Hungarian President Viktor Orban declared in a recent speech a series of measures to boost fertility, including the elimination of income tax for families with more than a certain number of children according to a report:
Hungary’s prime minister has announced a raft of measures aimed at boosting the country’s declining birth rate and reducing immigration.
Giving his annual State of the Nation address Sunday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced a seven-point “Family Protection Action Plan” designed to promote marriage and families.
Measures announced included waivers on personal income tax for women raising at least four children for the rest of their lives and subsidies for large families to buy larger cars. The ‘action plan’ also extended a loan program to help families with at least two children to buy homes. Every woman under 40 will also be eligible for a preferential loan when she first gets married.
The government has also said it will spend more on Hungary’s heathcare system and will create 21,000 creche places. In addition, grandparents will be eligible to receive a childcare fee if they look after young children instead of the parents, Orban said.
“There are fewer and fewer children born in Europe. For the West, the answer (to that challenge) is immigration. For every missing child there should be one coming in and then the numbers will be fine,” Orban said, Reuters reported.
“But we do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children,” he said, announcing the incentives program.
Referring to the action plan, Orban said “this is Hungary’s answer (to challenges) rather than immigration,” he said, according to English-speaking news service Daily News Hungary.
Orban is a well-known critic of immigration and Hungary’s government caused controversy in the European Union, of which Hungary is a member, when it (along with its eastern European neighbors) refused to allow asylum seekers to enter the country during the migration crisis in the continent in 2015.
Hungary’s government led by Orban’s Fidesz party has also been accused of backtracking on democratic values, the rule of law, minority rights and media freedoms. As a result, it could now face punitive action from the EU, along with Poland, after members of the European parliament (MEPs) voted last year to trigger disciplinary procedures against it because it was seen as breaching the bloc’s core values.
Like other conservative, nationalist governments in Europe, Hungary is worried about migration and its declining birth rate. Eurostat data from mid-2018, the latest available, shows that the birth rate is continuing to decline in the EU as a whole. In 2017, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, 90,000 less than the year before. In the same year, 5.3 million deaths were registered.
While birth rates remain robust in Ireland, Sweden, the U.K. and France, the lowest birth rates were registered in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Birth rates in Hungary are below the EU average – In Hungary the crude birth rate in 2017 was 9.7 per 1,000 residents, just below the EU average of 9.9 per 1,000 residents.
In 2017, 94,600 live births were registered in Hungary and 131,900 deaths were registered, equating to a population decline of just over 37,000 people, Eurostat data shows. (source)
Viktor Orban is not to be trusted. As a reminder, his education was provided for by George Soros’ Open Society Forum, and he was personally tutored under long-time Soros confidant and intellectual Zbignew Pelczynski. Many of his statements resonate with popular support but go no further than this, and given Hungary’s move towards supporting nationalism and her historical ties with Germany, one must look at her with an eye of caution.
However, Orban’s plan proposes an interesting theory, assuming that it is actually implemented. Would families in Hungary willingly have four to five children if they were actually not to pay income tax for the rest of their lives? Or would they choose the current state of idleness they reside in?
Population and demographics is a serious issue in Europe because people do not want to have children for selfish reasons. However, the solution to demographic “disaster” is as simple as not using a condom/birth control. It is true that one just does not “get pregnant” with ease in many cases, and that the process can take time. However, it is not impossible at all for a woman even well into her thirties to have three, four, or even five children with regular relations and lacking counter-reproductive measures. For a woman during her prime years of fertility in her late teens to early twenties, having five children is very simple, and she could easily have double or more than number should she choose to.
But the matter is again about choice. Does one want to have another child, or to go on weekly restaurant dinner dates? This is what the matter is for many, and given the luxurious standards of living enjoyed in the western world in combination with the stress and sacrifice that children necessitate to raise them, many would rather have the good things of this life in combination with the enjoyment of male-female relations while disassociating themselves from the natural fruit of said relations.
Would the peoples of Europe, in the face of major social initiative including as Orban points out, the elimination of all income tax, have more children simply to keep their society filled with people? It is entirely possible that Europeans would rather pay their income taxes and refuse to have children, continuing on as they have for decades now. The same can also be said of Americans, whose attitude is little different in terms of a philosophy of self-indulgence.
Many complain that society is being “taken over by [fill in the name of a group here]”, and there is a point to this. Areas do go through demographic changes throughout history. However, the major reason why such changes happen is because one group is having children and another is not. One cannot fault a man for reproducing, as God commanded man to “be fruitful and multiply.” It is one issue if a man is naturally unable to bear children, or does so with much difficulty, but it is another thing to intentionally sterilize oneself and then to complain about those who have not sterilized themselves.
The future belongs to the groups of people who show up in a society. If enough people show up, they will take over and not because they are INVADERS or have malicious intentions, but because of simple numerical differences. The Islamic presence in Europe grows not just because of migration, but because Europeans have no children and when they do it is only one or two, while the Muslims will have three, four, or five children.
Is it the Muslims’ fault they are reproducing? Is it the fault of people from Central America in the US that they are having children while their neighbors are not? Certainly not, but it is the fault of the persons in Europe and in the US who are not reproducing. While one may complain about the “invaders” coming in, if one thinks in the reverse, how was is that Europeans arrived in the Americas other than due to the fact that Europeans were reproducing, and in a sizeable number, that many of them migrated to other areas? I do not say this condescendingly, but as a note that perhaps instead of complaining about “those foreigners” who are coming to the US, if Europeans and Americans were savvy, they may want to consider doing the same thing with their own children, and that while some would stay at “home”, others may want to go to Central America, South America, Africa and Asia to seek their fortunes just as many Europeans did for centuries and got them.
A society, any society, is built on the assumption of a human presence because society comes from those who make it up. If people do not want to inhabit a society, that society will either disappear or be replaced by another people who wants to inhabit it. If that society is well-settled and many people reproduce in it, that society will grow and begin to diffuse to other areas. This is a recurring pattern in history, and can be seen in a much smaller way with houses. If a family cannot “sell” another house to another family who wants to live in it, they leave the house and it is abandoned until another family moves in. If the family in the house grows, then the house will be expanded and if the family is large enough, some of the people living there may go out to buy or build their own houses.
Returning to the Hungarian situation and Orban’s proposition, will the Hungarian people on some level take up the challenge? If Orban is serious- something which has yet to be seen for this issue -but the people do not care, then perhaps the “migration crisis” in their nation is simply a consequence of their apostasy through their actions, for by choosing to be “unfruitful and infertile” instead of being “fruitful and multiply(ing),” they have chosen their own deaths, and the very migrants who were trafficked into their society, if they wish to reproduce, are being given their nation as a reward for their obedience to this command.
Indeed, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
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