More Babies!

Trump promises free IVF and more lenient abortion laws: Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has decided to stake out a decidedly middle-of-the-road position on abortion, angering the pro-life flank of his party (and also yours truly).

“I think the six-week [ban] is too short, it has to be more time,” he told a reporter yesterday, referring to Florida’s restrictive abortion policy that will be put up to voters via ballot measure come November. “Everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated for years, 52 years, I got it done. They wanted it to go back to the states. Exceptions are very important for me, for Ronald Reagan, for others that have navigated this very very interesting and difficult path.”

It looks like a transparent ploy to win over normie, moderate, swing state women specifically. Tighter abortion restrictions in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe and returned the issue to the states, have been extraordinarily unpopular, frequently failing when explicitly put up to voters.

But Trump did not stop there: “I am announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with [in vitro fertilization (IVF)] treatment,” he said to an audience in Michigan yesterday. “Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely. And for this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes so that parents who have a beautiful baby will be able…we’re pro-family, nobody’s ever said that before.”

Setting aside that last bit, that Trump is the first politician to tout a “pro-family” stance, there is truly no reason for government to pay for IVF treatments. Government meddling would drive costs up further. It’s simply not the role of government to pay for such technology, just as it’s not the role of the government to shoulder costs for labor and delivery (which, even if you have insurance, can lead to several thousands of dollars’ worth of expenses) or for vasectomies. Being allowed to deduct “major newborn expenses” from one’s taxes is also an attempt to thumb the scale, providing more benefits to parents. The child tax credit—which looks set to be expanded regardless of whether Team Red or Team Blue take office—and the fact that property taxes get forked over to public schools already provide benefits to parents.

The best way to help families is not by promising free stuff that the federal government cannot afford. The best way to help families is for government to stay out and resist the urge to further meddle. For housing, it’s zoning restrictions that have made it harder to build and have driven costs up. For childcare, it’s onerous regulations like degree requirements that have driven costs up. (“Those services have risen in relative prices and some would say they also have decreased in reliability,” writes Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution in a wonderfully clinical summation.)

If the idea is that free stuff, or tax credits, must be provided in order to get the country’s birth rate up, neither Trump nor Harris will be able to do it at anywhere near the level that would actually affect people’s decisions to have kids. (More on how hard it is to actually affect people’s behavior and which policies might work, here. Italy’s Bolzano may be the best example we have of pro-natalist policies actually working as intended, but it’s such a multivariate problem and probably isn’t something that can be well-replicated here.) Trump is transparently trying to promise free stuff to people and moving away from the pro-life stances his party has long favored, in order to attract the voters he needs to win over.

This political transformation may be smart, which would explain why his opponent has started saying stuff like this, totally detached from anything Trump has said on the trail:

If Donald Trump wins, he will not only sign an abortion ban—he also intends to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 29, 2024

Harris sits down for first major interview: She had, what, six weeks to prepare for this? You wouldn’t have guessed that from watching it.

Conducted by CNN’s Dana Bash, who was overly polite and conciliatory, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris purportedly passed the “test”—whether she could answer questions competently without the aid of a teleprompter, in an unscripted setting—in the eyes of the media.

I don’t really agree. Her answers were meandering and nonsensical at times. She attempted to cast herself as a faithful cheerleader of President Joe Biden’s policy record, while simultaneously trying to act like a vote for her is a vote for change. She failed to define what she would do on Day One, not out of some principled opposition to issuing a slurry of executive orders, but out of seeming inability to come up with a cogent, concrete answer. “Day One priority is the middle class,” reads the CNN chyron, which tells you basically everything you need to know. The interview was about pandering, not specifics, and Day One questions are not about broad themes but about specific actions a president hopes to do as soon as possible once they take office.

Running mate/Minnesota Nice guy Tim Walz mostly just nodded and smiled—the role many progressives have long hoped old white guys will play—but managed to pipe up just enough to call his lies about his military service a…grammatical issue.

A politician calling them “weapons of war, that I carried in war” is not a grammatical issue, that’s just him exaggerating his record. We can all see right through it, better to own up to the mistake and put the issue to rest as best you can. https://t.co/k41CdeYWWq

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) August 30, 2024

It was all thoroughly fine. Her answer on fracking was insufficient, emblematic of her tendency to struggle when asked about flip-flopping on major issues. She defended “Bidenomics” and blamed economic turbulence/high inflation on the hand they were dealt by the Trump administration, not any sort of profligate government spending. To her credit, Harris has steered away from fixating on the identity politics angle. “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” she affirmed to Bash.

Harris proved she could handle less than 30 minutes, unscripted, without botching any answers, but she also said nothing especially revealing or deep. Bash could have gone a lot harder on both Harris and Walz for their changing records and narratives, case in point:

Kamala Harris, this February:

“The way that the president’s demeanor in [Robert Hur's] report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and [is] clearly politically motivated….We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”…

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) August 30, 2024

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Scenes from New York: All about Janet Fash, the Rockaway lifeguard who has been working to keep people safe at the beach since 1988 (and vocal critic of the union).

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QUICK HITS

• “How Japan Ignored Climate Critics and Built a Global Natural Gas Empire,” from Bloomberg. 
• Watch Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon disagree on how Kamala Harris performed last night, clash starts around one hour in, courtesy of The Free Press.
• More stolen valor scandals, if you’re into that kind of thing.
• Police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are targeting the greatest scourge of our times: Claw machines and plush dolls.
• Should Medicaid cover Ozempic and Wegovy?

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/08/30/more-babies/