It’s About Babies, Stupid: How the Trump Administration is Destroying Families and America

JD Vance says we all should be having more babies. After all, our short-lived DOGE King, Elon Musk has 14. But what is the difference between Mr. Musk and the rest of us?

Unlike Mr. Musk, Americans have no wealth. People like Trump and Musk have consolidated all of America’s wealth and have given it to themselves, as seen by Bezos’ latest wedding extravaganza to the horror of many Venetian onlookers. I think they are in the process of taking all of America’s money for themselves and passing a bit out to their wealthy friends. They have turned Capitalism into their personal bank accounts.

This matters on several fronts. There is a reason why the French gave us our Statue of Liberty, and there is an engraving on it that reads something like this, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The result in contemporary terms is that there are nearly 18 million kids in the country who have an immigrant parent. One in four kids in the United States is from an immigrant family.

The Trump administration has been very successful in scaring the hell out of people. Even I am scared, and I am native born with parents who were born in the United States. While being scared likely makes the Administration very happy, such will only plummet the population of children in the United States even further. According to Child Stats, our projected child population was to hit 66.7 million in 2049. Currently, we are at about 70 million kids. Immigrant kids make up about 13% of our total child population.

However, we’ve seen very little growth since about 1964, when the U.S. had about 69 million kids. I have little doubt that the Administration’s vicious attacks on immigrant families, most of which have no criminal record, are going to gravely impact our country’s child population. Not only do immigrants have children, they can make more children.

The saying on the Statue of Liberty is important because the United States is and has always been an immigrant country. Immigrants were once Irish, English, Italian, Polish, West African, and now many are south of the boarder. Immigrant children are critical, not only for the population but for the economy as well. Many Hispanic people come from cultures that are family-oriented.

From 1950 until 2025, live births in the United States have been cut in half.

This is a crisis! Regardless of projections, one thing is clear. We are not having more kids, and having a President that thrives on chaos and unpredictability does little to make couples have kids, no matter what their political stripes, but income and wealth do make a difference.

If JD Vance and Project 2025 want women to stay home and be barefoot and pregnant, then they must consider that, in 1950, the average person had wealth. They were not rich, but they had money and security. Many stayed at one job. Only one person had to work, and the other could be a stay-at-home parent. So, even if we believe that women are just breeding cows (the heck with feminism), there is no way the average American family could live up to such Taliban-like standards that Vance and Project 2025 envision. It’s just not possible anymore.

If we look at wealth percentile distribution from the Federal Reserve, .1% of our population has $5.2 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans have $4.41 trillion in wealth, and the upper 99% have $9.35 trillion . While these numbers don’t tell us about birth rates, what they do tell us is that a lot of regular people have very little money, and a few elite people have a lot of money. The rich have about $14 trillion in distributed wealth, compared to about $4 trillion for average to poor folks … me and most of you.

When added, the upper 50%-90%, have $22 trillion, but keep in mind that the 99%-to-upper -.1% has $14 trillion. There is a huge wealth disparity between you and the banker even if you are pretty well off.

The problem is that most rich folks are not taking Musk’s actions seriously and having multiple kids of their own and large families. Many that do have kids deny they had a child with such-and-such a person. That is not very family-oriented. The 99%, the .1%, even the upper 50%-99% are not going to save America by making babies. This demographic will likely have fewer kids, as we are seeing with the wealth distribution and with child population trends.

We need more girls and more babies. The well-off folks are not making babies fast enough, and that is where the lower 50% come in.

People need security, not crisis. People need stable jobs in order to raise stable kids. People need to feel safe, not scared. But this works against Musk’s and most CEOs’ vision where we work 125 hours per week, are discarded like trash, and told that AI will replace us soon. We don’t even need real friends, just AI friends. But an AI girlfriend cannot make a real baby, now can she, Mr. Zuckerberg?

There is no time to be a real dad or mom, is there? If dad or mom gets suddenly laid off, they cannot think about having future kids.

Many people in the lower 50% could lose Medicaid, and millions of children may lose coverage over Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” These families are certainly not going to suddenly have babies.

My feeling with JD Vance and the rest of the Administration is that they just cannot relate to the rest of us. They fail to understand why we cannot cut a check for thousands of dollars at any moment. If we cannot, we must be losers. But the reality is different.

Even if you hate kids and see them as crotch goblins, you want other people to have a lot of kids.

We need people to work and pay taxes. We need young people to take care of us when we age. We need soldiers, police, teachers, nurses, doctors, etc. All of these people were kids, most of whom came from the lower 50%. Not only is the President ravaging immigrant families, but he is also destroying American families that had stable American government jobs.

Trump’s politics will make America extinct. After all, who will get Musk’s coffee or clean his toilet? Who will do Justice Robert’s laundry? This is why all of us need to be protected from super wealthy folks. They will destroy us for personal gain. It’s human nature. Our government is supposed to protect those who cannot protect themselves from the super powerful. Trump may have turned the SCOTUS and the U.S. Government into the Enemy of the People.

If you don’t want voters to embrace socialism, then you have to prove that capitalism actually works for all Americans, including future Americans, and not just for a handful of elites.