US demographic composition population pyramid.
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Donald Trump wants Americans to start having more babies and, the New York Times reports, is mulling possible financial incentives (like $5,000 government checks for mothers upon childbirth) and "educational" initiatives (i.e. classes to help women figure out when they're ovulating so they can get pregnant more easily) to achieve the goal.
But the US government has encouraged and subsidized having kids for decades.
Child/dependent tax credits.
Tax deductions for buying homes to house the kids.
Welfare programs like WIC to help feed the kids.
Spreading the costs of "public education" around to non-parents so that parents don't have to cover those costs themselves.
If subsidizing kids got the job done, we wouldn't be seeing the birthrate decline we're seeing -- and there's no particular reason to believe that boosting the subsidies even higher will change the fact that in ever more prosperous societies, people choose to have ever fewer children.
And if that whole program that sounds like a bad fit with Trump's policy of trying to deport millions of foreign-born residents (who are seemingly more inclined to have the children he wants had), and even the native-born children of those residents, it is.
If you want a higher birth rate, throwing out the people who have kids makes zero sense.
Unless, that is, you couple the "demographic decline" panic with a "Great Replacement" theory positing that people who come to the United States and have kids are being "imported" for the express purpose of changing American politics and culture in particular and negative ways.
If you can successfully sell those claims as a pair, then you can justify both the deportations and the birth incentives.
To be fair, Trump is fairly good at selling silly ideas to gullible buyers. It's how he built his "brand" in business. His various cons didn't make him as much money as he'd have made from investing his inheritance in an S&P 500 indexed mutual fund, but they did make him more famous, and he seems to value the adoration of his marks more than he loves money.
But even Trump should have trouble putting over this double con.
"The Great Replacement" is real in the sense that people move and cultures change. But here's the evidence that this particular cycle of movement and change, in this country, is part of an intentional conspiracy to create Democratic voters, corrupt our precious bodily fluids, etc.:
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