Dear Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski,
My name is [Student]. I am a married mother to two children, with a child of my own and a stepchild from my husband. When we met 8 years ago, he worked for the state government, and I was working 3 jobs while going to school part time to get my associate degree. I was blessed to have a mother who was self-employed, eagerly willing to take on childcare for my daughter on my behalf so that I could obtain my degree while continuing to work, allowing me to support myself financially. My stepson continued to attend public daycare, which put a great financial burden on my husband and the mother of his child.
Early on in our relationship, we decided that we were not at a place to financially be responsible for an additional child, and agreed that we would not pursue trying to have another child. As the years passed, my desire for growing our family became undeniable. My husband continued to work for the state government, I graduated with my associate degree, and I was able to move on from three low-paying positions to one better paying sales position. We got married and I went on to work for a similar government agency to my husbands. At the start of our relationship, we felt we were not financially capable of conceiving and taking care of another child. Eight years later, we became homeowners, increased our household income, live in a home with enough space for a large family, and we are still unable to financially justify bringing another child into our home.
Before we were married, I was receiving SNAP benefits that aided in my ability to put food on our table so that I could use my income mainly for housing costs. My childcare costs were practically nothing. This assistance allowed me to successfully complete my associate degree, opening career opportunities for me to increase my household income. My thought was that one day I would not have to rely on government assistance once I am married, have a degree, and am making more money. Rationally, this would allow us to revisit to the conversation of expanding our family. The reality is that despite our combined income that has increased in the last eight years, we are still financially incapable of caring for another child…Which does not make any sense.
The problem in this country is that we hold emphasis on expanding families to ensure that we have enough humans in the next generations to care for the elderly, fill our jobs, and expectantly continue to boost our economic health. The most important missing piece of this expectation is how to properly support growing families long-term. Government assistance programs often hold a maximum household income that qualifies a family for continued support, almost choosing to be ignorant of the ongoing rising costs of supporting a family. The joy, excitement, and prospect of having children has evolved into the actuality that it is cost prohibitive to have children. If society is convinced that growing families are a necessity to the health of the economy, the government should have a duty to all families for continued support.
Let’s start with the basics. Giving birth is a literal necessity in producing human beings, yet in the United States, we are charged a price similar to that of a brand-new vehicle. On average, the cost of childbirth without insurance is over $18,000. Even families who are insured can be responsible for a $6,000 hospital bill after insurance coverage (my oldest sister and her husband being one of them). Compared to other countries where the cost of giving birth is much less and comprehensive maternity care is practically nothing, childbirth in the US is nearly a $68 billon dollar industry. This fact alone gives families no incentive to expand their families. According to Catherine Glenn Foster, M.A., there is a solution to the crippling cost of childbirth in America. Under a Make Birth Free in America program, we could allocate $100 billion per year to assist with the cost of childbirth, perinatal care, extended paid leave, and baby supplies (which is almost equal to the amount of aid that was sent to support Ukraine in 2022). This budget proposal is a minute portion of the federal budget, which was around $6.13 trillion in 2022, and accounts for the fact that 42% of births in the United States are financed through Medicaid. I can understand why the idea of the cost of childcare being almost entirely free in the US may intimidate taxpayers, but we must view it in a way that is cost-effective for all families, rather than for the medical industry alone. This proposal is a legitimate incentive for families who want to have more children to do so in a way that does not cripple them in more debt, and ultimately encourages the expansion of our economy.
The second issue I find in the lack of support for families is an inadequate amount of paid maternity leave. Often, women are forced to choose between leaving the workforce to care for their children, working part-time to continue financially supporting the household, or take unpaid leave to ensure the health of their babies during the most formative parts of their infancy (all options that result in less overall household income). For the well-being of children and the household income, maternity leave should be extended to a mandatory minimum of six months with a program to allow for partial paid leave, in addition to a government funded monthly allowance based on household income and expenses.
I want to begin with the importance of children bonding with their mothers and, if possible, breastfeeding for the first six months of life. To have a productive, thriving society we must do our best to ensure children are properly cared for in the most formative years of their lives. The goal in this entire letter is to encourage not only the growth of families, but their overall health and wellbeing. Studies have proven that brain development is greatest within an infant in the first two years of their life, and proper development depends heavily on the attachments and bonds a child has with their caregiver. As a society, we strive to give children the support necessary to ensure they are receiving adequate care and attention from their parents, and supporting a six-month mandatory maternity leave would allow just that. Mothers get more time to bond with their children without the threat of financial distress through a loss of income. In addition to the encouragement of proper brain development through the bonds that will be made while a mother is able to spend time with her infant for this extended period, the extended time for breastfeeding will only further benefit the child’s overall health. As well as protecting children from short and long-term diseases, breastfeeding has proven to decrease the risk of obesity, asthma, type 1 diabetes, and sudden infant death syndrome.
