Posted on 02/25/2014 7:16:32 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.
In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.
By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.
There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.
Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.
Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the “wealthy elderly” or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can’t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven’t been the problem in some time.
It’s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.
The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.
Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don’t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.
15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.
The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract “full value” from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.
The “modern” system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.
And yet we have all three.
In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately “modern” field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn’t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.
John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.
In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.
Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.
Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.
Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall.
Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can’t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.
By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.
Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn’t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It’s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn’t work in Detroit and it’s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it’s been tried.
After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.
The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.
How can we win the War On Poverty when our own government keeps helping millions of illegals to reenforce the other side?
. . . Japan shuns immigration . . .
No they don't. I've lived and worked there for more than 15 years. My brother and his wife and son are permanent residents there.
Japan can be welcoming to immigration . . . they just have a high bar. They don't take jag-offs from anywhere who just wants to live off the taxpayers.
Their immigration system is fairly simple: if you are determined to be a net benefit to Japanese society, then welcome. Otherwise, stay out or go home. Not all that tough to understand, really.
Most sane countries operate on comparable systems. Even relatively sparsely populated countries like Canada and New Zealand.
“We can’t just replace Americans with Mexicans.” It’s pretty much being done now and not just with Mexicans.
I was at the hospital yesterday and 4/5 pregnant women I saw are not “typical” Caucasian American women (and the one pregnant white woman I saw was a white trash); they are darker or have a different angle to their eyes.
The powers that be are importing (mostly illegally) the Americans that have either been aborted or never made to begin with (due to the destruction of the American society).
One HUGE problem with the importation of new “Americans” is that they have 0 knowledge (nor do they care to ever learn) about the country that’s feeding them. They have little to allegiance to the USA.
Why don’t they just force people to work more against their will? If that doesn’t work raise taxes.
In other news democrats think it is wonderful that people will not work as much so they can collect obamacare subsidies.
“We can’t just replace Americans with Mexicans.”
How about we replace the (presumably white) Americans with Chinese ?
And we ship the jobs of Americans to foreign lands, then we import their stuff on which neither they nor their employers pay SS. Foreign tax free stuff hurts American business and ruins the SS system.
i caught that one right away too...
libertarians want as little government in their lives as they can get..
another dude trying to drive a wedge....
>> Libertarians don’t want the government to take anything from anyone for these purposes.
>
> i caught that one right away too...
> libertarians want as little government in their lives as they can get..
> another dude trying to drive a wedge....
Perhaps the internal polls of the Statists show that the growing dissatisfaction and distrust of government if FAR more widespread than is even intuitively obvious to the casual observer. Driving wedges is the *ONLY* tool they have to hold on to their power, because they cannot stand up to even a significant minority of the people united together.
Using Karl Marx ‘s ideas to help the middle class is like using Adolph Hitler’s ideas to help the Jews.
But the middle class keeps voting for it.
People with half a brain and a desire to WORK, will always be OK.
Pollyanna.
Yea...I say Obama is a Trojan Horse....the very essence of Washington today, is the destruction/eradication of the white male....
Yea...I say Obama is a Trojan Horse....the very essence of Washington today, is the destruction/eradication of the white male....
100 million illegal Mexicans should fix that
This is an excellent commentary.
Thanks for posting it.
The only point I would argue with is old age spending. I personally believe the Death Panels will be a big benefit to the SocSec and Medicare budgets. Every year sliced off the lifespan is a big economic number, I’d guess.
Thanks for beating me to it, anyone who is stupid enough to make such an asinine statement needs to pull his/her head out of his/her ass, wipe the crap from their eyes, and pay better attention to their keyboard.
I expect that driven from the Left; but more and more I see if here on FR as well.
Opinions and @ssholes, eh?
I’m sure there’s one in every crowd, but I’m reading that in their platform.
IMHO, the ‘solution’ to both IS reigning in the Federal leviathan. There is NO authority for wealth distribution and if there is no carrot, there would be WAY less illegal immigration (IE: no ‘free’ $$$ to entice).
It’s why I tend to identify as (L) or ‘Constitutionalist’; IMHO (again) ‘Convservative’ denotes no STARTING point (IE: Are we conserving 60’s America? 30’s? 20’? 1890’s?).
Guilty as charged.
MY grandfather told that 50 years ago. He said he learned it during the Great Depression.
I've seen very little since then to suggest he was wrong.
NO - the Fed IS the enabler of "Progressive" government. Imagine a government that would have to compete with private citizens for real money. Imagine a government that faced immediate consequences in the market when it ran huge deficits. The nanny state simply could not exist. Fix it, and 100 other problems as diverse as immigration and abortion, fix themselves at the same time.
During the great depression, almost all goods used by Americans were made in America.
People can work only if there are jobs available. And to start a small business, there have to be people with money to purchase the goods or services offered, AND no red tape regulations that strangle small businesses.
In the county I live in, the are few jobs, and the onerous taxes and regulations cause almost every small business started to fail within 2 years.
The only solution is to either grow marijuana, which unfortunately many people do, or move to another location, which is very difficult. To rent a person needs a huge lump of cash and a job. And a lot of people here own their homes, and it’s very hard to sell anything now.
So, I disagree with your viewpoint.
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