Why “Pro-Family” Government Programs Don’t Increase the Fertility Rate

According to the most recent data, the birth rate in the United States hit a new low in 2024. Many pundits and economists across the political spectrum have framed this as a big problem, not least of all because regime supporters want more young taxpayers to prop up social-benefit programs like Medicare and Social Security. 

Among both leftists and conservatives, it has become popular to insist that a few tweaks to economic policy will reverse the downward trend in fertility. 

Socialism Is a Political Doctrine, Not an Economic One

The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform.