It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Childcare Subsidies, Birth Rates & the Family Policy Myth

Summary

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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

Episode: It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Childcare Subsidies, Birth Rates & the Family Policy Myth
Date: January 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Ryan Graduski, explores the complex relationship between state-funded childcare subsidies, declining birth rates, and the broader implications of family policy in America. Joined by special guest Tim Carney (Washington Examiner columnist and author), the discussion dissects the numbers and motivations behind the explosive growth in government childcare spending despite a shrinking child population. The conversation also navigates how these trends impact broader socio-political dynamics and questions whether state intervention is effective—or even counterproductive—in supporting family formation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Political Geography & Population Shifts (03:10–14:50)

• ICE Raids & Congressional Apportionment:
  Ryan starts with data on recent ICE raids in Minnesota, discussing the potential impact on the state's future political influence and congressional representation.

  • Notably, Minnesota retained its 8th congressional district in 2020 by only 89 people, a margin threatened by ongoing population changes due to immigration and enforcement.
  • Broader migration away from blue states (CA, MN, NY, IL, RI) toward states like TX, FL, GA, AZ is accelerating changes in political power, especially leading into the 2030 census.

• Demographic Implications:

  • California’s slight population growth is attributed exclusively to immigration, masking an ongoing decline among native-born citizens.
  • Up to eight electoral votes/congressional seats may shift from blue to red or purple states if current trends continue.

  Quote:

  “Just a few hundred people is going to be the difference of does this state get an extra congressional seat, an extra electoral college vote?”
  – Ryan Graduski (11:12)

2. Exploding Childcare Budgets Despite Fewer Children (14:50–18:21)

• The Numbers Don't Add Up:

  • New York City enrollment down by 110,000 over five years, but only two schools closed and 1,700 new staff hired (2019–2025).
  • NYC’s public school budget rose from $34B to $39B within the same period, raising per-student spending from $31K to $39K.
  • Similar trends seen in Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Minnesota (childcare programs: $51M in 2023 ➔ $300M by 2026, despite 60,000 fewer children).
  • No commensurate increase in student performance or family formation.

  Memorable Moment:

  “If the population of people it was serving was going down, it [a business] would have to change... But not government.”
  – Ryan Graduski (13:15)

3. Interview with Tim Carney: Family Policies & the Subsidy Paradox (18:22–38:21)

Effectiveness of Government Support for Families

• Findings from International and U.S. Policy Analysis:

  • Evidence suggests direct cash to parents (tax credits, baby bonuses) has a positive, albeit moderate, effect on birth rates.
  • In contrast, subsidies for child care rarely increase, and may even decrease, birth rates by maximizing attachment to the workforce rather than to family.
  • Childcare subsidies function as work subsidies rather than family formation incentives.

  Quote:

  “Money spent on subsidizing childcare does not seem to have any positive effect on birth rates. And there’s an argument that it drives it down.”
  – Tim Carney (18:46)

The True Beneficiaries of Childcare Subsidies

• Subsidies Flow to Unions and Political Machines:

  • Childcare subsidies help unionize the childcare workforce, thus boosting union coffers and, by extension, political donations to Democrats.
  • Expansion of subsidies, including to informal caregivers (like grandmothers), turns “the family into an employee of the state.”

  Quote:

  “Subsidizing them also indirectly pumps this money into the labor unions and back to the Democrats… That to me is one of the reasons that this is a major motivating factor.”
  – Tim Carney (21:08)

Social Engineering & Gender Equity Ideologies

• Government Policy Favors Dual-Income Model:

  • There’s policy emphasis on getting both parents into the workforce, justified by arguments for “gender equity.”
  • Pushback exists against any arrangement where one parent (especially a mother) stays home.

  Quote:

  “A lot of people really just think that the proper arrangement is… both of them working full time jobs and putting their kids in informal childcare…for gender equity reasons.”
  – Tim Carney (21:08)

• The “Life of Julia” Reference:

  • The Obama-era “Life of Julia” advertisement is cited as emblematic of hyper-collectivist, government-as-caregiver ideology, replacing family and community with state support.

  Quote:

  “The government was with her every moment. It was the spouse she never had.”
  – Ryan Graduski (24:03)

Why Don’t Subsidies Boost Family Formation?

• The Limits of Government Intervention:

  • Direct subsidies to parents are somewhat helpful, but increased government role in care can backfire by undermining familial autonomy and increasing fraud.
  • Policy suggestions: substantially increase the child tax credit, address housing affordability (building supply vs. subsidizing demand), and lower regulatory burdens making family expansion difficult (like car seat laws, zoning, etc.)

  Quote:

  “Our rates of marriage and family formation and our birth rates are low enough that we’re definitely suffering from too little marriage and too few babies… and suffering not just economically, but… culturally.”
  – Tim Carney (26:04)

• Physical and Regulatory Barriers:

  • Housing availability and cost, burdensome car seat regulations, and local laws that discourage larger families or make logistics more challenging are major factors.

