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 319 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 meaning that it will be a long time, if
ever, before those single families put back into the system, and most will
never put back in as much as they are taking out. Those children will cost
more to educate, be more likely to be involved in crime and less likely to
succeed economically. But even if they weren't, the system would still be
unsustainable.
Liberals act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed
if we take more from the "wealthy elderly" or give them less. And the
topic even came up at the CNBC Republican debate in a Social Security
debate.
But the problem is not the amount of money being spent at
the top on the elderly, but the diminishing prospects for paying in money
at the bottom. Youth unemployment is high and job prospects are low. And
the birth rate is skewed toward populations that are the least likely to
be educated, the least likely to have good jobs and the least likely to
pay more into the system than that they take out of it.
At the CNBC
Debate, Senator Rand Paul said, "It’s not Republicans’ fault, it’s not
Democrats’ fault, it’s your grandparents’ fault for having too many damn
kids." But it's the other way around. Your grandparents didn't have enough
kids. Neither did your parents. Neither do you.
Ron Paul had five
kids. He had four brothers. That's a stable generational expansion.
Without that, there's no one to pay for an older population that is living
longer.
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.
Bernie Sanders admires Europe. But
Europe's welfare state is imploding because of low birth rates. And so it
adopted the American solution of expecting immigrants to make up the
difference. But the immigrants have high rates of unemployment and low
rates of productivity. Instead of funding the welfare state, they're
bankrupting it even faster.
The United States takes in a million
immigrants a year, many of whom also take out more than they put in. 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 doesn't 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. 25 percent of
these senior immigrants were over 80. Desiline Victor wasn't an outlier.
Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part
because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like 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, late marriages, working parents, 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.
Instead of forming a comprehensive picture,
our approach is to tackle each problem as if were wholly separate from
everything else. Working parents are applauded because they swell out the
tax base in the short term. Young immigrants are applauded because they
are supposed to swell out the lower part of the demographic imbalance.
Manufacturing jobs are cast aside for modern jobs. The long term
consequences of each step is ignored.
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.
The reality is that John and Julia begin
their 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.
John and Julia are Obama voters. They have two children.
They don't worry about the future. The future to them seems to be a bright
and modern thing overseen by experts and meticulously planned out in every
detail. The only dark clouds on their horizon are the Republicans and the
Great Unwashed in the Red States who are resisting the future by clinging
to their guns and bibles.
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. There are a number of factors responsible, but one
simple factor is that work ethics and skills are no longer being passed
down to a growing percentage of the population.
Liberal 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.
The issue isn't "investing more in education" which is the liberal
solution for everything including the imminent heat death of the universe.
It's liberalism.
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 spending completely
unsustainable. On a social level alone, we don't have the people we need
to pay the bills. And at the rate we are going, we will only run up more
bills that our demographics and our culture can no longer cash.
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.
14 million people
are now on Disability. That means that there are more people on Disability
than there were people in the country during the War of 1812. Half of
those on Disability are claiming back problems or mental problems. There
are over a million children on Disability and the program is packed with
younger recipients who are substituting it for welfare.
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 is
bankrupt and doesn't know it yet. Reality hasn't caught up with the
numbers. Instead the welfare state is floating on loans based on past
productivity, old infrastructure and a diminishing productive population
whose technological industries employ fewer people and don't require their
physical presence in the United States.
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.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based
writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz
Freedom Center.
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