The Relentless Power of Demography
By Alan
Caruba
The
President of the United States is routinely referred to as the most powerful man
on the Earth. There is a greater power and it is the changing characteristics of
population, something that occurs constantly here and around the
world.
Laws
are powerless against it and, in particular, laws that were passed some eighty
to fifty years ago with the best of intentions. I refer, in particular, to
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. No one anticipated that Americans would
routinely live to their current life expectancy of 78 years, nor that advances
in medicine and healthcare would extend their lives into their late 80’s and
their 90’s.
Nor
could laws anticipate American lifestyles that went from a time when older
citizens often lived with and were cared for by their children to a time when
retirement communities exist along with facilities that provide care for the
elderly afflicted with the illness associated with aging such as the explosion
of Alzheimer’s disease. In the 1930s, no one anticipated the emancipation of
women and their empowerment in the workplace.
Jonathan Last is a senior writer at
the Weekly Standard and the author of a new book, “What to Expect When No
One’s Expecting: American’s Coming Demographic Disaster.” The Wall Street
Journal recently published an article by Last, “America’s Baby Bust.”
Demographics, birth rates, aging, and
the movement of populations such as the many Hispanics that crossed our southern
border to seek jobs and enjoy the benefits America extends through programs that
aid the poor. For the second time since 1986, Congress is attempting to grapple
with millions of illegal aliens and their children who call America home.
While
the immigration debate rages, Last notes that it has been the immigration of
Hispanics that has kept the U.S. from becoming as stagnant as Japan. “While the
nation as a whole has a fertility rate of 1.93, the Hispanic-American fertility
rate is 2.35.” Even that is beginning to decline.
“Forget
the debt ceiling, Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the
entitlement cliff. These are just symptoms. What America really faces is a
demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining
fertility rate.”
“The
fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course
of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children
than that, the population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total
fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn’t been above the replacement rate in a
sustained way since the early 1970s.”
The
only blip in our fertility rate followed the end of WWII and that cohort became
known as the “baby boomers.” They are now retiring in large numbers daily. That
is putting a strain on the Social Security and Medicare programs.
In the
“good old days” women were, for the most part, homemakers caring for their
families, but not part of the job market. Another factor after WWII was the
belief that everyone had to have a college degree to have upward mobility.
“Women,” notes Last, “began attending college in equal (and then ever greater)
numbers than men.”
This
caused young people of both sexes to put off marriage and, as the economy
encountered recessions and the present fiscal uncertainties, the cost of college
has skyrocketed, and graduation now means a huge debt for many of them before
they even enter the job market.
The
decrease in the fertility rate is not just an American problem. It is global and
we are seeing this in Europe where socialism has been practiced even more
briskly than here. As Last points out, “97% of the world’s population now lives
in countries where the fertility rate is falling.” It translates into lost
productivity and pressures on governments that attempt to prop up and maintain
their economies through excessive borrowing. The U.S. government borrows about
40 cents of every dollar it spends.
So the
President and Congress face the problem of an aging population, too few new
babies being born, and economic policies—increased taxation—that work against
the decision to have children. Children are expensive. The “perverse effect of
putting government in the business of eldercare has been to reduce the
incentives to have children…”
To that
we can add putting government in charge of healthcare, education, housing, and
energy. It has a track record of ruining these sectors that would thrive if they
were returned to the free and open marketplace. One can search the Constitution
long and hard to find a justification for government intervention or control and
plenty of history to demonstrate they do better when addressed at the state and
local level.
“In the
face of this decline,” says Last, “the only thing that will preserve America’s
place in the world is if all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics,
blacks, Jews, Christians and atheists—decide to have
babies.”
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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