  Lighthearted/Notable Point:

  “Car seats as contraception is a study… the Trump administration is trying to make it so that buying the regulatory cost on buying a bigger car goes down.”
  – Tim Carney (30:19)

School System as Jobs Program

• Public Education’s Resistance to Population Change:

  • Public schools refuse to downsize or close as enrollments fall, often expanding staff and maintaining facilities through political pressure from unions—a dynamic that mirrors childcare politics.
  • The focus seems to shift from serving children to maintaining government employment.

  Quote:

  “At what point does it become… a state program for government employees to sit there and run forever?”
  – Ryan Graduski (32:49) “Schools need to learn… to become smaller and learn how to be a small school, which means not employing as many adults, or they need to consolidate.”
  – Tim Carney (33:04)

4. Broader Reflections: Who Benefits from Policy? (36:00–38:21)

• Real beneficiaries of subsidies are often not the children or families, but adults working in the system, public sector unions, or associated political interests.

  Quote:

  “You see all these signs: ‘We support our government workers’ as if that’s the point of federal jobs… they’re supposed to be supporting us.”
  – Tim Carney (35:16) “When you see big money being spent on something from a state or federal government, part of what you have to ask is who’s actually benefiting from it.”
  – Tim Carney (35:16)

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Noteworthy Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On political consequences of migration:
  “A Republican can become president by just winning Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Ohio. They don’t need Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan. The whole blue wall doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
  – Ryan Graduski (12:45)

• On the effects of regulations:
  “The regulation over child seats… unless you’re buying a bus… It is very limiting around that.”
  – Ryan Graduski (29:29) “Car seats as contraception is a study that was the title of the study and JD Vance… cited that study… and it caused an uproar.”
  – Tim Carney (30:19)

• On the school system’s resistance to change:
  “They’re changing different types of regulations to make schools work because they don’t need [students]. And also at the same time they’ve hired 2,000 more workers in the school system. So employee population is growing, schools aren’t closing but student population is declining substantially.”
  – Ryan Graduski (32:08)

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment/Topic | |-----------|------------------------------------------------| | 03:10 | Political Impact of ICE Raids & Census | | 09:00 | Migration Patterns & Reapportionment | | 13:15 | School Enrollment vs. Budget Expansion | | 18:22 | Tim Carney Interview Begins | | 18:46 | Childcare Subsidies vs. Birth Rates | | 21:08 | Who Benefits from Subsidies | | 24:03 | “Life of Julia” and State as Caretaker | | 26:04 | What Would Actually Increase Birth Rates? | | 29:23 | Regulations & Barriers to Family Expansion | | 32:08 | Schools as Jobs Programs | | 35:16 | Adult-Focused Education & Childcare Systems | | 36:50 | Carney on Monopoly & Special Interest Policy | | 38:21 | Interview Wrap-up |

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Flow & Tone

• The episode is data-driven yet conversational, blending policy analysis with candid, sometimes humorous, banter—particularly during Ryan and Tim’s exchange.
• Both host and guest demonstrate skepticism toward the efficacy of increasing government involvement in shaping family outcomes, preferring policies that increase autonomy or directly address affordability.
• Tone: Wry, analytical, occasionally contrarian, aimed at challenging mainstream narratives around childcare subsidies and family policy.

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Summary

This episode combines hard numbers with policy critique to argue that ballooning state child care and education budgets do not align with shrinking student and child populations—or better outcomes for families. Instead, subsidies expand union and government employment, entrenching interests opposed to structural reform. The interplay between progressive ideals (workforce participation, gender equity) and unintended consequences (more government dependency, less family formation) forms the backdrop for a lively and revealing dialogue. The conclusion? True pro-family policy may require less bureaucracy, more direct support, and a willingness to rethink regulatory and cultural obstacles to parenthood.

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Transcript

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Licensed by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act. Conditions and restrictions may apply.

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[Ryan Graduski]

