Published August 27, 2024
Congratulations, it’s a boy! Or a girl! Or maybe twins! And already, the expenses have begun piling up—regular prenatal visits, a car seat for the trip home from the hospital, icepacks and pads for mom’s recovery, and, unless you’re one of the 27% of workers lucky enough to have paid family leave, your income is going to take a hit.
There’s nothing more pro-family than trying to soften the financial costs associated with childbirth. Both presidential campaigns have discussed potentially substantial increases to the Child Tax Credit (CTC), the main vehicle for financially supporting families at the federal level. But the tax code isn’t the only place pro-family benefits can be delivered.
If we want to help parents afford the cost of becoming parents, we should financially support them. A straightforward monetary benefit to new parents would help smooth over those periods of postpartum expenses and forgone income. The Republican ticket should embrace a $2,000-per-parent “baby bonus” as a way to aid families, expanding paid leave options, and signaling that the rhetorical energy around wanting an America that better supports parents has real substance behind it.
The Harris-Walz campaign recently proposed expanding the CTC to $6,000 in the first year of a child’s life. It is a welcome gesture, but one with a significant flaw because of the limits of doing social policy through the tax code. The CTC is a great tax provision, but it is ill-suited for immediate assistance around childbirth. Families won’t see any benefit on their taxes until the following tax season, when their new addition could be toddling around as a one-year-old. (The Harris plan would try to get around the issue by bringing back the monthly, fully refundable CTC checks that were politically contentious.)
An explicit, universal baby bonus is an opportunity for the Trump-Vance campaign to differentiate its pro-parent offerings. Under such a plan, married parents would be eligible for a $4,000 check at the time they receive their child’s new Social Security card, typically around two weeks after the baby is born. It would be considered tax-free income, to avoid pushing families into higher tax brackets.
This type of proposal would be administratively doable and highly salient in a way that other proposals for supporting families aren’t. Vice-presidential candidate and Sen. JD Vance has spoken passionately about the impact that unexpected bills related to childbirth can have on families. Thankfully, Trump signed a bill in late 2020 that curbed the practice of surprise out-of-network billing, and the Biden administration has begun implementing the provision (with the usual hiccups and blind spots). These types of steps, and others, are needed to make the health care system more friendly to the needs of new parents, rather than insurance companies.
But public policy tweaks and fixes can be tetchy, technical things. The beauty of a “baby bonus,” or a “maternity grant,” as it’s known on the Continent, is that writing checks is a delightfully straightforward task for the federal government to execute. Nearly all of the necessary administrative machinery already exists.
When a new baby is born, parents apply for a Social Security card at the hospital, which submits the information to the state’s bureau of vital statistics. That agency then forwards the information to the Social Security Administration, which assigns a number to the newborn and mails the new parents their card a week or two later, unless you have the misfortune of living in Alaska. The SSA, rather famously, is also responsible for writing checks to retirees. So adding an option for parents to receive their baby bonus via direct deposit at the same time their new baby’s number is issued shouldn’t be an especially heavy administrative lift. And it can be delivered shortly after birth, when parents most need the help.
An upfront payment to new parents doesn’t need to break the budget and can fit squarely within a conservative pro-family agenda. Because it is only tied to the immediate post-birth period, as opposed to more extensive CTC expansion efforts, concerns about decline in labor force participation should be minimal. A one-time, $2,000 payment might allow a single mom to delay going back into the labor force for a couple of weeks while her body heals and she gets used to a new normal. But it isn’t likely to be enough for her to drop out of the workforce entirely.
And the grant can be structured in such a way as to be neutral to marriage without discouraging work. Allowing each parent—rather than each household—to be eligible for $2,000 ensures that we are not penalizing cohabiting couples who may want to tie the knot when they find out a baby is on the way.
Direct assistance to new parents that recognizes the importance of work and marriage fits squarely into an authentically conservative approach to family policy. It is far less distortive than other family-related tax code shenanigans. And, if coupled with stronger protections against pregnancy discrimination, it could provide a welcome alternative to the intra-squad disagreements about how conservatives should approach the question of a federal paid leave program.
Indeed, it was a conservative government that introduced a similar plan in Australia in 2004. New parents received a universal, 3,000-Australian-dollar payment, the equivalent of $2,100 when the measure passed (the policy was abolished in 2014 as a cost-cutting effort). The Australian baby bonus was tied to a relatively modest but measurable uptick in both births and higher self-reported intention to have kids.
And Trump himself heralded the idea of a baby bonus in his own inimitable way during his 2023 campaign speech to CPAC, declaring: “We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. How does that sound?…Our country will shine, thrive, and prosper like never before.”
So far, the Trump campaign hasn’t filled in the details—but in a close-fought election year, the time is ripe. When I run the numbers on a plan like this, with married households receiving $4,000 checks and single parents receiving $2,000, the cost would end up around $11.7 billion given the number of births in 2023. If we simply project births remain flat for the next ten years (a generous assumption, sadly), this baby bonus structure would still have a smaller fiscal impact than most estimates of the “No Tax on Tips” proposal currently getting eyeballs. And a cost of $12 billion a year could easily be made deficit-neutral by scaling back Biden-era electric vehicle tax credits or overly-generous increases to Medicare benefits.
We can’t spend our way out of the problem of declining birth rates. But we can increase the salience and scope of our pro-family efforts. The message would be simple: Get married, have a baby, get a $4,000 check. It wouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of pro-family policy. But it would be understandable, straightforward, and immediately recognizable as linked to having a child. Making parents wait months on end for tax relief is a poor substitute.
At a time when new parents’ heads are spinning, a baby bonus would be a sensible, tangible benefit that can help get their new lives off to a solid start. More importantly, it would be a signal to everyone that America considers parenthood worth investing in.
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work with the Life and Family Initiative focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.
