They will give birth less
In the new year, 2024, it is planned to increase the amount of maternity capital. From 779 to 816 thousand rubles. The purpose of this increase was announced as the most sacred: to bring the cost of payments in line with the official inflation rate in the country at 4%. (Interestingly, have the authors seen the prices in stores?)
From the good news: money for this good deed will no longer be required from the treasury, on the contrary, in the period from 2024 to 2026, the reduction in the total budget of maternity capital may amount to 356 billion rubles, that is, minus 17%. Simply because they will give birth even less.
Yes, it’s sad, but the fact is that a simple arithmetic increase in the amount of maternity capital does not solve its main task — to stimulate the birth rate in the conditions of a national demographic catastrophe. Well, parents will be grateful, because any money in the family is not, in principle, superfluous.
The meaning of maternity capital from the point of view of state benefit was lost at the moment when the main amount of payments in 2020 was transferred from the second child in the family on the first. The fact is that before we paid only for the birth of a second child. Now most of them are given for the first child — 589 thousand rubles. And for the second, a dry balance of 189.5 thousand remains (in 2024 it will become 198.7 thousand rubles)
As you know, everyone gives birth to first-born. With subsequent children, there are options, one of the main reasons why citizens never go for another baby is the instability of the financial situation. And here the scales can fluctuate: almost a million paid for a second baby may well be the final argument for his birth.
Less than 200 thousand rubles, as they pay now, is unlikely.
“Now, if you make a million for the second child, and one and a half for the third, then the situation can change for the better,” says well-known demographer Alexei Raksha. — The birth rate of firstborns is more strongly influenced by non-material factors: individual, family history, psychology, interpersonal relationships, etc. Matkapital here, as expected, has almost no effect. “Affordable” about firstborns is spoken much less often, it is more often a “mandatory program”. And the birth rate of second and subsequent children due to maternity capital at one time increased, because many, thanks to it, were finally able to afford the child they wanted before. Nevertheless, negative events still affect the birth rate even of the first-born. Therefore, if the mother capital is now completely canceled and for the first-born, the birth rate will further fall.
I wonder who came up with the idea to change the payment scheme so that it would not be very profitable for Russians to give birth to second children? Surely these officials have names, surnames, positions and some kind of argumentation as to why they did it. So let them explain openly why they undermine the population policy? And if they don’t understand and just wanted the best, then how did they even end up in their places, not seeing the obvious?
Of course, people give birth not only for the sake of 779 thousand rubles of maternity capital, they can only buy a hut in a remote province and certainly not to raise a baby from birth to puberty, but still at least some help in our difficult time. It is naive to expect that this will somehow globally affect the demographic situation in the Russian Federation.
However, it is no more naive than another new way to encourage Russians to create large families: with a proposal to create a line of large toys for the Minister of Industry and Denis Manturov was contacted by toy manufacturers today.
“These could be sets of dolls with mom, dad and three or four children of different ages,” the authors of the initiative said.
It’s not very clear why write to the minister on such matters? If you want to make dolls, do it. Or in the expectation that this project will also be sponsored by the state?