Welcome back to A Numbers Game with Ryan Graduski. Thank you guys for being here. Happy Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I hope you're all enjoying your day. If you have the day off, I have a fantastic guest coming on the show to talk about my main topic. But before we go into that, I want to briefly cover how the ICE raids in Minnesota are affecting the future of that state's political influence on the country on the presidential elections. I know it sounds confusing, but listen to me. I wrote this for my substack on the national popular newsletter if you want to read the numbers out. So a friend of mine named Tim, very smart guy, he's very into data and he commented on one of my tweets that the ice there was a, there was a story that had come out that 2400 illegal aliens have been arrested in Minneapolis and especially in the Twin City area, I guess not just Minneapolis proper and 2,400 people. And he said that's more than than Minnesota got for their last congressional redistricting. They would have lost their 8th, their 8th congressional district. And I was trying to do all the numbers and counting. If you include the 1700 arrests from January to October and this 2400, and then you kind of guess what happened between October and January. About 5,000, in my estimation, illegal aliens have been arrested out of Minnesota since the beginning of the Trump presidency. That's about 2% of all illegal aliens, if my math is correct, which is a lot for a state like that. But what's missing in the conversation and what my friend Tim pointed out, so kudos to him for this, is that there, that is enough people to deny Minnesota a congressional district in 2032, in 2020, when the census was detailing which states received how many congressional districts right when they were know they were distributing congressional districts across the country. Minnesota held onto their 8th congressional district by a mere 89 people. If there were 89 fewer people counted in Minnesota, that seat would have not been there. It would have gone to New York, which I know you're probably like, oh, you know, it's another blue state, who cares? Yes, but think of the bigger picture now of what is happening nationwide for the 2030 census, which is just four years away. I know 2030 sounds like a magical number and you know, to a MILLENNIAL like me, 1990 was only 10 years ago, but that's four years away. See, the trend for the last two decades is that American citizens have increasingly been turning away from blue states over taxed expensive housing cities that you know, for all sense of the word are being run into the ground now with easy access to cheaper homes and apartments year round. Air conditioning, lower taxes, less restrictions during COVID improving educational standards that have accelerated the last five years. They're moving to the south, they're moving to the Midwest, they're moving other parts of the country. Take California for example. More than 100,000American citizens have been leaving California every year for the last decade. The population growth that California has had is entirely linked to immigration. American population is not growing. Immigrants are growing in California, even though its population has grown for three consecutive years. It's still less though where it was than before COVID started. Right. So Since COVID since 2020, the population hasn't exceeded that number yet. It's getting very close. But if it were not for immigration, it would be in a full on decline. With Trump's crackdown of legal immigration and falling population of illegal immigrants and foreign born residents nationwide, declining California could be in very serious trouble. Last year they only grew by 19, 500 new residents. So while California has less people than they had in 2020, Texas and Florida combined have 2.4 million more people. When reapportion rolls around in 2030, that's going to matter a lot. This is not just about this immigration rate. It's not about just this year or next year. This, this is about the next decade in this country. And when it comes to individual congressional districts, that one or two extra seats to a red state from a blue state, it, it's going to come down to just a few hundred people. Just a few hundred people is going to be the difference of does this state get an extra congressional seat, an extra electoral college vote? Does this state have that one extra to decide who the President of the United States will be? California only held onto their 52nd congressional by a few thousand people. Now think of how many tens of thousands have been deported out of California. Say goodbye to that congressional district, that electoral college vote. Demographers and economists from ESRI predict now that California, New York, Minnesota, Illinois and Rhode island, all deep blue states, will lose a combined eight Electoral College votes. Eight congressional districts in 2032 states like Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Idaho and Utah will gain nine seats. The only state that voted for Trump last election to lose the seat will be Pennsylvania, they estimate by one electoral college vote. So not only does that mean waning influences for places like Mannesota and Illinois, that means that they'll have like 1 fewer to 2 fewer congressmen, 2 fewer electoral college votes. But it means blue states are losing influence. If the Brokings Institute is correct when they made their prediction that the US is set to lose another 500,000 foreign born people next year on top of the 100,000 they lost this year, that means the number becomes even harder when immigrants aren't there to make up your losses. So it could mean exacerbated losses in these blue states. What does that look like for 2032, 2036 and 2040 for those presidential years? Let's like actually hear the numbers. A Republican, if those, if that trajectory is there, even if it doesn't manifest as being larger, if they lose those eight, eight Electoral College votes, even if it doesn't lead to nine or 10, because the immigration. Let's just leave it at that eight, that eight Electoral College vote lost out of those deep blue states. That means a Republican can become president by just winning Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Ohio. They don't need Pennsylvania, they don't need Wisconsin, they don't need Michigan. The whole blue wall doesn't mean anything anymore. That is what crazy. It's going to change a lot of economic things. Our politics towards populism probably decreases quite substantially because of how much populism comes out of those states on the right. But all of those states do not matter anymore for presidential politics. It becomes entirely about the Southeast and the, and the Southwest. That's it. I mean that is the first time in the history of this country that that has happened. And big blue states like Illinois and New York and California, which could always get away with putting bad policies forward that deny, you know, the best interests of American citizens, citizens because they always knew they had more immigrants, legal and illegal, coming to fill their spots. It means they don't anymore. These ICE raids have far reaching implications into the future. It is not about today. It is about the next decade and whether that will be a decade of Republican political dominance. If President Trump continues on his trajectory today, it will mean a decade of Republican presence in the future. Now, that's not even my main topic for the show. I want to talk about the main topic. Sorry I had to get on that political tangent, but the main topic for the show is I was reading a story last week by Tim Carney in the Washington examiner paper I used to work for back in the mid 2010s and it was with all the new government programs for children. And it got me really thinking. New York City unveiled a $15 billion universal child care program. Minnesota has hundreds, hundreds of, not hundreds of millions, if not several billions in new child care programs. California has paid billions in free child care across the state, including to grandparents who stay at home and state employees. All these billions upon billions of dollars for child care, all while the population of children is shrinking, right? I started thinking about the inverse relationship with why is the money going up while the population is going down? And I've spoken on this program a number of times of shrinking fertility rates. But what I haven't thought about is the effect government is having because it's not operating like a business. A business would have to change, right? A business, if the population of people it was serving was going down, it would have to change, right? Less services or less businesses. Take New York City for example, right? Between 2024 and 2025, that school year, there were 884,000 children enrolled in the new public school system, according to the website the 74. That's down nearly 10% from 2018 to 2019, when it was 994,000, according to Empire Center, 110,000 fewer children in a five year period. Guess how many public schools closed as enrollment fell? From everything I looked up, it was a whopping 2. 2 for 110,000 fewer students and 16 merged. And since July 2019, the new Board of Education has hired more than 1700 new full time staffers to watch and be involved in a school system that has 110,000 fewer children. And while the population of students declined 10%, the budget increased by more than 10% from 34 billion to 37 billion in 2025 from 2020. But that estimates could be on the low scale. They say it could be as High as 39 billion. The cost per student taxpayer has risen from $31,000 per student in 2020 to $39,000 in 2025, an $8,000 increase per student. What are they getting out of all this extra money per student? Not better grades, not better numbers and standards, not, you know, higher rates of proficiency in math or science or reading. It's complete madness. And that's just one state. They're not alone. Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut are all just as guilty. Some states have done a very good job at reducing learning loss since COVID Places like Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, those are the exceptions and not the rule. It's more than just education, though. Minnesota's child care system program increased from 51 million in 2023 to 300 million in 2026, all while the population of children in the state declined by 60,000. How are you increasing by 500% when there's 60,000 fewer kids? Progressives have increasingly said these programs are necessary as childcare and healthcare for children are as enormously expensive. Which it is. I mean, there's no question about that. I agree. However, these programs seem less and less likely to focus on children's needs and more about servicing adults. If children's interests were the main priority, why is it then the Minneapolis teachers Union is starting to strike? If the federal government doesn't remove ICE from their city, how does it make any sense and improve education? The vast majority of children who experience sustained learning loss since the COVID lockdowns will be locked out of school again. And none of this is doing anything to reverse the demographic decline or fertility rates. None of this is promoting more people to have families and have children. When it comes to how much the state is willing to pay for children is increasing, becoming clear that the process of growing dependency on the state. It's not to create independent families or more families or manage population decline. It's to create more voters who will be loyal to big government spending. It's about growing the size of the government worker. It's about growing dependency to the state, not intact families. With me is a man who's written a lot about this. He's a very smart guy. He's the author who I read this entire article about. Tim Carney's coming up next. Stay tuned.

