 if that's the best a totalitarian government can do, paid family leave is just not going to move the needle. Scott, have you found any places where these policies either seem to work or they kind of pay for themselves or something? So I thought Liz's article did a great job summarizing the evidence. I've tended to sort of look to some of the more pronatalist folks out there who would love to find policies that would move the needle and to sort of see what they say. So I think now's the time and the conversation that we ring the bell and invoke limestone. He had a long Twitter response, which is kind of his modus operandi to Liz's original piece when it came out. And what was interesting about it was to me was that he claimed, first of all, that 99% of the first that Liz ignored the programs that work was the first one, second that 99% of what's tried is too meager to have any impact. So I guess he's saying Liz missed the 1% of studies. And then third, that as an example of something that to be clear, he didn't endorse, but something that could move the needle was in Romania, where they outlawed birth control and abortion for... Yeah, this was under Cechescu. So at the peak of Cechescu's glorious powers. Yeah. So for more than a decade, outlawing birth control and abortion for most of the population. And as far as I can tell, the claim was that maybe in the long run, they increased the total fertility rate by half a child. So if that's the best a totalitarian government can do, paid family leave is just not going to move the needle. I think Liz quotes somebody is saying the amounts we're talking about versus how much it costs to raise a kid, the idea that a $3,000 child tax credit instead of a $2,000 child tax credit is going to suddenly reverse the trends just doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. And I guess there's that issue of like, even if it was $30,000, I mean, what, I don't mean to put you guys individually on the spot, but what would it take to put you in the position of having more kids? And Liz, you're actually, you have one child and you're pregnant with your second. You know, what would it take for you to, you know, to have triplets or something like that? I mean, I don't think there's any amount of money that would make me have more kids than I otherwise wanted to. And I think that's the big problem with a lot of these. Most people, these aren't decisions that you can buy, you know, these are deeply based on deeply held beliefs and values. And they're not the kind of thing that you can easily sway with a little more money. They have shown, you know, to be fair, they have shown that, like, some of these policies can change the timing of kids. They can make people have kids sooner, but not necessarily have more. And, you know, they can, there are some people that some policies might make convinced, you know, it's not like literally they don't work on anybody. Like I'm sure that, you know, there are families that might have an extricate if they got free childcare, but it's just not ever enough to make to make any sort of difference, except for on the margins, you know, like it's not, it's not making any wide scale difference. I know I believe this was my birth announcement. I was born in 1963. So it was the end of the baby boom, but it, it, the birth announcement, it had a picture of the baby with a diaper and a stamp on the diaper saying another tax deduction, which is kind of, you know, kind of early natalist kind of policy, right? And but it, I don't think my parents took seriously, you know, the cost of children or how much money they might get out of it. And I know in my own experience, and again, you know, we, you know, we can't mistake this for kind of data or, or random controlled studies or anything like that. But the idea that you would be able to pay people to have more kids, it's, it seems kind of, you know, it's just not going to work. And Liz, in your piece, you do point to a number of places where it shows the timing of children, you know, changed in some of these studies, but it really did not increase the overall amount. Scott, what, you know, is there, talk a little bit about the earned income tax credit and some of the other tax policies that have been tried that are, you know, considered child friendly or family friendly? And do they have the, the effects, the, the intended effects, or is it mostly kind of rewarding people for decisions that they were going to do anyway? Yeah, I don't know of good research that, that shows that they have moved the needle, you know, in terms of people that would have people that wanted to have another child being, you know, incentivizing them to have more kids. I think, you know, the child tax credit is something that goes pretty high up the income scale. So you can be a married couple making $400,000 a year and still get the maximum child tax credit per child. I think there probably are some families, you know, that switched from being two worker families to being one worker families and having one of the parents stay at home. That's a, that's a sort of explicit goal that a lot of social conservatives have for the program, I think. But I've not seen any evidence to suggest that it's affected fertility. The EITC, the Earned Income Tax Credit that you mentioned, is more of an anti-poverty program than the child tax credit is. It phases out a lot sooner. It's targeted much more towards the working poor. And I don't know of good evidence there that that has also increased fertility, but it does sort of raise, I think, what ought to be a real concern for a lot of the pro-natalists who generally think that these incentives are going to increase the number of kids being raised by married parents, maybe it's going to increase the number of kids and married parent families with one parent at home. But to the extent that they target folks lower down on the income ladder, they could also increase fertility in ways that maybe they haven't thought about non-marital fertility, unintended fertility, teen fertility. It really raises the question of is all fertility something that we want to encourage, the policy wants to encourage. And it's really relevant that there's good research showing that the decline in fertility since the Great Recession is overwhelmingly a decline in non-marital fertility. So it's not that married couples are having fewer kids, it's that single single mothers are having fewer kids. Over half of it is a decline in unintended fertility. So do we wish that we had had more unintended births since since 2007? That's a big open question. That's a fascinating kind of question, too, of like, you know, one of the ways, you know, if you know, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, who, you know, Rob Banks, because that's where the money is, do you want to go back to a world in which teenagers are having more kids because, you know, that is way down. That's a huge part of this, too, is it's so drastically. Yeah, it's such a triumph. I mean, I think until about 1970 that it was typical that, you know, a first live birth was to a woman who was 20 or younger that has aged up. And it also seems particularly with social conservatives who are often obsessed with, you know, issues of grooming and things like that. We have effectively de-sexualized adolescents and young adulthood or or late teen years, which would seem to be a win. But then it's like, OK, well, you know, why aren't kids having more sex or more births? It gets confusing very quickly. That's part of the live stream conversation that I had with Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute and Elizabeth Nolan Brown, of reason talking about whether or not the state should encourage people to have more babies if you want to see the full conversation go here. If you want to see another segment, go here.