On the menu today: The first half of an idea that is too big to fit in just one edition of this newsletter . . . What do U.S. government leaders prioritize? What should they prioritize?
Listen to the Democratic Socialists of America, and you would think the biggest problems facing the United States are the existence of billionaires, of private companies, of the U.S. Senate, of the presidency, of the Supreme Court, and of the State of Israel.
Listen to the president, and you would think the biggest problems facing the United States include the lack of a White House ballroom, vandals terrorizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, the mortgage application of Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, and the lack of a paid subscription service for early access to presidential announcements.
Listen to non-DSA Democrats, and you would think the biggest problem facing the United States is President Trump.
Listen to focus groups, and you would think the biggest problems facing the United States include the construction of data centers, pollution of drinking water,* and government tracking of personal data.**
But in fact none of these rank among the biggest problems facing the United States. The biggest problems are complicated, and scary, and solving them would require making decisions that place the country’s long-term interest over individuals’ short-term interest. Read on.
Neither the President nor Congress Seems to Be Making These Issues a Priority
1. The decline in the birth rate will have ripple effects. About 3.6 million babies were born in the United States last year, continuing a decline since the peak of 4.3 million babies born in 2007; in other words, nearly 718,000 fewer children were born in 2025 than in 2007. (The early data for 2026 look slightly worse than for 2025.)
Given those 3.6 million babies born in 2025, in the year 2043 the United States will have slightly less than 3.6 million young people turning 18 and becoming legal adults. (Alas, some children will die in the next 18 years.) That total could be increased through immigration of children born in 2025, but as you’ve noticed, legal immigration is a lot more controversial than it used to be.
The Institute for Family Studies calculates that “if fertility rates continue their recent decline, U.S. population will peak around 351 million and begin declining in the 2050s. . . . Even as the total fertility rate has plummeted below 1.6 children per woman, surveys continue to show Americans incorrectly think they will have about two children each and aspire to have 2.4 children each.”
Thanks to the stark raving maniac Paul Ehrlich, many people think overpopulation is a major threat. Ehrlich, the biology professor and environmentalist who died earlier this year, was stunningly successful in convincing human beings to see each other as burdens and liabilities to be eliminated instead of allies and assets to be welcomed and integrated.
This is not intended to pooh-pooh anyone out there who didn’t have children or hasn’t had children yet, but children are an amazing incentive for long-term thinking in adults. When people become parents, suddenly they have an enormous investment in the condition of their community, their country, and the world a decade or two down the road. The “burn it down” mentality has a much harder time catching on when you’ve got a lot more to lose.
The Institute for Family Studies regularly publishes detailed reports on the declining birth rate and delayed family formation, and those reports are chock full of recommendations. Yet other than nibbling around the edges — creating the $1,000 “Trump account,” increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,220, and establishing the Moms.gov website — there’s little indication that halting or reversing the declining birth rate is truly a priority for the president or most members of Congress.
But forget the problem of having significantly fewer young adults in the year 2043. Think about the coming years: What are they like if you work in the toy industry, or children’s book publishing, or your company manufactures playground equipment, or you work in any business whose customer base is primarily children? Speaking of institutions that revolve around children . . .
2. The K–12 enrollment collapse has already begun. Fewer kids being born means that five years down the line, there will be fewer kids entering kindergarten and the school system. This is bad news for all schools, but even worse news for public schools, because their funding is based on enrollment. Fewer students means smaller budgets.
From Reason:
Public schools are already feeling the squeeze of reduced enrollment. Since 2020, national enrollment numbers have dropped to 49,516,361 students — a loss of almost 1.3 million students, or –2.5 percent — as of 2024, the most recent year with complete data available.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), public school enrollment is projected to decline by another 2.6 million students by 2031, which would mean a loss of four million public school students since 2020.
From the New York Times, in May:
A school with too few students still needs a principal, teachers and other key employees, resulting in a high cost per student. Often, schools cut electives or offer fewer Advanced Placement classes, which can push more families away.
Closing school buildings can save money — but be politically explosive.
So far, relatively few districts have carried out large-scale closures, in part because of political pressure from families. Some districts have faced criticism that closures would disproportionately harm minority and low-income students.
Still, closures may be on the horizon for more districts. Philadelphia and Austin, Texas, recently approved plans to close schools. In Oakland, Calif., where previous attempts to close schools have been vigorously opposed, more than 60 principals signed a rare letter supporting closures.
And in Pittsburgh, a plan to close nine schools was voted down by the school board in November, only to be put back on the agenda this spring.
