ways.
00:26:55.000Even if people are slightly distracted from the actual thing that's happening.
00:27:01.000So, again, a culture built around kids is a real thing.
00:27:04.000And that's not unique to Judaism, right?
00:27:06.000Their culture is built around kids in the United States.
00:27:07.000If you go to deeply Catholic communities, lots of kids running around, deeply Protestant communities, lots of kids running around.
00:27:12.000Okay, Israel is in fact built on religious principles.
00:27:16.000It is not a state that is ruled by Jewish law.
00:27:20.000But even the secular, very secular in Tel Aviv, where the politics are similar to San Francisco, has a relative who is religious.
00:27:26.000Secular people in Israel still very often light candles on Friday night, even if they then go on to do things that violate the laws of Sabbath.
00:27:35.000When Yom Kippur happens, Tel Aviv shuts down.
00:27:44.000Like secular people in Israel are very often more religious than the reformed Jews in the United States by a fair margin.
00:27:51.000Not only that, there's a civic nationalism that applies in Israel because Israel is under continuous fire, obviously.
00:27:56.000And that means that every single Israeli has a national commitment to the future of the state and to the Jewish people, which is why a line that you'll very often hear in Israel and in the Jewish community more broadly, but mostly in Israel, is the best revenge against Hitler is to have lots of kids.
00:28:10.000The thing that you'll hear people say.
00:28:13.000Okay, so again, all the elements of having lots of kids are there and could be there for Americans, right?
00:29:03.000Back to the policy that's being proposed.
00:29:05.000When we say that we're going to pay people to stay at home with the kids, and now maybe they'll have more kids, we are trying to solve a problem with a tool it is not designed to do.
00:29:14.000We're trying to fix a broken light bulb with a fly swatter.
00:29:18.000So, Hungary, beloved of sort of the NatCon right, and a lot of people in the nationalist conservative movement, very fond of Hungary because they love government promoted, quote unquote, common good.
00:29:29.000Hungary tried this and it totally didn't work.
00:29:31.000As the American Enterprise Institute reported back in November of 2025, Hungary spends around 5% of GDP on family subsidies.
00:29:40.000The OECD ranks Hungary among the top five OECD countries overall in public spending on family benefits.
00:29:44.000Viktor Orban said in 2017, the country's objective was to raise the total fertility rate.
00:29:49.000To replacement level, which is 2.1 by 2030.
00:29:52.000Fertility instead has been trending down.
00:29:55.000Hungary is further from meeting its 2030 fertility objective.
00:29:57.000They go way further than anything being promoted by JD Vance and the rest of the federal government under President Trump right now.
00:30:04.000So here we're talking about like $9,000 subsidies to stay home, which frankly is not that much money.
00:30:09.000Orban's government in Hungary introduced lifetime personal income tax exemptions for women with four more kids.
00:30:16.000If you had four more kids, no taxes, none.
00:30:19.000And then later they expanded that to include moms with three.
00:30:38.000They ended up with the same number of kids total, but they accelerated the baby making.
00:30:43.000That strategy, by the way, from the government also included zero interest baby expecting loans forgiven after the birth of three kids, huge housing subsidies, and a car purchase grant for big families.
00:30:53.000So, the fertility rate saw a rise from 1.25 in 2010 to a peak of about 1.6 in 2020, 2021, which is large, right?
00:31:02.000But then it turns out that everybody who's going to have the babies, they hit the two and they didn't want to have three, or they hit the three and they didn't want to have four.
00:32:06.000Well, to take the other side of this debate, because We do disagree a fair bit here at Daily Wire.
00:32:11.000Actually, this is the second time in like three shows that we've taken opposite sides of the same question.
00:32:16.000Is Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show?
00:32:18.000So, Michael, we've been discussing the proposed family policy put forward by the Trump administration with regard to subsidies for moms to stay at home with their kids.
00:32:28.000The best argument that I heard was Kevin Roberts' argument at Heritage that basically we're not getting rid of all these welfare programs, so we may as well use the money for a better cause.
00:32:37.000The overall argument, I sort of have two problems with, and I want to get your take on it.
00:32:41.000One is, That if you're going to pursue family policies like this, this should not be done by the federal government on an ideological level.
00:32:46.000It should be done by state and local governments if you're going to do it at all, because subsidiarity suggests you're going to get a better policy and better agreement on what the policy ought to be at the local level.
00:32:55.000And then, question number two is more of an efficacy one.
