What the Federal Government Can Do to Counteract the Baby Bust

During his first week in office, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy signed a memo instructing his subordinates to “give preference to communities with marriage and birthrates higher than the national average” and otherwise use its resources to help families with children, insofar as the law allows. The decision appears in line with Vice-President J.D. Vance’s recent statement that he wants “more babies in the United States of America.” Yet it is not entirely clear what the federal government can do to raise declining fertility rates. Timothy Carney considers the problem and makes a few concrete suggestions, among them:

Home prices are the single greatest economic contributor to the baby bust and the retreat from marriage, and so anyone who wants to reverse these trends needs to figure out how to make homes more affordable.

The obvious answer, when you consider that prices are set by supply and demand, is to help create more houses. (Twenty years ago, you may remember, the U.S. government, through Fannie Mae, was dead set on subsidizing demand. That led to the financial crisis of 2008–2009.) . . . There are plenty of ways to do this: repeal laws requiring massive parking lots for new housing, repeal zoning laws that prohibit duplexes and apartment buildings, and repeal minimum-lot-size laws.

If [newly built] buildings don’t include a mix of studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom apartments, they could trap young adults in permanent singlehood or childlessness.

What’s missing the most in the current housing market is the “starter home.” Think of a townhouse, a small 1,000-square-foot Cape Cod, or a suburban duplex. These exist, but they are aging, and the supply is shrinking because they are almost never built anymore. One root problem here is overregulation.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Fertility, U.S. Politics

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict