The country needs birth rates to go up. Now.
By Catholics for Catholics
Singapore is undergoing a serious problem: the country’s birth rate is in serious decline.
But its answer to fix the problem and Singapore’s plan could be something to emulate, even by the United States, some say.
When Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s Prime Minister, gave his annual address in late August, he said his government would invest large amounts of money to face a national crisis, according to a story by NPR.
“We want to make a fundamental shift in how we support families,” Wong said. “We will walk alongside parents throughout the journey of raising their children.”
Wong’s package unveiled offers the equivalent of roughly $55,000 per baby. The program starts with a $7,000 cash payment at birth and is followed by annual payments and credits that continue until the child is 16 years old. Wong said the steps are needed to counter a looming demographic crisis that he said threatens “our ability to keep Singapore going.”
“I was reading through what Singapore is doing, and it’s hard not to drool with envy,” Guzzo said. “It [offers] investments in children and family for an extended period of time, and I think that’s really important.”
“This is an existential challenge,” Gan Kim Yong, the Deputy Prime Minister told Parliament, warning that the country’s demographic crisis could soon face a point of no return. “Over time, it will be practically impossible to reverse the trend because we will have fewer and fewer women who can bear children.”
Birth rates in the U.S. are still almost twice those of Singapore, but have declined steadily since 2007. They now stand well below the “replacement rate” that researchers say is needed to maintain a stable population.
“I do think [U.S. birth rates] are likely to continue trending downward,” said Karen Guzzo, an expert on family development and demographic trends at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She noted that efforts to support family size in the U.S. have so far been much more modest than in other countries. “We’re tweaking with child tax credits and we’ve got the Trump accounts. Those things aren’t going to do much.”
But according to a story by Catholics for Catholics, the Institute for Family Studies recommends a unique proposal to fight against the worrying birth statistics: baby bonuses.
The authors write that “generous baby bonuses worth five or six figures can be paid for with less than 1% of the federal budget; in fact, they’re cheaper than recently proposed child care or parental leave expansions. Massive increases in the generosity of family policy do not have to be fiscally reckless.”
Interestingly, western states have historically had higher average birth rates while urban, eastern states have had the lowest rates. The states of Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia have had lower birth rates than the national average since the 1970s.
The only state in the country meeting replacement-rate fertility is South Dakota.
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