OPINION:
Congressional Budget Office economists recently released a report warning that the U.S. population will peak at 364 million. That’s bad news for Social Security, the Ponzi scheme that relies on an ever-growing pool of laborers to underwrite benefits for the elderly.
Such a system won’t last through the year 2056, when CBO says the population will start slowly contracting. A graying majority won’t have enough workers to prop up their golden years. If CBO is right, then the transition starts in four years. “Declining fertility rates cause the annual number of deaths to exceed the annual number of births starting in 2030,” the report concludes.
Blame misguided government policy for the shortfall. Politicians unable to curb their lust for other people’s money have supersized tax and regulatory burdens. Most young families need two breadwinners to survive.
Unlike their parents, real incomes for today’s generation have tumbled in the face of soaring rent and education expenses. The average household has shrunk as a result, and the numbers show it.
The fertility rate of two births per woman in the 1990s fell to 1.6 by 2024, but the most noticeable drop happened during the Great Recession. The correlation between economic prosperity and offspring is striking.
There’s also a moral component. Church attendance is all the rage in red states, and, not surprisingly, they also have more babies than blue jurisdictions. Texas, for instance, has an above-average fertility rate of 1.8. Vermont, the least religious state according to a Pew Research survey, is at the bottom of the list at 1.4.
Recognizing the trend, University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox called on policymakers to focus on bettering circumstances for moms and dads. The family-first agenda should emphasize lower housing prices.
“The most important set of family policies that states should pursue, in other words, are those that make family life more affordable for ordinary citizens and underline the value of getting married and raising a family for the next generation,” he wrote in a paper for the Civitas Institute.
Liberals prefer to force businesses to pay for programs such as paternity leave, as if that’s going to improve the situation. Nor does it help to pay one Somali immigrant thousands of dollars to watch the child of another Somali immigrant.
The left follows the lead of globalists who insist that only the mass importation of foreigners can fix the downward statistical spiral. This bright idea comes from the billionaires and foundations that spent their fortunes promoting abortion and other human extermination campaigns in the name of “preventing overpopulation.” They are merely wrapping their nihilism in a slightly different package.
President Trump isn’t playing that game. CBO noted that the influx of illegal immigrants “turned negative” this year. Courtesy of deportations and return-home incentives, 360,000 more illegals have departed than arrived. Had Kamala Harris won, CBO would have kept its estimate that assumed a Democratic president would have brought in an extra 2.6 million from the Third World by now.
The United States is more than an arbitrary, borderless geographic location. America cannot endure if it allows itself to be colonized by outsiders who hate the West. Fortunately, we don’t have to. Conservative states have shown that the best way forward is economic revitalization combined with spiritual revival.
As a nation, we must reject the left’s obsession with abortion and transgenderism and re-embrace the importance of faith, family and country.
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