Kevin Roberts

the percentage of blame for each of those.

But culture broadly, I think, is the most important.

Having said that, what we argue in the paper, and a lot of people who didn't think they would be convinced by our argument have become convinced of it, is that if you have upstreamed these cultural trends that you outlined so well, and in 1965, the misnamed war on poverty aggravates that by disincentivizing marriage and at least

in some segments of the population, birth, then you have the situation that we're in.

And then what's happened, especially over the last 15 to 20 years, as health care and higher education costs have skyrocketed, we've foisted upon that really bad context, the impossibility from the standpoint of many young American men and women who want to be married and want to have kids of believing financially they can make it happen.

And so what we're trying to do is...

is addressed in that paper, the last two of those, the federal policy and economic policies that need to change.

We at Heritage, even though we have a little bit of cultural influence, we'll have to rely on Americans and American leaders to do their part.

For example, we even say this in the paper,

American policymakers using the bully pulpit, not just to push a particular policy, but to talk about this positive vision of what it is to be married and have children can in fact help culture and those trends reverse.

Two countries.

The gold standard is what Israel has done.

Now, they've got some intrinsic advantages, largely religious, largely homogenous.

But we...

believe that the policies that they've enacted, which we mimic in our paper, have also played a role.

Because remember, we're not saying that our policy proposals are the end-all, be-all.

We're just saying that if you get these other cultural and social trends reversed, these can be really helpful.

But the second country, more like us, although much smaller, is Hungary.

There, the data is mixed to positive.

But the one piece of data, we're not expecting to see this.