“People are making really rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent and how the stakes seem higher and higher,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the Carolina Population Center.
Efforts in other countries to subsidize child-rearing and boost fertility have largely fallen flat. In Japan and Hungary, for example, policies like expanded paid family leave and monthly per-child allowances led to only modest increases in the birthrate.
But those types of policies are very different from what the Trump administration is laying out.
“If I have a baby today, I need money today, I don’t need money when my kid turns 18,” said Guzzo.
Terry Schilling, who runs conservative political ads as head of the American Principles Project, says that he sees Trump accounts as a “great starting point at shifting our economy toward the next generation.” Millennials and Gen Z, he says, are the first generations to inherit a worse country and economy than their parents. “We need to fix that, and soon, or else we will lose our country to socialism,” he said, pointing to how Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral election in part by appealing to young people’s economic anxieties.