This program would differ from programs such as TANF or SNAP, as this would solely be supplemental income to make up for what is not covered through partial paid maternity leave to continue to cover mandatory household expenses. Dual income households are negatively affected when a new mother is forced to remove herself from the workforce to care for an infant, often decreasing the overall household income. This program would allow for households to maintain their financial stability until mothers return to work after spending an adequate amount of time with their infant to extend their breastfeeding, create bonds and establish attachments with their infant, and ensure of their health and wellbeing before returning to their careers. This support would only encourage families to have children that they can continue to financially support and remove the threat of financial instability by being forced to lose income while staying home to take care of their newborn children.
I ask that you consider my proposals that would benefit families in a society where having children is one of (if not) the most expensive endeavors that a couple inevitably must account for when considering their own financial growth goals. The fact is that we cannot continue to encourage economic growth if people cannot afford to have children. If we cannot attempt to create programs that mitigate at least some of the costs of expanding families—including giving up your career and financial comfortability to care for your own children—society will continue to justifiably decline having children, despite the so-called “dire need” for families in the United States to have more children.
Respectfully,
[Student]
Very detailed and thorough letter. A real letter to Nikki would be shorter, but if you wanted to give her a better understanding of the situation, this would be good, and as an exercise in considering the reasons to support a policy, I am glad that you were thorough and detailed.
Let me summarize your letter as I read it.
First, you were once low-income, and now you are middle income, living in a household with two incomes, but you have two children, and cannot afford a third child, although you would like to have a third child. It seems wrong, or it is wrong, that a two-income household cannot afford to have three children.
It is better for our society if we have a stable population, but many nations that have gone through demographic transition are now shrinking, and some are shrinking dramatically as fewer children are born. We avoid population shrinkage by importing young people through immigration, but that is not a popular solution. To achieve a stable population without a heavy reliance on immigration and to achieve fairness so that two-income families can afford to have children, we need policies to address the barriers to families having a third or fourth child.
Some of the barriers you face, and many families must also face, include the high cost of childbirth, the high cost of taking time off from your career to care for the infant, the high cost of early childhood care when you return to the labor force before your child is old enough for public preschool and kindergarten, and the high cost of housing that would provide space for children (although this isn’t an issue for you), and the general high cost of having children (perhaps you could mention the need to set aside a few hundred dollars each month from the time a child is born until she enters college to pay for four years of college).
You are suggesting the following policies:
1) some sort of income support for middle-income families, as they suffer a very significant loss of income if a parent takes a leave for six months to a year to stay home with an infant. Low income parents may receive Medicaid to pay for the costs of healthcare for their child, and SNAP, and WIC, and a variety of other benefits, which is good, but middle-income and non-poor families that are not excessively wealthy need help to afford the cost of new children as well. What you have suggested is a mandatory six-month leave for new parents, with some sort of stipend to make up for the lost income when the parent takes a leave from work.
2) a policy to reduce the financial burden of having children to nearly nothing (at least for a year or two). This is a request for some sort of policy that would assist with the cost of childbirth, perinatal care, extended paid leave, and baby supplies. This could be achieved by offering families a refundable tax credit for two tax years each time they have child, and setting the tax credit at some figure that is equivalent to the costs you want to cover. The policy could also be covered by programs to pay for all childbirth (instead of a tax credit, take in the tax revenue, and then give it back to people through automatic stipends given to families with young children). There could also be some sort of universal health care available to all pregnant women and their children until their youngest children reach the age of two years-old.
In terms of actually writing to your Representative, I make the following suggestions:
Construct letters in a way that present a problem, present some various solutions we are trying or that have been suggested to the problem, and then pick one or two solutions and explain why they are best. Ask the government official to support bills or introduce a bill that will do the thing that is best.
Your letter does this, somewhat. You present the unfairness of your situation, but you could help the congressperson understand this by making a moral claim clearly right at the beginning: “if a family has two adults working full-time, that ought to provide an income sufficient for them to have three or four children, and my experience shows that this is not the case, so either wages are too low or the costs of rearing children are too high. The government should therefore intervene to make the costs of rearing children lower and affordable.”
Your other claim also could be put in the same paragraph. Perhaps you could say, “Our country faces two problems because of the high costs of bearing and rearing children. In the first place, we are being unfair and breaking an assumed contract between the public and potential parents by making child bearing and child rearing so expensive that most people cannot afford to have sufficient children to replace the population and maintain a stable population. In the second place, by failing to create conditions where child bearing and child rearing are affordable, we are discouraging Americans from having children, our total fertility rate is dropping, and that threatens our society with a rapid population decrease and problems associated with that (now being faced in Japan, Italy, Eastern Europe, China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc.). The solution America has relied on (immigration) is now politically unpopular, so some other solution must be found.”