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Tim.

[Ryan Graduski]

Carney is a senior columnist at the Washington examiner, my old place of residency and senior fellow at aei. He's also the author of Family Unfriendly, A Critical Examination of Over Parenting and Its Consequences. Thanks for coming on, Tim.

[Tim Carney]

Sure. Thanks for having me, Ryan.

[Ryan Graduski]

Tim, I really liked your article in the Washington examiner, which is why I reached out to you about the over increasing amount of state subsidies into child care and the state increasing responsibility into child care and what that's resulting in. Some maybe not resulting too, but it's not alleviating the problem we have of less people wanting to make families.

[Tim Carney]

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean so for family and friendly I studied the different countries that did family policy, what they spend their money on and if you can detect any effect on birth rate. And it's true that a place like France, they just threw a ton of money at everything and they were for a short time, I think, driving their birth rate up. But the thing that made a difference seemed to be money directly to parents, like a larger child tax credit or a baby bonus, money spent on subsidizing childcare. And I didn't do this international comparison in my examiner piece, but I have it in the book. Money spent on subsidizing childcare does not seem to have any positive effect on birth rates. And there's an argument that it drives it down. In other words, a child care subsidy is a work subsidy. And so you drive up people's attachment to work. Work is good. There's a lot of people who need work subsidies. Right. Single men in their 20s who are slacking off and having welfare. We probably need to prod them to get a job. But to say, well, we need to make sure both parents are working, that's kind of the effect of childcare subsidies. And when the news broke about the, when the reporting was done about the Somali childcare facilities being looks like fronts or just ways to commit welfare fraud. I started looking into the labor unions role behind and that's, that's what my examiner article's about.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah. And it's, it's not, I mean Minnesota, that's where, that's where Governor Waltz kind of like said this was my line mantras. I'm going to get Involved where the government is going to have a relationship with the family and they're going to sit there and sponsor all these things. But a lot of states are this. California now pays grandmas to watch children, which doesn't seem like that much of a negative, a negative thing in it for that individual thing. But it makes the gut. The, the, the family is a, is a, is a employee of the state and it just changes the overall relationship on its own. In New York, they were doing massive expansion into K through 12 education and child care, not K through, sorry, pre, pre K education and child care. And the overall cost of per child that the states are paying are now close to. In New York City, it's $40,000 a year per kid. And the results aren't getting better. The children aren't going in there. Do you have any opinion as what is the goal, what is the goal of sitting there trying to make this into a larger state?

