The real population bomb to come? Social Security’s looming bankruptcy
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Throughout President Donald Trump‘s second, nonconsecutive term, pundits across the political spectrum have warned that the economy is on the cusp of mass job losses. They have cited everything from the demonstrable downward pressure on the labor market from tariffs to Trump’s orders for the Federal Reserve, an independent body, to immediately slash the federal funds rate.
But as the nation hits a dangerous economic inflection point, its long-predicted future demographic crisis will not be that we have too many people for too few jobs, as is often warned about. But rather too few people will be available to work at all.
Democrats like to blame the nation’s demographic decline on Trump’s immigration policy. Yet so long as the White House remains focused on deporting illegal immigrants, especially with an emphasis on the criminal illegal immigrants and welfare queens who are overwhelmingly a net-negative on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet, the enforcement of already extant immigration law is not the problem.
Over the year starting July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau found that the nation’s population only increased by 1.8 million people, or 0.5%. That’s about half as fast as it averaged 20 years ago. The core cause is, and always has been, the birth dearth of the last decade.
The birth dearth is a consequence of collapsing marriage rates. While fertility among married women has held roughly constant over the last three decades, it has fallen off among unmarried women. And because fewer young people are getting married, the overall fertility rate has crumbled. This means that whereas the annual rate of the population’s natural increase due to births minus deaths was steady from the end of the baby boom until the 21st century, it began a precipitous decline around the Great Recession.
Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that American deaths will outpace births by 2030, meaning that, absent immigration, the population will begin to shrink in four years. Even accounting for the CBO’s immigration assumptions, which lie somewhere in the average between former President Joe Biden’s open borders and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s dream to obliterate legal immigration, the number of seniors age 65 or older is slated to increase an average 1.6% per year for the next decade, while the number of people younger than 25 years old will decrease by 0.8% annually.
In other words, we have an increasing rate of retirees aging …
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Throughout President Donald Trump‘s second, nonconsecutive term, pundits across the political spectrum have warned that the economy is on the cusp of mass job losses. They have cited everything from the demonstrable downward pressure on the labor market from tariffs to Trump’s orders for the Federal Reserve, an independent body, to immediately slash the federal funds rate.
But as the nation hits a dangerous economic inflection point, its long-predicted future demographic crisis will not be that we have too many people for too few jobs, as is often warned about. But rather too few people will be available to work at all.
Democrats like to blame the nation’s demographic decline on Trump’s immigration policy. Yet so long as the White House remains focused on deporting illegal immigrants, especially with an emphasis on the criminal illegal immigrants and welfare queens who are overwhelmingly a net-negative on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet, the enforcement of already extant immigration law is not the problem.
Over the year starting July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau found that the nation’s population only increased by 1.8 million people, or 0.5%. That’s about half as fast as it averaged 20 years ago. The core cause is, and always has been, the birth dearth of the last decade.
The birth dearth is a consequence of collapsing marriage rates. While fertility among married women has held roughly constant over the last three decades, it has fallen off among unmarried women. And because fewer young people are getting married, the overall fertility rate has crumbled. This means that whereas the annual rate of the population’s natural increase due to births minus deaths was steady from the end of the baby boom until the 21st century, it began a precipitous decline around the Great Recession.
Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that American deaths will outpace births by 2030, meaning that, absent immigration, the population will begin to shrink in four years. Even accounting for the CBO’s immigration assumptions, which lie somewhere in the average between former President Joe Biden’s open borders and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s dream to obliterate legal immigration, the number of seniors age 65 or older is slated to increase an average 1.6% per year for the next decade, while the number of people younger than 25 years old will decrease by 0.8% annually.
In other words, we have an increasing rate of retirees aging …
The real population bomb to come? Social Security’s looming bankruptcy
This isn't complicated—it's willpower.
Throughout President Donald Trump‘s second, nonconsecutive term, pundits across the political spectrum have warned that the economy is on the cusp of mass job losses. They have cited everything from the demonstrable downward pressure on the labor market from tariffs to Trump’s orders for the Federal Reserve, an independent body, to immediately slash the federal funds rate.
But as the nation hits a dangerous economic inflection point, its long-predicted future demographic crisis will not be that we have too many people for too few jobs, as is often warned about. But rather too few people will be available to work at all.
Democrats like to blame the nation’s demographic decline on Trump’s immigration policy. Yet so long as the White House remains focused on deporting illegal immigrants, especially with an emphasis on the criminal illegal immigrants and welfare queens who are overwhelmingly a net-negative on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet, the enforcement of already extant immigration law is not the problem.
Over the year starting July 1, 2024, the Census Bureau found that the nation’s population only increased by 1.8 million people, or 0.5%. That’s about half as fast as it averaged 20 years ago. The core cause is, and always has been, the birth dearth of the last decade.
The birth dearth is a consequence of collapsing marriage rates. While fertility among married women has held roughly constant over the last three decades, it has fallen off among unmarried women. And because fewer young people are getting married, the overall fertility rate has crumbled. This means that whereas the annual rate of the population’s natural increase due to births minus deaths was steady from the end of the baby boom until the 21st century, it began a precipitous decline around the Great Recession.
Now, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that American deaths will outpace births by 2030, meaning that, absent immigration, the population will begin to shrink in four years. Even accounting for the CBO’s immigration assumptions, which lie somewhere in the average between former President Joe Biden’s open borders and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s dream to obliterate legal immigration, the number of seniors age 65 or older is slated to increase an average 1.6% per year for the next decade, while the number of people younger than 25 years old will decrease by 0.8% annually.
In other words, we have an increasing rate of retirees aging …
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