00:32:58.000Hungary tried this and it just didn't work because what you're trying to do is use material circumstance as a substitute for the real problem, which is spiritual and social fabric lack, and that can't be filled in by government.
00:33:11.000The Hungary one is a really good point because.
00:33:14.000Hungary did have this concerted effort on family policy broadly.
00:33:18.000And we should make a distinction between family policy broadly and what the Trump administration is proposing here, because I think it's being misrepresented and it's much narrower than the broader debate, but I'm interested in the broader debate.
00:33:29.000When it comes to Hungary, yes, the Hungary policy failed to increase birth rates to replacement levels, and it failed spectacularly at that.
00:33:38.000However, we should remember there were some wins to the Hungarian family policy.
00:33:42.000It did increase, in the short run, the fertility rate by about 30%.
00:33:57.000I agree, though, that yes, trying to get people to have kids just by giving them money is ultimately not going to work.
00:34:04.000The greatest predictor of increasing the fertility rate is religiosity.
00:34:08.000It's not just money, but money plays a little bit of a role, too.
00:34:10.000So then, okay, then we get to this specific aspect of family policy.
00:34:14.000And I think in many ways conservatives are talking past each other here because I agree with many of the arguments that are being made against the policy that Trump is not doing.
00:34:26.000In other words, I agree with many of the arguments against creating a new welfare program or expanding the spending on this welfare program or this, that, or the.
00:34:34.000Yeah, I agree with a lot of those arguments.
00:34:37.000According to reporting from the New York Times, so take it with a grain of salt, there is a welfare program, which is the Child Care and Development Fund, which has existed for 30 years.
00:34:48.000And the fund says that if you're a single mother, a single parent, but The vast majority of the money is going to single mothers.
00:34:53.000If you're a single mother below a certain income threshold, you can get the money and you can pay it to a daycare and then you can go work in the widget factory.
00:35:01.000The Trump administration comes in and says, you know what?
00:35:04.000Uh, we should actually open up the pool of eligibility here and say that, uh, if you are a stay at home mother, if you want to care for your own kid rather than just sending this government cheese to the daycare center so you can work for Dr. McGillicuddy, if you want to care for your own kid, you can be eligible for that money as well.
00:35:20.000So in other words, it takes the pre-existing program, already has mandatory spending, doesn't add a penny, and just says, Rather than only incentivizing single parenthood, we're also going to incentivize people to be able to stay at home and give the care to their kids they deserve.
00:35:34.000This, to me, seems exactly the same as the argument for school choice, which was a little bit controversial on the right.
00:35:40.000Even some of my fellow Tennessee Republicans, they were kind of opposed to it because they supported the public schools.
00:35:45.000But generally, this is a very popular policy.
00:35:48.000It says we're going to get direct payments from the government to help you raise your kids in the way that you see fit.
00:35:53.000Yes, it's unsatisfying because we're not abolishing the welfare state.
00:35:56.000Yes, it's unsatisfying because we're not, we don't have a perfect subsidiarity here where the decisions are being made at the most competent local levels.
00:36:05.000But all in all, I really don't get much of the opposition to this policy.
00:36:10.000I get an opposition to a broader ideology, but I don't get an opposition to this policy.
00:36:16.000No, I mean, I tend to, I mean, we're supposed to disagree, but I'm tending to agree with you.
00:36:20.000The policy itself, as I say, is not wildly objectionable as it currently stands.
00:36:25.000I'm afraid that it does open the door to a bunch of waste and fraud and abuse because it's a government program and people will find ways to stay home, take the money, go work on the side anyway, and then just, you know, take the difference because that's what people do when government grab bags of cash are made.
00:36:38.000But yeah, it's the broader debate that I find kind of interesting and the one that you and I have been having continuously for years at this point, which is sort of what is the goal of government in promoting, quote unquote, the common good?
00:36:48.000Because some of the language that's being used to defend this policy, to me, never had any limiting principle.
00:36:53.000And it is very difficult for me to see how that doesn't end up kind of coming back around and biting conservatives in very sensitive spots.
00:37:01.000And also, again, when you examine the evidence, you and I, I think, agree on the main things that actually drive people to have kids.
00:37:06.000What Hungary actually showed is that if you subsidize certain things, You get a speed up.
00:37:11.000So, if people wanted to have three kids and they were thinking they were going to do it in four years, instead, they basically were like, you know, I'm going to sneak it under the wire and get free of income tax.
