In a move to counter falling population without allowing migration, Victor Orban promises Hungarian mothers Have Four Children and Pay No Income Tax for life.
“There are fewer and fewer children born in Europe,” Mr Orban said during his annual State of the Nation address. “For the west, the answer is immigration. But we do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children.”
Orban did not say how he would pay for the scheme. Of course, no one ever says how they will pay for any scheme.
Poland and Serbia have similar proposals on the books.
Have-a-Kid
- Poland gives 500 zlotys a month, about a third of the minimum wage, to mothers for their second and subsequent children. That about $130 per month.
- Serbia gives 12,000 dinars to families with three children and 18,000 dinars for the fourth. That’s about $114 and $172 per month respectively.
Serbia Population
Starting sometime between 1995 and 2000, World Odometers shows Serbia started losing population and it has continued ever since.
Hungary Population
Poland Population
The EU allows freedom of movement. Those in Eastern European countries are voting with their feet.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
We do the same thing, but only if the kid is born out of wedlock, likely in an inner city to a welfare mother.
In the US we have similar incentives. The more children, the bigger the welfare check. Problem is it only encourages those on welfare to have kids. And those kids have a preponderance to end up on welfare too.
Exactly., while the hard working middle class cannot afford homes, college, or medical care. We wonder why the middle class with work ethic and family values are not reproducing. Do the math it does not end well.
The cost of an additional bedroom in prime residential areas, is about the best predictor of natality, among the not entirely disenfranchised, there is.
The only part of the world with population growth is sub Saharan Africa. And they have too much growth. The problem is government ponzi schemes require an ever growing population and nobody wants blacks emigrating to their country.
This will cost next to nothing. How many women with four children have a large income tax liability, after existing deductions for the children? They’re lucky to do some part-time work.
Any scheme that creates an incentive for children is a good investment in the future of pension liabilities and the credit-worthiness of the state. It is also has a much higher return on investment than unskilled migrants who will break the social solidarity and cooperation, bankrupt the social safety net, and eventually displace the population.
1.) This ploy is to generate future economic need and taxpayers tp repay debts.
2.) This is an implicit admission the bulk of European immigrants have no wealth grow the economy, let alone raise a family.
Great idea by Orban.
Those families having 3 kids will now consider making the 4th to have the mother be tax free from then on.
I would improve the idea by giving moms back the taxes they paid in the last 18 months for the 3rd baby and then tax freedom from the 4th.
I hope Poland, Serbia, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia also copy this policy.
When many countries have done it maybe other EU countries will also copy this.
The beauty is that it is freedom from taxes so benefits those who work.
The “let’s give more welfare” style that Western Europe and Northern Europe currently use causes Somali families with 8-10 kids and iraqis, afghans etc. making huge numbers of kids while in large part of those immigrants families the whole family lives on welfare long term.
In Serbia and Poland giving money for having many babies might work since there are so few migrants,
In Sweden, Norway and Finland government gives money for each baby every month and this leads to Somalis, Syrians, Afghans Iraqis etc. having 8-10 kids per family.
I get the desire to boost birth rates, but this does nothing to address the underlying problem, the financial ponzi that hangs over all of us. Kids today are born into an insane debt burden they can’t possibly deal with. Furthermore they’ll have to try to live through the great reset and all the hardship it entails. They’re in for a much tougher slog than we had, all this because we wouldn’t let this ridiculous system collapse a decade ago when it wanted to.
I suppose Orban is just trying to think outside the box, but he’s addressing a symptom rather than the problem.
The demographic time-bomb. Tick, tick ..
Who will pay off all the debt? The gigantic ponzi will soon be revealed to the man on the street … in brutal fashion.
The debts will NOT be repaid.
In EU countries will return to their own floating rate currencies and there will again be proper risk pricing by markets and markets deciding currency rates.
That process will be far more painful than you make it sound. Globalists in the US, UK, Germany, etc will fight it tooth and nail, causing tremendous damage. Look at what happened to the Greeks when Varoufakis tried to take on the Troika, or what’s going on with Brexit now. That’s the EU playing comparatively nice, but they can get much nastier.
Which is why it is so important, that non globalists grow the heck up, and start giving about as much of a toot about that which the globalists are trying to preserve for their own selfish reasons; as the US revolutionaries, and later the Somalis, did; wrt what their “globalists” insisted would be too scary to get rid off at any cost whatsoever.
If you’d like to know what the world is going to look like in 50 years or so, just look at who is having babies…and who is not. Demographics is a fairly easy discipline to understand.
France will be 60% African and Arab.
Sweden will be 60% Syrian and African.
Germany will be 60% Turkish and Syrian.
In a future dominated by robots and artificial intelligence a small, highly skilled population will be a blessing.
So said the last Neanderthal…..
Latkes: “It will cost very little, because there will be very few takers. You can’t meaningfully increase natality by bribing women.”
Mish: The FT reports “the initiative costs more than 1 percent of Poland’s GDP” That’s quite a bit
It looks like the population in each of the countries has fallen since the year before the highlighted periods since the “yearly change” is based on the previous period. For example, Hungary’s population has been declining since 1980. Of course, it’s possible it went up from 1980 to 1981, only to fall by a larger percentage over the rest of the five year period. In any event, those are very long-term declines.
Why do they need more people?
The answer is that as people age, they would like to retire, and for that to happen, there must be younger people to support them. If the population declines, schemes like Social Security implode. There is also a second problem. Rising population means rising real estate values, but falling population means collapsing real estate values. Detroit was a good example of that.
Also, keep in mind that these are governmental officials. Can government continue to grow as the population shrinks?
It’s obvious the populations of these countries see no future there which is why these cockamamie schemes have no chance of working. Why not enact economic reforms that free the people like less regulation and low taxes for all?
Economics was given the name “the dismal science” due to the theory of Malthus that in times of abundance human population would increase until the population was once again limited by the means of subsistence. It seems we have found a way out of that trap.
The depressions are only local. Globally, Malthus cannot help but be right. As well, there is nothing dismal about something as essential to any viable lifeform, as evolutionary pressures.
Malthus has always been wrong and governments have used his “science” as a way to justify eugenics…
And the theory that predicts the Sun will at some point burn out, has always been arong as well. As were theories about over fishing eventually depleting fisheries, until they one day were not.
Malthus’ predictions follow, by simple deductive logic, from evolution and ultimate resource scarcity. Just like the rest of economics does. Mindless “it sure doesn’t look like that from m kitchen window this morning” exercises in mindless application of empiricism where it has no merit, have no bearing on its validity or not whatsoever.
At least not until looking back, at the onset of the next Big Bang. At that point, one could perhaps argue economics did in fact overestimate the importance it places on “the long run.” But until then, logic is logic. And, conversely, illogic ditto.
What a laugh has been wrong since 1700s is useless. Timing is everything.