One Way To Fix Plummeting Birthrates: Stop Bashing America
By: Josh Hammer
The America hatred that is the 1619 project, critical race theory must be confronted head on and defeated. America is an exceptional nation that it’s citizens should show pride in being a part of it. People from all over the world try to come here because they want a piece of how great we are. We as citizens should put America first.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The National Center for Health Statistics, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention subagency, reported this week that America’s fertility rate dropped for the sixth consecutive year. Total births declined by 4% in 2020, down to 1,637.5 children per 1,000 women. The statistical replacement rate for the U.S. population, by contrast, is roughly 2,100 births per 1,000 women. Overall, the 3,605,201 births last year in the U.S. represented the lowest number since the Jimmy Carter presidency.
It is perhaps too early to tell whether yet another annual incremental birthrate decline is anomalous, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or flows naturally from existing demographic trendlines. Sociologists and demographers will pore over the data, but it is difficult to ignore the broader trend and place the blame squarely — or even predominantly — on the virus and the myriad draconian lifestyle restrictions the virus engendered. On the contrary, many had speculated before this week’s report that the extended COVID lockdowns might lead to a one-time annual increase in the birthrate as couples sheltered in place together for months on end.
This bleak demographic reality is inconsonant with Americans’ stated child-rearing preferences. According to polling data revealed by American Compass in February, 45% to 50% of Americans who do not report that their families are still growing say they have fewer children than they would ideally desire, whereas 0% to 10% of Americans without growing families say they have more children than they ideally would have had. Put simply, Americans want more babies, but for various, complicated reasons, they are not having them. A drastic incongruence between stated preferences and lived reality is the definitional case for good public policy, and there has been a resurgence of interest of late on the realignment right to rediscover the tools of economic statecraft as it pertains to family policy.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, recently released his Family Security Act plan to provide direct monthly cash benefits for young and school-aged children. Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, came out in support of a further increase in the Child Tax Credit for young children. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., unveiled a new “Parent Tax Credit” that the American Principles Project’s Jon Schweppe has labeled the “most pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-life, pro-adoption, pro-work, pro-everything-that-conservatives-love economic proposal offered … in recent memory,” and American Compass itself devised a rival “Family Income Supplemental Credit” policy. There are other competing ideas, too, such as University of Dallas professor Gladden Pappin’s 2019 proposal for a generous direct support system called “FamilyPay.”
This economic policy fermentation is deeply healthy. Elected Republicans in Washington, D.C., ought to eventually coalesce around one proposal, but for now, the intellectual vitality of the present policy discussion is intrinsically beneficial. There are also innumerable avenues for noneconomic policy — the realms of sociology, technology, religion and so forth — to help lay the foundations for a possible new baby boom. Here is one exceedingly straightforward idea to add into the mix: Stop incessantly bashing America and telling young parents and children to hate America.
As a matter of public discourse and increasingly as a matter of education policy, impressionable young would-be parents and their even more impressionable children are indoctrinated in rank America-hatred. The most sordid forms of this indoctrination come packaged in woke-speak such as “critical race theory” and “anti-racism,” which dovetail with The New York Times’ insidious “1619 Project” in making an affirmative case for America’s purported “systemic racism.” This is no longer a fringe theory relegated to the cesspool that is the modern American academy; in the aftermath of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s recent guilty conviction, no less a figure than President Joe Biden himself seized the moment to decry the “systemic racism that is a stain on our nation’s soul.” Indeed, in the year 2021, condemning the United States’ incorrigible “systemic racism” is perhaps the Democratic Party’s foremost call to arms.
Holding aside the fact that this is a noxious lie — America has not been “systemically racist,” with the possible exception of the anti-Asian racism of affirmative action education policies, since Jim Crow — there are tangible effects of this rhetoric for the body politic. Put simply, inculcating America-hatred logically ought to disincentivize young, healthy couples from procreating. After all, who would rationally want to bring forth new life into a country that is irredeemably “systemically racist” to its core?
Demographers often associate falling birthrates with falling confidence in a nation’s future. The U.S. in the year 2021 is no exception. Fortunately, some of our plummeting confidence is baseless — and self-inflicted. The most straightforward way to help accelerate birthrates again could be as simple as ceasing the collective self-flagellation of leftist America-hatred.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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The people raping the earth want you to reproduce?
The dang fundies just keep getting nuttier every day.
Indeed. The world has nearly 8 BILLION people, with diminishing resources and ecological damage as a result. And some people think it's a good idea to increase the population? Nuttier doesn't begin to cover it!
I can't stand people that think they have to have twenty kids.
Nothing but ridiculous vanity.
And selfishness and stupidity.
Any more than 2 is too many.
Hardly. That will ensure population stability and balance.
There were four of us. I think two is a good number. That way the kids have a sibling.
Let us know when you and Josh figure out that all those new babies are going to grow up, move to cities and yikes, become secular liberals.
Lower birth rate is one key to solving overpopulation and poverty problems and the other key is keeping people from all over the world from coming here (as mentioned in article). Both of these put America first.
You wanna take care of plummeting birth rates then stop making it such an expensive pain in the ass to have kids. Maybe provide some incentive for young couple to have children, because as it stands right now there isn’t one.
The pro-birthers have ZERO interest in children after they are born. For them it's all about telling when what they can do with their own bodies because many of them are misogynists. Ted Cruz is a prime example.
It's because many of them believe they have a pocket sky fairy that was the one who wanted those children in the first place and will magically take care of everything eventually when "he" returns, that way they can attack those who are pro-choice while also shirking all responsibility for the unwanted children born if they got their way.
Just turning on the local news is enough to show anyone that it is pretty unsafe to bring children into this world already, no bashing of America needed.
America is a far better place to be born than many other places on this planet, but since the first humans walked this earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, it has been an inhospitable deadly fight for survival, that is the nature of nature. It doesn't give two shits about us being humans or any other animal, it treats everyone just the same and is just as likely to drown you or kill you with a violent storm as it is to provide a protected habitat.
Thank goodness our ancestors weren't such wusses. (that is if you like life, which I do). Imagine thinking that 2021 is "unsafe" compared to just about any point in global history. Life was as Hobbes describes life before the modern state:
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
The better things get, the more progressives hate the world..
[(removed)] because kids are expensive as hell. Who wants to have kids when it costs an arm and a leg to cover the hospital bills, young couples probably have student loan debt, their jobs probably aren’t exactly paying a whole lot and they want a house some day, and child care is incredibly expensive. There is every economic reason imaginable to NOT have children in America.
People used to have a lot of kids because a) there was no birth control, and b) childhood fatality rates were pretty damn high and children were needed to assist with various labor tasks especially in rural areas. None of that is the case now.
The claim was the world is now unsafe. Nothing you wrote has anything to do with that.
Thank you to the progressives for the insight into your issues.
The amount of projection by progressives is extraordinary.
Pro-social engineering? Just admit you are for it!
What’s bleak about it? If you ask me, we could use less people, not more.