[Tim Carney]

I mean, I, it depends on, you know, it's the early afternoon, I haven't had anything to drink, so I'm only going to be so conspiratorial.

[Ryan Graduski]

But the, we have John on for those things. John, he's been on my guest twice.

[Tim Carney]

So, you know, so yeah, again, get me later and I'll start talking about like culture war stuff. But the easiest thing, what I address in the examiner article is these subsidies help the Democrats politically because what the subsidies do is they create actually a mechanism for child care to be unionized, including like Aunt Susie's childcare, you know, the, the empty nester who just loved raising kids. And so she opens her up, her house up and it's, it's legal but not necessarily licensed. That's a big category in childcare. And so she now is getting a state subsidy if any of those children are low income and increasingly it's, you know, middle income. Get the subsidies too for childcare. But then once she's getting that subsidy, she gets a phone call from the labor union if she's in California or Minnesota or Maryland or any of these, these blue states. And the labor union says, well, you're one of us, you should join. She kind of has the right to opt out, but sometimes it's hard to make sure they don't take any of her dues. And once all these people are roped into the union, of course some of the portion that's coming from the state, some of the portion that's coming from the parents, some of that gets kicked back to the labor unions. And of course, you know, then that gets kicked back to the Democrats, but organizing more people who, some of them are in a very informal economy, some of them are, you know, formal childcare institutions. Subsidizing them, gave the legal way to organize them, and then subsidizing them also indirectly pumps this money into the labor unions and back to the Democrats. So that to me is one of the reasons that this is a major motivating factor. A second reason I would just give is that a lot of people really just think that the proper arrangement is if you've got married parents, is both of them working full time jobs and putting their kids in informal childcare especially, and that there's sort of gender equity reasons for that. That if, if, if I say one parent, I say most parents who are married, they would rather reduce the amount of work they do. The feminist says, what you mean is a woman stay at home. And I say, so what if I do that? That's what they want. But that upsets the whole idea of, of gender equity that so many feminists operate under. So if you look at how the Obama, how the Biden administration spoke about the work life balance, and if you look at these subsidies, you see, okay, I think what they want is to subsidize work, increase the labor force and create a system where there's less difference between men and women altogether.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah. Do you remember that video that the Biden, Obama, rather the Obama administration released about the woman? It was like the life of, I don't know, Julia.

[Tim Carney]

The life of Julia.

[Ryan Graduski]

And basically the government was with her every moment. It was the spouse she never had.

[Tim Carney]

There was nobody there. There was no other human beings in that. She, at one point, Julia decides to have a baby. There was no man in there. It was like it was a virgin birth. But it was Obama Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Holy Spirit. And, but that idea of. And so this I think gets at a deeper thing, Ryan. And sometimes conservatives and libertarians have trouble when I say this, but I think we're too individualistic. And I think we, as a lot of people's view of our society is well, of the good life is well, we're American. We should be self sufficient. We shouldn't be dependent on other people. So that's sometimes kind of on the, on the, either maga right or the, or the libertarian right. And then on the left, the sort of hyper individualist feminism is, well, dependence. That's like a system of patriarchy and a system of oppression. So this is opposition to marriage, opposition to, for instance, a Woman not being totally financially independent because she stays at home part of the time with her kids. And so that Life of Julia story to me was a perfect example of how the kind of the, the collectivism.

[Ryan Graduski]

And the rugged individualism of collectivism right there. Yeah, they're really the same thing. Well, and you know. Well, you say, listen, I mean, you say this in part because you're a Gen Xer and Catholic and not a Protestant boomer, because the hyper individual thing is a very Protestant boomer. It is. I mean, that's just. That is really the apex of that. That's why you have these. And no offense to any audience members who like this, but that's why you have these 70, 75 year olds who are like, I'm not giving any money to my kids. It's all going to like whatever. My. They're not getting any inheritance. Which is like, okay, there's no legacy there to build. And I constantly bring that up. But what. Okay, if government intervention does not, and it's proven not to, so I don't disagree with you. But if government intervention does not sit there and improve overall fertility and family formation, what does?

