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May 13, 2024

Do Mothers Have “Societal Support”? Does It Count if It Comes from Neighbors?

It is an annual tradition, for some reason, for folks on social media to dump all over Mother’s Day. Some on the fringe decide it’s sexist or cisnormative or something to believe only women can be mothers or that mothers are special. The abortion lobby hates the idea that womanhood is associated with motherhood. But last year, I stumbled across an anti-Mother’s…

By Timothy P. Carney

May 6, 2024

Generation Z Has Problems Compared to Past Generations, but Money Isn’t One

If you ask why these privileged college students are bringing their campuses to a halt over an issue that has almost nothing to do with their universities, the answer is likely to expand beyond Gaza into a story of a broader struggle and trauma this generation has endured. This contention, that Generation Z has grown up in a uniquely…

By Timothy P. Carney

April 23, 2024

Awkward Truth: Subsidizing Women’s Work Drives Down Birthrates

Birthrates are low and falling in the United States, and commentators and policymakers are starting to realize this is a problem. It’s tempting to assume that this is about affordability: People aren’t getting married and having children because they can’t afford it! This is partly true, and so it’s partly true that we can drive up birthrates by giving money…

By Timothy P. Carney

January 10, 2024

By the Numbers: Here’s How the New Federal Financial Aid Formula Harms Families with More Than One Child

The old federal formula for higher education financial aid is dead. The new formula creates winners and losers. Specifically, the new formula harms middle-class families with more than one child in college at a time. It’s not that the new formula doesn’t take family size into account at all—it does, barely. The issue is that the new formula calculates the total…

By Timothy Carney

January 9, 2024

Let’s Expand the Child Tax Credit a Little Bit

A bipartisan group of senators is trying to hash out a deal on extending some of the Republican tax cuts from 2017. If Congress does nothing, the child tax credit will drop down to $1,000 per child from its current level of $2,000. Some lawmakers want to expand the child tax credit massively. Others don’t. There’s a middle course that involves moderately growing…

By Timothy Carney

September 1, 2023

Paying People to Have Kids Can Only Do So Much When You’re in a Spiraling Baby Bust

“Frankly, whenever elections come up politicians tend to unveil grand measures aimed at resolving the birthrate issue,” Choi Seul-ki, a demographer in South Korea, told the Wall Street Journal. “But cash is a limited incentive in changing people’s outlook on life.” Indeed, South Korea has spent more than $210 billion in the past decade in an effort to…

By Timothy P. Carney

August 24, 2023

Baby Boom Or Bust

Salt Lake City’s lower Avenues neighborhood is a lovely change of pace after a morning walking through the central part of the city. Everything is on a more human scale up here. The streets are easier to cross, the blocks are shorter. As I study the homes and take in the neighborhood, I start to…

By Timothy P. Carney

August 3, 2023

Fight Crime, and Poverty, with Civil Society

Maryland’s new Democratic governor, Wes Moore, has to play to his party’s increasingly left-wing base, but he also knows that problem No. 1 in much of the state is rising crime. Prince George’s County, in particular, has a much higher crime rate than the national average, and crime has been rising since the COVID lockdowns, which were extraordinarily…

By Timothy P. Carney

June 22, 2023

In An Age Of Low Social Trust, Stopping By Your Neighbor’s House Is Weird And Creepy

It was presaged during the pandemic: “Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs,” the New York Times reported in April 2021. “They can keep that too-chatty neighbor at bay or help the introvert hide in plain sight.” Everyone had shouted at us in spring 2020 to stay at home. They told us that…

By Timothy P. Carney

June 22, 2023

Thanks to the Baby Bust, America Is Getting Older

When I was born in 1978, the median American was 30 years old. These days, the median American is 38.9, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday. That’s a rapid aging of the American population. Some portion of that increase is good news: Older people are living longer than they were 40 years ago. In 1980, the average American life expectancy at…

By Timothy P. Carney