Trump, a boomer, wants another baby boom.

Measles hits a new high, and the Senate would like a word with RFK Jr.

This is America Dissected.

I'm your host, Dr. Abba, Al-Saléi.

And I'm your co-host, Dr. Caitlin Jadalina.

And we're recording this on Tuesday, April 29th, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

Let's start with Donald Trump's newest idea to ignite a baby boom in America.

He wants to give $5,000 baby bonuses if women have children.

This is his idea to increase the U.S. birth rate, which has been dropping for some time now.

Currently, the average number of children born to each woman in the U.S. is 1.6.

And just do the math, you kind of need two babies born to each woman so that we can just

maintain the population moving forward.

That 1.6, by the way, is down from 3.7 in 1960.

Kalen, so do we think that $5,000 is enough to get people to have babies

in one of the most challenging moments in American history?

Yeah, you know, I was very curious.

This conversation was unfolding very quickly last week, and I actually wrote about it on YLE. So I did some homework. I'm like, globally, if we pay families to have children, has it, is it yield positive results? And it's actually really interesting to me that there's actually a ton of mixed results around this. So in Russia, for example, payments of $10,000 did increase fertility rates by about 20%.

However, in other places like Canada, and it was like the 1970s had similar efforts and really

no long-term increase.

I think that, so that's my like scientist hat is like there's

mixed results. And then I put like my mom hat on and I'm just like this conversation about

declining birth rates, it just feels so disconnected from reality because we, if we want people to more have more children, it's not rocket science,

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