The Institute for Family Studies puts up a pro-natal proposal that I'd not seen before.
Most of the literature I've seen on baby bonuses suggests that the amount on offer would have to be hefty to have substantive effects. This version could harness a bit of loss aversion:
President Trump launched a small savings account seeded with $1,000 to give emerging adults a leg up in his “Trump Accounts,” passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Heritage Foundation has proposed a larger investment intended to mature upon marriage. These ideas are good starts. But the most complete proposal in this regard is a recent proposal in Finland called Vauvasampo. Adapted for the American case, this proposal is simple: every child born as a U.S. citizen in 2026 or any future year would have some amount of money, perhaps $15,000, invested in their name, which we call “American Birthday Accounts,” in honor of our 250th year of independence.
Beneficiaries could not touch these accounts until they have a child; that is, until they are the legal and custodial parent of a related child born in the United States or under U.S. jurisdiction abroad, and coresiding with that child or else deployed on U.S. government business. At the first birth (or, if preferable to avoid risks of early child abandonment, at the child’s 1st birthday, if still coresident and full custodial), they would gain access to, say, 50% of their account’s value, and the residual 50% would continue growing. At the second birth, 75% of the fund’s remaining value at that time could be claimed. At a third birth, all remaining funds can be claimed. Assuming funds are invested in something like a mutual fund, a $15,000 investment could easily lead to a married couple receiving a baby bonus worth $100,000 for a first birth, with smaller additional payments for subsequent births. Recipients could be permitted to cash out their benefit over multiple years if they preferred, and any new funds gained through subsequent births would be added to this continuing fund.
This baby bonus money could be counted as income, which means that part of its cost would be directly recouped through interactions with means tested programs and income taxes: beneficiary families at both very low and very high incomes would receive smaller after-tax-and-benefit returns. All families of any income would be eligible, but in practice the real benefits would be most generous for middle-income married families, subsidizing fertility the most for working- and middle-class families. Because only children born in the U.S. would be eligible for the investment, concerns about subsidies for children of immigrants would also be alleviated: it would be essentially a subsidy only for U.S.-born individuals to have their own children. Because married couples would be eligible for each parent’s baby bonus, the benefit would effectively double for married couples. To avoid creating subsidies for teen pregnancy, fund accessibility could be set aside until parents reach an appropriate age (perhaps 21 for a first birth, and a slightly higher age for subsequent births).
Bang-for-buck, American Birthday Accounts are the single best way to get more babies born in stable families than almost any other policy imaginable. In the long run, since many individuals will have fewer than 3 children (and many will be childless, thus leaving many funds unclaimed), those unused funds can be reinvested in the program to create a rolling national family trust fund, which would render the program zero-cost to taxpayers after the first eligible generation had completed their childbearing. Even without that reinvestment, the budgetary cost for an investment of $15,000 to $20,000 per child would be between $45 and $80 billion per year. For comparison, U.S. public schools spent just under $19,000 per year per student in 2021, so this program amounts to the public investing just one year of schooling worth of public resources into children’s future family life.
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