[Tim Carney]

Well, I mean, it's a really tough question, right? Like, I wrote a book on it and I only have so many answers, which in Washington, D.C. is so unsatisfying to the audience. They're like, all right, thank you. What are the three bills we could pass? So to say there are policies that can make a difference. And I will say I think the government should do this because a society in which people are married and our parents is a happier society, especially at our lower rates. Let me put it this way. Our rates of marriage and family formation and our birth rates are low enough that we're definitely suffering from too little marriage and too little too few babies and suffering not just economically, but I think culturally. And so we do need to push it up. The problem is, you know, you talk about a subsidy to grandma staying with the kid. Grandma staying with the kid is one of the best things in the world. But once you set that up, you're asking for fraud. You're getting the government involved in these decisions, and a lot of that will backfire. So the few policies that work around the edge, one, I think it's good they raised the child tax credit a little, but it should be raised more. It didn't even bumping up to $2,200. That's still not worth as much as it was when the Tax Cuts and Jobs act made a $2,000 back before Biden inflation. Right. Number two. So I would make it about $3,000 and then make it a little bigger for younger kids. When they're younger, that's when mom is more likely to take time off of work or they have to shell out for daycare. But just give them the cash and don't, you know, keep tabs on what they spend on it. Number two, housing. I think to take a step back when millennial, and some of my best friends are millennials in Gen Z, but when they complain, you Gen Xers, we can't afford life like you did, I think most of that is wrong. I think that you look at the data. But it is true with buying a house. Buying a house today is so much more expensive than it was most of the 90s and the aughts. And especially after the financial Crisis up to 2015, it was just much easier to do it, much more affordable. So there's a bill. Tim Scott in the Senate and some Democrats are on board to try to get more housing built like we made the mistake of.

[Ryan Graduski]

I think, I think he attaches Section 8 in that bill. But it's the same bill I'm thinking of. But anyway, go ahead.

[Tim Carney]

But part of the ide here is we want to increase the supply.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah.

[Tim Carney]

To drive down the price rather than when we subsidize demand back. That caused a financial crisis, increase the supply of homes. But that is primarily not a federal thing. That's going to be about state law, about state regulations, about, about banking regulations. Then on the local level, I think, I think I have a chapter title. If you want walkability, if you want fecundity in the sheets, you need walkability in the streets. I have a theory, and this one's not proven, but it is my theory that if parents didn't have to drive their kids all over the place, that they'd have more kids. And the suburbs in most ways are the best place to raise a kid. You got a fence in backyard, you have a little more space. Not every kid needs their own bedroom. But you know, if you have three bedrooms and you can have a boys room and a girl's room, that's all more doable in the suburbs. But when mom and dad have to drive their kids everywhere, it's a huge track.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, I'll say, I'll say this about data with, with those two things. One is that I, because I've looked into this quite a bit. Apartment buildings by size prove less. You're less likely to start a family. So if you will have if you live in an apartment building with 50 or more units you're very less likely to start a family. Maybe that's supposed to attract to that. But also and I want you to just maybe think of chew on this for us. I mean another article but also the amount the regulation over over a child what's it called a child seats is reduces size too because it's all it is virtually impossible unless you're buying a bus to have a compatible car that has five that can fit five seats in it. It like with like the child's. The regulations around seating they make it so yeah you're maximum you can only have four kids. I mean some people can but that's it is very limiting around that.

[Tim Carney]

No. And car seats as contraception is a study that that was the title of the study and J.D. vance who had this amazing power of saying true things and then getting headlines. Can you believe what J.D. vance just said? He cited that study in a transportation committee hearing and it caused an uproar when he was running for vice president. But that's true and the Trump administration is trying to make it so that buying the regulatory cost on buying a bigger car goes down. So.

[Ryan Graduski]

I didn't know that.

[Tim Carney]

Yeah. And so I mean the the fuel economy standards obviously drive up the the costs of of a bigger car. SUVs get a little bit grandfathered. But a big minivan. I mean we had a minivan for years until broke while my oldest child was driving it. But now we just cram them. We sometimes cram them into an SUV but then a lot of times we just go in two different cars.

[Ryan Graduski]

Right. Well it's him and six children so I mean he snows all the levels.

[Tim Carney]

Lots of tricks here my friends drive like those airports shuttle vans. We call them Catholic assault vehicles and the and so don't make Catholic assault vehicles more expensive make it easier for people to buy and own a home and and then also some of the helicopter parenting that I think drives down birthright is a result of of local laws like in a lot of places you're not allowed to let your 13 year old babysit her little siblings. You could have a 13, 11 and.

[Ryan Graduski]

9 year old and it would be.

[Tim Carney]

Illegal for you to leave 13 year old home while you go out to dinner.

[Ryan Graduski]

And so you mentioned France before. France is the only west France did have much higher birth rates. They've started to come down but it is the only country where it did not increase the trend of over parenting. People were spending less time with their children as the years went by, not more. Which is extremely. I mean, that's very French. If anything's French, it's time with your kids as the years goes by. Yeah, I completely agree. And the most fascinating thing is in a free market, right, where like let's say New York, for example, because I just know the numbers because I did it for this intro, this podcast. New York has lost about 10% of their student population over a five year period. That is an immense loss. It has closed a total of two schools. They are changing different types of regulations to make schools work because they don't need. And also at the same time, they've hired 2,000 more workers in the school system. So school system employee population is growing. Schools are not closing, but the student population is declining substantially. And at what point does it become, I mean, this is just a state program for government employees to sit there and run forever. The free market you have to close in these schools.

