We Should Have a Mega Baby Bonus. The Institute for Family Studies, Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes say they have spent a long time on this, and it shows. The idea is a prefunded account that a current baby can eventually draw from when they have children of their own. The fund has time to grow, and not everyone will have the children that will enable them to withdraw the fund in their account.
But not everybody has babies (and certainly not everyone has the 3 babies you’d have to have to claim the full benefit value). In our vision, once people turn 50, any fund value not yet claimed due to not having had kids (or early mortality) would be yielded back into a fund, which would be continually reinvested and used to pay for the next generation of seed funding for American Birthday Accounts. By our math, it is extremely unlikely that the American Birthday Accounts raise fertility enough to make unclaimed funds too small to pay for the next round of baby bonuses, because unclaimed funds have had fifty years to accrue value.
It takes a while to pay for itself but is eventually self-sustaining.
Fun to contemplate. But like anything else, how do we sell a radical idea?
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