More Babies!
Trump promises free IVF and more lenient abortion laws: Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has decided to stake out a decidedly middle-of-the-road position on abortion, angering the pro-life flank of his party (and also yours truly).
“I think the six-week [ban] is too short, it has to be more time,” he told a reporter yesterday, referring to Florida’s restrictive abortion policy that will be put up to voters via ballot measure come November. “Everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated for years, 52 years, I got it done. They wanted it to go back to the states. Exceptions are very important for me, for Ronald Reagan, for others that have navigated this very very interesting and difficult path.”
It looks like a transparent ploy to win over normie, moderate, swing state women specifically. Tighter abortion restrictions in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe and returned the issue to the states, have been extraordinarily unpopular, frequently failing when explicitly put up to voters.
But Trump did not stop there: “I am announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with [in vitro fertilization (IVF)] treatment,” he said to an audience in Michigan yesterday. “Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely. And for this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes so that parents who have a beautiful baby will be able…we’re pro-family, nobody’s ever said that before.”
Setting aside that last bit, that Trump is the first politician to tout a “pro-family” stance, there is truly no reason for government to pay for IVF treatments. Government meddling would drive costs up further. It’s simply not the role of government to pay for such technology, just as it’s not the role of the government to shoulder costs for labor and delivery (which, even if you have insurance, can lead to several thousands of dollars’ worth of expenses) or for vasectomies. Being allowed to deduct “major newborn expenses” from one’s taxes is also an attempt to thumb the scale, providing more benefits to parents. The child tax credit—which looks set to be expanded regardless of whether Team Red or Team Blue take office—and the fact that property taxes get forked over to public schools already provide benefits to parents.
The best way to help families is not by promising free stuff that the federal government cannot afford. The best way to help families is for government to stay out and resist the urge to further meddle. For housing, it’s zoning restrictions that have made it harder to build and have driven costs up. For childcare, it’s onerous regulations like degree requirements that have driven costs up. (“Those services have risen in relative prices and some would say they also have decreased in reliability,” writes Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution in a wonderfully clinical summation.)
If the idea is that free stuff, or tax credits, must be provided in order to get the country’s birth rate up, neither Trump nor Harris will be able to do it at anywhere near the level that would actually affect people’s decisions to have kids. (More on how hard it is to actually affect people’s behavior and which policies might work, here. Italy’s Bolzano may be the best exampl
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