Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

The New York Times ^ | December 15, 2012 | ALEXANDRA HARNEY

[MinorityRepublican]

TOKYO

THE first grade class at the elementary school in Nanmoku, about 85 miles from Tokyo, has just a single student this year. The local school system that five decades ago taught 1,250 elementary school children is now educating just 37. Many of the town’s elegant wooden homes are abandoned. Where generations of cedar loggers, sweet potato farmers and factory workers once made their lives, monkeys now reside. The only sounds at night are the cries of deer and the wail of an occasional ambulance.

Nanmoku’s plight is Japan’s fate. Faced with an aging society, a depopulating countryside and economic stagnation, the country has struggled for decades to address its challenges. As Japan goes to the polls on Dec. 16 for parliamentary elections that will most likely mean the seventh prime minister in six years, voters need to demand that politicians address the most important issue of all: the country’s low birthrate.

Sadly, this issue is hardly being discussed on the campaign trail. Instead, parties are promising to lavish more money on special interests like construction companies, the main beneficiaries of public works spending.

Nowhere is the rapid aging of Japan more visible than in rural towns like Nanmoku, where 56 percent of local residents are over 65. Over the next 25 years, the proportion of Japan’s population that is elderly will rise from almost one in four to one in three. Sales of adult diapers will soon surpass those of baby diapers.

[JCBreckenridge]

I offered my solution. Actually cut government.

[JCBreckenridge]

Meh, he probably said, “hey babybee, look at the size of my EBT”.

He’s already on record saying that he wants the government to support his wife.

[GOPJ]

Churchill once noted that the most productive countries were Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Churchill would be considered a racist today...

[BobL]

“I offered my solution. Actually cut government.”

It would help, but probably not enough. People don’t pay all that much in taxes now, particularly if they have kids. Women will still be tempted by the big bucks to put off kids (i.e., not have many, if any) if the size of government could be cut.

But I guess we’re at a stalemate - even most older FReepers don’t want government cut if it means less goodies for them (i.e., SS and Medicare), and Dems don’t want it cut at all. On the other hand, our society is nowhere near the point of accepting that women either have to be dragged out of the workplace to have kids, or paid sufficiently to have kids.

So we watch our society crumble before our eyes, and our kids and grandkids will pay the ultimate price...