The slowing of immigration is starting to make our falling birthrates more noticeable. We'll need to see a surge in immigration in the coming years to avoid the aging problem facing most other wealthy countries.
Biden's proposed $2 trillion family plan might help if it could ever get passed, but it might be too little too late. Other countries have had far more extreme incentives to have kids for decades and still ended up much farther down the wrong side of the aging curve than we are.
EDIT: I appreciate the downvotes. But I wonder which you prefer: higher taxes for working people, reduced benefits for the elderly, or more immigrants coming to our nation of immigrants? We need to pick one.
Birthrates are depressed because prime child-rearing ages, (22-35?) are increasingly unable to afford adequate housing and health insurance. Solve those, families will feel more secure and be able to live close to relatives to help out with children, and the issue is much more tractable.
That perspective is not compatible with what we know about birthrates in other developed nations. More highly educated societies exhibit lower birthrates, more or less universally. Even within the US, people with more education have children later and fewer children, even though they also have higher incomes and better insurance, etc.
In many European countries, families are given considerable support and incentives far beyond what American families receive, yet birthrates still continue to drop.
Affordable housing isn't a US centric problem, I think that it is fair to say that it is still a big concern for many families across the world. If you look at what % people are paying for housing vs. other stuff, I imagine a pretty clear trend over the last 50-80 years would start to show.
And if you increase immigration, you increase labour supply, and demand for housing - reducing wages and increasing cost of living, which negatively impacts fertility.
The fundamental problem in the USA is the broken healthcare and pension system, which allocates too many resources to baby boomers and unfairly burdens younger workers.
The fertility issue is not a unique American problem. It has been happening for decades in nearly every developed country, and it is consistently observed when populations become more highly educated. The reason it has hit most developed nations harder than the US is because the US historically has much higher immigration rates than other nations, and immigrants tend to skew younger.
Comments
The slowing of immigration is starting to make our falling birthrates more noticeable. We'll need to see a surge in immigration in the coming years to avoid the aging problem facing most other wealthy countries.
Biden's proposed $2 trillion family plan might help if it could ever get passed, but it might be too little too late. Other countries have had far more extreme incentives to have kids for decades and still ended up much farther down the wrong side of the aging curve than we are.
EDIT: I appreciate the downvotes. But I wonder which you prefer: higher taxes for working people, reduced benefits for the elderly, or more immigrants coming to our nation of immigrants? We need to pick one.
Birthrates are depressed because prime child-rearing ages, (22-35?) are increasingly unable to afford adequate housing and health insurance. Solve those, families will feel more secure and be able to live close to relatives to help out with children, and the issue is much more tractable.
That perspective is not compatible with what we know about birthrates in other developed nations. More highly educated societies exhibit lower birthrates, more or less universally. Even within the US, people with more education have children later and fewer children, even though they also have higher incomes and better insurance, etc.
In many European countries, families are given considerable support and incentives far beyond what American families receive, yet birthrates still continue to drop.
Affordable housing isn't a US centric problem, I think that it is fair to say that it is still a big concern for many families across the world. If you look at what % people are paying for housing vs. other stuff, I imagine a pretty clear trend over the last 50-80 years would start to show.
And if you increase immigration, you increase labour supply, and demand for housing - reducing wages and increasing cost of living, which negatively impacts fertility.
The fundamental problem in the USA is the broken healthcare and pension system, which allocates too many resources to baby boomers and unfairly burdens younger workers.
The fertility issue is not a unique American problem. It has been happening for decades in nearly every developed country, and it is consistently observed when populations become more highly educated. The reason it has hit most developed nations harder than the US is because the US historically has much higher immigration rates than other nations, and immigrants tend to skew younger.