The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of declining birthrates and warn conservatives not to attempt to reverse them by subsidizing families. Broad cultural trends, they say, are unlikely to be reversed by government policies. Our focus should be on removing government-created obstacles to affordable family formation.
I agree both that we should be humble about the power of policy changes to affect these trends and that we should have a strong preference for obstacle removal to subsidy expansion.
But there are three considerations that, I think, tell against their pessimism about the possibility that government policy toward families can be improved in ways that will make a difference.
First, the Journal has an unjustifiably broad definition of what counts as a subsidy. Cutting taxes on families through the child tax credit, for example, is properly understood as a step closer to governmental neutrality toward families rather than as a subsidy. Allowing people to take some of their Social Security benefits when they have children rather than when they retire is better seen as an increase in flexibility in an existing government program than as an expansion of government.
Second, the inability to reverse a trend should not be mistaken for an inability to ameliorate it. The Journal generally insists on the importance of changes at the margin. It advocates reductions in tax rates to increase incentives to work, save, and invest, even when the evidence suggests that it would make only a modest difference and not, say, bring back the economic growth rates of the 1960s. Similarly: No government policy is going to restore pre-industrial birth rates, nor would many people want to try, but that does not preclude the possibility that better policies will lead to significantly better results. Especially because:
Third, the Journal’s emphasis on cultural trends behind the falling birthrate, while based on truth, obscures an important point: Americans generally say, and have said in surveys for decades, that they would like to have larger families than they actually do. To raise the birthrate does not require changing the culture to get people to want more kids; it requires changing it, and government policies, to make it more possible for them to achieve their goals. And so the prospects for “pro-natalism” — or “anti-anti-natalism” — look to me brighter than the Journal allows.