I would prefer the population of the USA to decline back down to 250 million, which was the population when I was young (because I remember that we had less urban sprawl, and smaller crowds at national parks, and generally more human scale environments in the 1970s and early 1980s when our population was about 80 million less than it is now). But I’d like our population to drop back to that lower level over the next couple centuries (very slowly), and I agree with you that for economic reasons and for reasons of fairness, we ought to implement policies that you suggest or similar policies that would aim to have the same effect.
I recall that in The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith writes something to the effect that there ought to be a natural minimum income or minimum wage for each income earner, and that would be an annual income sufficient to provide good health (shelter, food, etc.) to a worker and the worker’s spouse and at least two dependents, so that the labor force can remain stable. A stable labor force could be achieved if the Total Fertility Rate was 2.1, but I believe in the United States it is now closer to 1.8. I would be in favor of policies to raise the TFR to 2.0 or 1.9.
All societies that are facing precipitous population decline have some of the following problems. First, housing is so expensive and available affordable housing units are so small that most young people (in their 20s and 30s) cannot afford to own housing or rent housing sufficiently large to facilitate having children. Political leaders stupidly persist in thinking that housing is a commodity that should be available only according to the wealth and ability to pay for it, and thus they do not see the advantages of seeing housing as a public good that is necessary to provide for a stable population. It can be both a public good and a commodity, if only the government would get the provision of social housing (non-profit and public housing) up to a point of 15% to 30% of the entire housing stock, making it available to persons from low income / no income up to incomes near the median income. Likewise, childbearing should obviously be free, and it’s ridiculous to ask families to pay $6,000, about a month’s gross wages for households at the median household income level. Likewise, any reasonable system that was designed to encourage a stable 1.9 to 2.0 TFR would require men and women to take at least four months off for parental leave, and perhaps as much as six months, off from work. Companies and employers would be required (as a condition of being registered as corporations or licensed businesses) to require all new parents to take at least four months of paid leave within 24 months of the birth or adoption of a child, and the government would subsidize employers’ costs in providing these paid parental leaves. The mandatory leaves would be enforced by requiring companies to pay an extra tax equivalent to four months of their employee’s pay if they could not document that the employee took a four-month paid leave in the required 24-month period. Like you, I think the paid parental leave should be mandatory, but I also think it should be mandatory for each father and mother (so that the paid family leave for infant care would not result in unequal results for women and men in the workforce).
As for the additional costs of child-care and the extra costs of having young children, I like three policies to handle some of these.
First, I think every American child should have an individual development account, with the government providing some money, and then matching family contributions into the personal development account, so that children would have some wealth that they could use when they reach age 18 or 21 for things such as starting businesses, purchasing homes, paying for college, investing in safe investments, or saving to pay for health care costs, business start up costs, or educational costs at any time in their adult lives. Government matching contributions should encourage families who can afford to add money into the account to do so (maybe no tax on capital gains in the individual development account and no income tax paid on money contributed into it, and government matching contribution up to some level, perhaps $1,000 per year. The government subsidies or contributions can be made on a sliding scale, so that when a family at the poverty level contributes $120 per year, the family gets a government subsidy of $1000 contribution into the fund, and a family at double the poverty level or higher gets $1000 from the government for the first $1,000 contributed and no more.
Second, I think every household in the country should get a large (perhaps $5,000 per child) refundable tax credit for each child under the age of 4 in their household, and a substantial ($3,000 per child) refundable tax credit for every child from age 4 up to the age of 17. I would limit the tax credits to four children in a lifetime. (One can claim up to four children over one’s lifetime for the tax credit).
Third, I think we ought to have a national service opportunity that would help us guarantee that every able-bodied and sound-minded American could take a decent job paying a decent wage in the public sector if nothing in the private sector appealed to their talents and interests. The options for national service would include work in elderly care, care for persons with developmental or physical disabilities, low-income housing construction and maintenance, medical care, early childhood care, environmental work, research assistance with public and non-profit universities and government funded research projects, military service, after-school enrichment programming for children and youth, border control and immigration service, and foreign aid work. For persons engaged in the early childhood care, this would help the government provide affordable child care in areas where the free market was failing to offer sufficient options to middle-income and low-income parents.
In any case, governments all over the world that are concerned with total fertility rates below 1.5 (indicating rapid decline in population) ought to do something to encourage more young adults to have children. Stupidly persisting in supporting only market-oriented solutions (that make housing unaffordable, childcare too expensive, and costs of rearing children unaffordable) will just drive down fertility rates. Also, the increasing focus on individual career achievement and the decreasing value placed on family life, leisure, quality time with children and spouses and friends, and community engagement just feeds into the life orientation where children become a low priority and people will sacrifice family formation in order to survive or flourish in a capitalist society that puts the highest value on accumulation of good stuff and purchasing goods and services that help create a “self” worthy of presenting to the world.
