[Brian Kopp DPM]

Demographics and depression

 

Thursday April 30, 2009

Categories: Economics, Population

Economist David Goldman at First Things says our failure to reproduce enough children to sustain our society will make us poorer. Excerpts:

Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.

It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.

What could we do to promote natalism at the policy level? Goldman suggests:

Numerous proposals for family-friendly tax policy are in circulation, including recent suggestions by Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam. The core of a family-oriented economic program might include the following measures:

• Cut taxes on families. The personal exemption introduced with the Second World War's Victory Tax was $624, reflecting the cost of "food and a little more." In today's dollars that would be about $7,600, while the current personal exemption stands at only $3,650. The personal exemption should be raised to $8,000 simply to restore the real value of the deduction, and the full personal exemption should apply to children.

• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.

• Make child-related expenses tax deductible. Tuition and health care are the key expenses here with which parents need help.

• Change the immigration laws. The United States needs highly skilled, productive individuals in their prime years for earning and family formation.

We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together. A generation of Americans has grown up with the belief that the traditional family is merely one lifestyle choice among many.

[snip]

Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.

Philip Longman has covered this ground before, from a secular liberal point of view. Last November, Longman and his New America Foundation colleague David Gray proposed a new pro-family "social contract" (PDF form here) to address the same problems David Goldman identifies. Excerpt:

Americans instinctively revere the family as an institution that helps facilitate all other aspects of life. The family fosters attachments across generations, provides a nurturing environment in which to raise children, and is a means of transmitting values from one generation to the next. It is the foundation upon which our social contract has been built.

Historically, public discussions of the social contract
have largely ignored the role of families. In a pre-industrial
world in which children both performed economically useful
tasks while young and, as adults, offered vital support
to their aging parents, it was easy to assume that the family
as an institution could be relied on to take care of itself.
Today, however, the economic basis of the family is
largely eroded. Children are no longer economic assets to
their parents, but costly liabilities. Due to the growth of
Social Security, Medicare, and private pension schemes,
support in old age no longer depends on an individual's
decision to raise a family, but on other people bearing the
burdens of parenthood so as to produce the vital human
capital to keep the system going. Meanwhile, the widening
life options of a secularized society raise the opportunity
cost, for both men and women, of nurturing the next
generation.

One result of these changed circumstances, in all
advanced nations, has been a dramatic fall in birthrates,
often to well below replacement rates, and rapidly aging
populations. At the same time, the state of family life has
become deeply problematic, with high rates of divorce and
out-of-wedlock births, and increasing downward mobility
among parents.

Other sectors of society have effectively appropriated for
themselves much of the value in human capital created by
families, contributing to the strain on parents and a decline
in overall fertility rates. Public policy and current law stacks
the odds against those who choose to raise children.
We need to make major adjustments to the social contract
in order to allow parents to retain more of the return
that comes to society through their investment in children.
Because stable families make a great difference in the lives
of children, the next social contract should support them.
Because having and raising children is a public good, the
next social contact should focus on supporting parents and
children as early in life as possible.

[mlocher]

The origin of the crisis is demographic, and its solution is demographic. To break the vicious circle, America needs to find productive young people to whom to lend. There are two ways this might be accomplished: immigration or exports.

This is a fallacy. If each person were resonsible for their own pension (IRAs, 401Ks, etc.) then each individual could invest their capital where the workers are -- be it in the United States or elsewhere -- that will provide a fair return on their investment.

[Star Traveler]

No problem .... the Muslims are making up for the dearth in births ... LOL ... they're planning on taking over here, just by having babies ... hoo-boy!

See the following from another post of mine..., and make sure you see that short little video on "Demographics" ...

---

That evil and oppressive governmental idealogy of Islam and the way of implementing it by Sharia law is already making inroads right here in this country — the good ole USA. We’re about to see a “takeover” of the U.S. by the evil and oppressive idealogy of the government of Islam (that is aiming for world-wide conquest and has stated that the U.S. is *on its list* to take over...)

And for those people who need some additional facts about what the evil and oppressive governmental idealogy of Islam is doing, look at some of the following.

There’s no question about it... the enemy is *Islam* itself and the evil and oppressive and false idealogy that it perpetrates. Some say the problem is “fascism” (instead of the basic oppressive governmental idealogy of Islam, itself). But, that is to engage in “political correctness” and nothing more... and sidetracks people from the *true enemy* in this war.

In one generation we’ll see, right here in the United States that “Islam” is the enemy and not “fascism”...

Muslim Demographics...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

and also, this...

Islam: What the West Needs to Know - FULL LENGTH ENGLISH VERSION
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-871902797772997781

and then, looking at this...

“The Third Jihad” (video - abridged version of film)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2271522/posts

This is the allowance of “false gods” to take over this nation because of the ignorance of the people of the land in regards to the true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...

And so, we see that we’re going to have the “false god of Islam” ruling over the USA and running the USA in just one generation from now.

[kabar]

There are only two countries in the industrial world with a positive rate of population increase, the United States and Israel. That is probably because they are the two developed countries with the highest proportion of people of faith, as I argued before.

Immigration is driving our increase in population. We will add 130 million people in the next 40 years, 75% due to immigration. We are importing poverty, which will hurt this country economically. Milton Friedman said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” We have both.

[Age of Reason]

America is overpopulated as it is.

We don’t need anymore people and we don’t need any further loss of freedom that comes with population growth.

[wardaddy]

This and baby boomer die off is what will keep US housing from ever getting back to the boom

baring massive immigration of skilled well off workers

[tanknetter]

2) Americans need to rebuild their finances, that is, to save, just when their incomes are falling and unemployment is rising.

An important point to consider in this regard is what will happen at the end of 2010 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Not only will you have incomes falling, but businesses and individuals will have significantly less disposable income to pump into the system because a larger chunk of their income will be dedicated to paying the increased taxes.

[Gen-X-Dad]

The perfect storm for the ruling elites of modern day Western civilization:

1) Overpopulation causes a great concern that the ruling elites will run out of resources to live their lives the way they want to (ever wonder why billionaires seem obsessed with supporting environmentalism, birth control, abortion, and turning large chunks of property into state controlled reserves?). Their Malthusian obsession is very evident in our time.

2) With advancements in technology, the ruling elites really don’t need all of us hanging around to meet their needs. Huxley estimated a cap of 2 billion in “Brave New World”, the Georgia Guidestones push for a cap of 500 million.

3) We have seen decades of social engineering promoting zero population growth a.k.a. ZPG (abortion, destruction of heterosexual marriage, rise of homosexuality, birth control, obsessive protection of environment at expense of humans, etc.). They have been very successful in accomplishing their goals through this social engineering based on the evidence of the demographic curves.

4) However, someone forgot to persuade the equatorial regions to buy into ZPG and now Western Civilization can quite simply be overrun as soon as the current crop of human beings die off. This has happened many times in the past, stagnant populations are dismissed while more vibrant populations take over.

5) The ruling elites have set up their Western financial system to be driven by constant growth (steady inflation, steady increase in producing and selling things to consumers). Essentially they have constructed an elaborate ponzi scheme which is buckling under the pressure of unsustainable growth. They have the success of ZPG to thank for accelerating this problem.

They are in a conundrum of their own making. The nature of unintended consequences is upon us.

[wagglebee]

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[GOPJ]

Countries with good "social security" systems have few births.

Countries without social security systems use children for that purpose - and there's an abundance of children.