[Tim Carney]

No, I mean, that's right, that schools need to learn how to become. Either each school needs to become smaller and learn how to be a small school, which means not employing as many adults, or they need to consolidate. And both of those, either one of those things could work. And different places ideally would experiment with both of them. The labor unions obviously are not going to be happy with it. But being a small school means you're going to give up some nice things about a bigger school. Like, oh, maybe, you know, I went to a small high school outside of New York in the suburbs. So we didn't have like a lot of electives. There wasn't. You couldn't take a Shakespeare class. You couldn't. There was, there was English and there was social studies. And that was part of being a small school. And it had upsides, which is that all the teachers knew the kids. Your English teacher was your basketball coach. And it was a wealthy town in Westchester. So we sort of took advantage of all the small school stuff while, you know, not getting some of the things that New Rochelle next door with three times the student size that they got. And so learning how to be a small school is part of it or consolidating. And I don't want to be making that choice for anybody. But those are going to be the choices that we face because right now, the high school graduating class, my daughter graduated last year. That's the biggest one for the foreseeable future. Across the US the number of high school seniors will be lower every year for the foreseeable future because of how the birth rate has been falling for 18 straight years.

[Ryan Graduski]

Peak year was 2007. I mean, that's. Yeah. And it's gone down every year since. Every kindergarten class. And it's not the United States alone. I mean, China's is, is immeasurably smaller, but it's affected a lot of countries. But this goes to the bigger question of the role of government in child care. Right now in Minneapolis, because of the ICE raids, the teachers union are saying, hey, guess what? We're going to strike in opposition to ice. Nothing to do with like the student population whatsoever. We saw this during COVID so often, especially when it comes to education. But I bet you as a child care and other things, so often the policies are about adults who work in those industries and not actually about children.

[Tim Carney]

That's. That's exactly right. And that has been true for decades. The COVID was just made that crystal clear to everybody that they wanted to keep those schools closed when it was very clear that children didn't get the virus as bad, they didn't spread it as easily. This had nothing to do with children. This was in fact against the children and not really in favor of the teacher's health so much as their, their bargaining power. Right. And so when you see big money being spent on something from a state or federal government, part of what you have to ask is who's actually benefiting from it. It's like the Obamacare subsidies are really subsidies for the health insurance companies. The, the subsidies for the public school salaries. A lot of them are for the teachers and sometimes the teachers. Teachers unions are dumb enough to admit it and, but on a bigger. Been abstracting away from kids. Where I live in Northern Virginia, you see all these signs. We support our government workers as if that's the point of federal jobs, is to provide jobs. No, they're supposed to be supporting us. And the Republicans do it with the military as well. Like, oh, think of all the jobs we'd lose if we shut down this military base in Oklahoma. That's not the point of the military base. That's not the point of the government jobs. And it's not the point. It shouldn't be the point of supporting either childcare or education, but that's the way special interest politics works.

[Walton Goggins]

Work.

[Tim Carney]

There will be the term concentrated benefits that the, the people who stand to benefit the most from it will be the ones who have the most control over the policies. And in these cases, it's going to be the public sector unions.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah, Tim wrote a brilliant book. It's gotta be over. Well, it's definitely over a decade ago called Obama Nomics about this. I actually still cite that book and not regular conversation, but when citing it. No, because it was, I mean it was what you. There are times where you read a book about politics and there's like a moment where something clicks so profoundly that you're like, oh wow, this is. It was like that with black rednecks and white liberals from Thomas Sowell. When you wrote in your book, you wrote about regulations over the cigarette industry and you were like, yeah, they actually advocate for it. Big, big companies do because it weeds out the smaller ones so they get to monopolize the entire pie. And that's how government create economic monopolies. One of. I mean I haven't read the book in a very long time, but it was a profound thing that I've held onto all these years. I'm like, oh, I get it now. Like, I completely understand because this one passage. So very, very good book. Along with Tim's other stuff. Tim, where can people go to read for your work and get unfollow you on social media?

[Tim Carney]

Yeah, so basically everything I write is at the Washington Examiner. I'm also a visiting fellow, as you said, at aei. So you know, I do events there and that kind of stuff. AEI.org, washingtonexaminer.com on Twitter I'm TP Carney. That's for Timothy Patrick Carney. Very, very Italian name there. And I try not to be too obnoxious on Twitter, but this story, this childcare one that took off, Elon tweeted it out and so that was nice for traffic there.

[Ryan Graduski]

That's awesome. Well, congratulations on that. Thank you so much for coming this podcast. I really appreciate it.

[Tim Carney]

Thank you.