00:37:18.000So, they didn't end up generally increasing fertility rate.
00:37:21.000They ended up accelerating fertility rate temporarily, and then it went back down.
00:37:25.000The real crisis in the West actually is not how many kids people are having within marriage.
00:37:29.000It's been basically stable since the 70s.
00:37:31.000It's that no one in the West is even getting married.
00:37:34.000And that is a function of the birth control pill, that is a function of a society that teaches people that marriage is not worthwhile, it's a function of lack of religiosity in society.
00:37:42.000And it is also a function of lack of civic nationalism.
00:37:45.000And the reason that I cite all of these things is because there is only one country, and I wish it weren't this country because it always gets awkward when I say this, but there's only one country that is developed that has fertility rates that are above replacement, and it's Israel by leaps and bounds.
00:37:57.000Israel has a fertility rate that is at like three.
00:38:00.000And that's true not just in the very religious areas where if you're in the so called settlements, those settlements, the people there are having, I believe, on average six kids.
00:38:09.000If you go to the ultra Orthodox areas, people are having on average eight kids.
00:38:12.000But if you go to Tel Aviv, and Tel Aviv has the politics of San Francisco, people on average have three kids.
00:38:18.000And the reason for that is because there is an extraordinary level of civic nationalism in Israel where people are saying, listen, our country just does not survive if we don't have kids.
00:38:27.000One of the phrases that's frequently used in Israel is the best revenge against Hitler is have kids.
00:38:31.000He wanted to wipe out the Jews, so we're going to just make more Jews.
00:38:36.000There's also, because of that, a very child centric society.
00:38:39.000If you ever go to Israel, then what you see is that there are kids kind of running around everywhere, and kids are given enormous levels of responsibility you would never see in America.
00:38:49.000If you have a seven year old kid, your kid is taking the bus by himself from the time he's like six, seven years old because the bus driver will protect the kid.
00:38:59.000That stuff could happen in America, but it requires a renewed sense of religiosity and civic nationalism, both of which are in abstract.
00:39:05.000And I think it's deeper even than civic nationalism.
00:39:07.000I mean, obviously in the United States, civic nationalism is kind of our go to because we're a historically strange country that is now extremely multi ethnic and multi religious and all the rest.
00:39:17.000But with Israel, you know, many 20th century liberals will say America is just an idea.
00:40:11.000Uh, you know, so we could use a lot more of that in the United States.
00:40:14.000I think that's actually a very good model.
00:40:16.000And so it gets down to, okay, what's the government supposed to do?
00:40:20.000Uh, you know, the, the government for most of American history, uh, we don't have a church establishment.
00:40:25.000We don't have a confessional state, certainly, but the government did promote religion all the time.
00:40:29.000You know, we had blue laws, stores closed on Sunday, prayer in schools, Bible in schools.
00:40:34.000Uh, Yoram Hazoni, a great Israeli philosopher points out, you, you can't have education without, uh, So, you could put all of those things back in.
00:40:45.000That would help increase the fertility rate.
00:40:47.000In terms of marriage, yeah, we've, because of liberalism, we've just totally weakened marriage.
00:40:53.000Don't forget, the state of New York didn't fully liberalize divorce until like 15 years ago.
00:40:58.000You know, this was a relatively new event coming out of the 60s and 70s, along with the supposed constitutional right to abortion and contraception and all the rest of it.
00:41:06.000Whatever you think about the individual issues, all of this leads into this problem.
00:41:10.000So, so then my response, getting back to the original question on this policy debate, but even tying it into the bigger issue.
00:41:18.000I think you got some people who come out and they say, I don't want this policy reform, even if it doesn't expand the welfare state, even if it doesn't make a new program, even if it doesn't add a penny of spending, because it would be better to abolish the welfare system.
00:41:31.000It would be better to just cut taxes and send the money.
00:42:36.000And this may turn out to be a sort of politically pragmatic argument because, again, the question is going to be whether you are now entering into a sweepstakes in which you will always be outbid because no matter how many benefits you give, the other side will always give more benefits.
00:42:48.000And to people, With fewer restrictions, or whether, as you say, you basically have to cede some ground in order to achieve victory.
00:42:55.000And that really is sort of one of the big questions.
00:42:56.000Well, Michael, really appreciate the time.
00:42:58.000We didn't argue as much as I thought we were going to, unfortunately, but there'll be plenty of time for that so long as you remain employed.
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