Orbán announced unprecedented tax cuts for 2025, virtually all of which are aimed at helping families have children. The biggest announcement was a lifetime tax exemption for mothers with two, three, or four children.
(LifeSiteNews) — On January 30, Louis March published a bracing column titled: “You can’t stare down reality: population collapse has begun.” He cites a recent study from the McKinsey Global Institute titled “Dependency and depopulation? Confronting the consequences of a new demographic reality,” which concludes:
Falling fertility rates are propelling major economies toward population collapse in this century. Two-thirds of humanity lives in countries with fertility below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family. By 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent, based on UN projections. The world reached its maximum number of annual births in 2012, when 146 million babies were born, and the global number of births will continue to slowly decline.
What does this mean? It means that the demographic instability that many have been predicting for decades is upon us. As the McKinsey report states:
Absent swift and comprehensive action, younger workers today will inherit a weaker world economy, strained public retirement systems, and eroded wealth transfers between generations. Building resilience to this demographic transformation requires fundamental societal and economic shifts.
Even with “swift and comprehensive action,” it isn’t clear that this future is avoidable. The indigenous populations of virtually every European country have abandoned child-bearing, and all of the attendant problems—mass migration, strained welfare states, the legalization of euthanasia as a safety valve for a over-burdened healthcare system serving an aging population—are clearly in evidence. (Although Orwell and Huxley are the preferred predictive dystopias, I suspect P.D. James’s The Children of Men, on a childless West, may best describe the possible future.)
After decades of agenda-driven babble from progressives prophesying overpopulation, many of us may witness, in our lifetimes, the precise opposite: Population collapse. There are some waking up to this. Elon Musk, who just had his fourteenth child (with four mothers), is constantly warning about the baby dearth, even if he is taking a clearly immoral approach to the problem. Patrick Brown published a report earlier this year titled “Remote Work Created a Baby Boom. Can We Keep It Up?” and WORLD Magazine detailed the rising pro-natalist movement and the many Christians who are part of it in an essay titled “Baby Fever.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán deserves credit as the first European leader to recognize and address the fundamental demographic challenge. In 2021, I interviewed then-family minister Katalin Novák (she would later serve as president), and she detailed the all-hands-on-deck approach the Orbán government is taking to boost the birthrate. Most recently, Orbán announced unprecedented tax cuts for 2025, virtually all of which are aimed at helping families have children. The biggest announcement was a lifetime tax exemption for mothers with two, three, or four children. From The European Conservative:
Hungarian mothers with three children will be given lifetime income tax exemption from October this year, while the same will be gradually expanded to cover mothers with two kids starting January 2026. These measures are estimated to affect 250 thousand families with three children, and another 600 thousand raising two. There will only be more births if the mothers feel financially secure, Orbán said, adding that Hungary would have at least two hundred thousand fewer births since 2010 if it wasn’t for the Fidesz government’s generous family policies. Apart from the mothers’ tax exemption which is unique in the EU, Hungarian families can also deduct a certain amount from their taxes, similarly to many other countries. Orbán, however, also announced the doubling of the amount of these deductibles later this year, increasing the monthly amount parents can write off their taxes to €50 euros after one child, €200 after two, and €500 after three children. In addition, all types of allowances and childcare benefits linked to parental leave will also become tax-free.
Orbán noted that this will increase public spending, but that Hungary can afford it. These new policies augment an already robust agenda that includes interest-free government loans for newlyweds who pledge to have children within five years, with portions of those loans becoming “grants” after each child is born; hefty subsidies for seven-seater minivans; and much more.
As TEC noted, “Hungary’s family policies are often brought up as a model that should be followed elsewhere by conservative MEPs in Brussels,” and last month “the European Commission presented its own set of solutions under the new ‘Demography Toolbox,’ which prompted a heavy debate in the EU Parliament for focusing on increasing third-world labor migration instead of incentivizing more births in Europe.”
But there is one reality that everyone is ignoring, which I have noted before: Eventually, societies will be forced to conclude that we cannot afford abortion. This is a realization China has already reached, as the same family planning officials who once perpetrated forced abortions and sterilizations are now phoning newlyweds to badger them about having children. Right now, Western governments are funding and facilitating abortion—Western countries (North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) kill more than 1.94 million children through abortion each year. Globally, 73 million children are aborted.
As the shortage of babies grows and the social effects become increasingly clear, so will the fact that we need babies more than we need abortion.