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[Ryan Graduski]

Now it's time for Ask Me Anything. If you want to be part of the Ask Me Anything segment, email me. Ryan numbers game podcast.com that's Ryan plural numbers game podcast.com I have an empty docket. Email me. You will get your questions answered this week on the show. I look forward to them. This question comes from my buddy Joel. He's written me a number of times. Joel, I'm a big fan that you're a devout listener of this show. He mentioned that Tom Cotton's bookshelf on an episode previously he was said he was looking at the books and what they said about his politics and he actually said he mentioned he asked what books were on my bookshelf and any titles you'd recommend that really shaped your political worldview. Okay, I have a bookshelf to my back over here you could possibly see if you're watching on YouTube. There's also a whole bookshelf in front of me that you guys can see. I picked up a few of them that I actually really, really love. Some of them political, some aren't. So first one that I have is Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Recharge. It is our rack I Reich. I think forec. It is my favorite World War II book that there is. It is a fabulous, fabulous book. It is about. It is about a German nobility seeing the rise of Nazism and being horrified by it. And it details why Nazism was bad from a conservative perspective and just the loss of one's country and the beginnings of the Holocaust. It is absolutely fabulous. It is. It definitely gave me a perspective to. To a conservative, a traditional conservative. And I say traditional, I don't mean like, you know, Romney Republicanism. I mean like traditional old conservatism and love of country and familia familiarity and about. A little peek into those people who oppose Nazism from that perspective. Next book I have is Camp of Saints. Very famous book. I don't know if it's even in print anymore. It wasn't for a while, if you can get your hands on it. I talk about this book to Ann Coulter all the time. Ann thought it was hilarious. It gave me anxiety. But it's a fabulous book about immigration and migration. And this is not a political book, but one I highly recommend. It is a book called Walking Papers by Francesco Clark. It is about a man who has a. Jumps into a swimming pool, breaks his neck and becomes paralyzed from the neck down. And it is his story about trying to build a career and a life for himself, being paralyzed. It is one that I go to. I've read this book a couple of times and it's one where you're feeling like, you know, I gotta. I gotta make it. I gotta do something. I gotta build for myself. And it's a very inspiring story. Okay, last three. This is also not a political one, but you guys know I love true crime. For those who read it, the man with the Candy, the story of the Houston mass murders. One of my favorite. The Candyman Killers. Phenomenal book. Gives you heart palpitations. Makes you think. This book is not. It's a fiction book, but it is political. It is the Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. This is a book. This. I'm not. I'm telling you, Lionel Shriver, when she nails it. I don't love all her books, but when she nails it. Let me tell you, this book came out. I read it. I think it kept me up for three straight nights. I had to finish it because it is about what life in America is like when the dollar collapses. If you don't have anxiety and night sweats reading this book, I, when I met Lionel, I was like, lionel, you ruined like two weeks of my life trying to get back from where I was. And it makes me think about economic policy. It is a phenomenal book. It literally gives me immense amount of anxiety. Okay, politically oriented books. I was thinking about this because you said, what shaped your political worldview. I have a Pappy Cannon book. I have an Ann Coulter book. But I'm going to pick two more obscure books that I think about all the time. One is called what Are People For? By Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry is one of these authors, really old American authors. He wrote a short story called Making It Home, which is one of my favorite stories about World War II. It's unbelievably good. But what I love about what are people for? Is the essential question of are people meant? Is the, is the, is the human soul and the human body isn't meant to be crammed into like section 8 housing in overcrowded cities? And is it met? Is there any dignity associated with anything that we're doing? And what is the level of human dignity that should be paid to by us as people? It's a very deep concept. There's a businessman named Brunello Cucinelli who's an Italian fashion designer. He sells very expensive clothing. But he talks about this a lot with his own business. And that's something I've thought a lot about as a boss and as an employer and then as in my politics as well. And the last book is by Amy Chua. It's called Political Tribes. You can see all my little thumbnails in here. I, I think I sent it to her in an email one time. How much I really, really love this book. And it is about something that people don't know enough in this country about. It focuses on overseas populations and how a lot of times it's, it's. It's an enormously important topic that no one talks about. It talks and focuses a lot about economic dominant minorities, populations that were a minority of the population, a majority of economic output. I'm talking the Chinese in Vietnam, Indians in Ghana. Indians in Ethiopia, Jews in Germany and whites in South Africa and what happens to people and how tribal are people when feelings of resentment and jealousy take over. Something I think about very, very, very often as our politics are changing and our policies are doing stuff. It's I think it's a fun, phenomenal book. I I can't recommend it enough. Okay, that is just a few books on my shelf. I thank you for asking that question, Joel. I get to sit there and talk about books for a lot for for a while and tell you all what I and gush over really, really love So I have huge exciting news that I am breaking tomorrow and if you don't see it, please listen to the Wednesday show. It is going to be very very exciting. I will have on a special guest to talk about my breaking news, but I really hope you listen to it and you like and subscribe to this podcast. Give me a five star review. If you're feeling generous, please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, YouTube, wherever you get your podcast and I will see you guys on Wednesday.

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