But as schools get smaller, then maybe class sizes will get smaller, and each student will get more attention, ensuring greater achievement, right? And then they can go to college, except . . .
3. The higher education “enrollment cliff” has also already begun. Back in 2008, the Great Recession started, and the U.S. birth rate, which had remained flat or showed a very gradual decline, went into a steeper decline. It’s now 18 years later; there are fewer 18-year-olds around, so there are fewer high school seniors applying to college. In the coming years, the numbers will only decline further.
Jay Caspian Kang, writing in the New Yorker:
Scholars and researchers disagree a bit on how steep this decline will be—the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that the number of high-school graduates will be down thirteen per cent by the end of 2041—but almost everyone agrees that a significant contraction in the country’s number of colleges is inevitable.
The effect, it’s important to note, will not be evenly spread throughout the country. Some states, such as Hawaii, Illinois, California, and New York, might see their population of high-school graduates drop by more than twenty-five per cent. The South has a rosier outlook, because more people are moving there, and its Latino population, in particular, is booming.
Jeffrey Selingo, writing in The Atlantic:
If you overlay a map of where colleges are located with projections of high-school graduates, you’ll notice an immediate disconnect with supply and demand. The Northeast and the Midwest have the highest density of college campuses but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s. In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates. Only 10, most of them in the South, will experience growth.
Unlike a Home Depot or a McDonald’s, colleges can’t simply relocate when the nearby population shrinks. “When local options start to disappear, it can start a downward spiral,” Nicholas Hillman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the geography of higher education, told me. Colleges come to resemble zombie malls with fewer majors and students, eventually ending up in a doom loop they can’t escape.
This is all separate from the ongoing decline in international students, driven in large part by the policies of the current administration. According to the data released earlier this month, international enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities peaked in the 2024–25 academic year at 1,178,000 students; this year it is projected to be 1,057,000, a decline of 121,000 students over two years.
Those pursuing a career in academia ought to keep that in mind: the near future will feature fewer colleges and universities, with smaller enrollment, smaller faculties, and fewer opportunities for tenure. (On all matters education-related, check out National Review’s special back-to-school issue!)
There is never a good time for leaders of higher education to come across as arrogant, smug, out of touch, ideologically and politically extreme, or tolerant of antisemitism. Alienating the public and elected leaders is never advisable. But to do so right as the demand for your services is plummeting is a special kind of self-destructiveness.
But at least the kids who come out of the remaining colleges will be prepared for the workforce, right? Well . . .
4. Colleges aren’t preparing graduates for the workplace well enough. ResumeTemplates.com surveyed 1,000 U.S. hiring managers responsible for entry-level hiring at companies with 101 or more employees. Their assessment of recent college graduates was grim:
When managers explain their hesitation, the reasons center on character and conduct more than credentials.
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A lack of relevant work experience is the single most-cited concern, at 45 percent.
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69 percent name at least one character concern. The most common are a lack of work ethic (33 percent), professionalism (32 percent), and motivation (31 percent).
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Managers also frequently cite poor communication (28 percent), difficulty handling feedback (26 percent), insufficient technical skills (26 percent), and poor time management (25 percent).
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24 percent say grads arrive entitled, with unrealistic expectations, and 18 percent say grads are too easily offended at work.
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Two AI-specific concerns now appear on the list: 18 percent say grads submit AI-generated work without checking it, and 16 percent say grads over-rely on AI for tasks they should do themselves.
I would point out these are not new complaints; ten years ago, a test of nearly 32,000 college students found that “four in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work.” And experienced workers griping that new hires don’t know anything has been a thing since, oh, Sumeria, 2000 B.C. But that doesn’t necessarily mean today’s complaints are baseless.
But at least those young people will have jobs, right? Well . . .
5. AI is hollowing out entry-level jobs. Notice that the most common complaint from employers about their entry-level employees was “lack of experience.” But those jobs are supposedly “entry level.” It used to be that your first few jobs helped you develop those critical thinking skills. (Scientists dispute the argument that male brains don’t fully develop until age 25, but let’s face it, most of us guys in our 30s or above made better decisions in the latter half of our twenties than in the first half.)
It’s never been easy to get an employer to take a chance on you if you don’t have the relevant experience. But now it’s just about impossible: “The share of salaried jobs open to candidates with no experience has fallen 73 percent in four years. Inexperienced candidates are now welcomed in just one in 50 openings, down from one in 15 in 2022.”
But what’s even worse is that the capabilities of AI are making entry-level jobs the easiest to remove or not replace. “Research from Revelio Labs shows that entry-level job postings in the U.S. are down 35 percent since early 2023. In specific sectors, the decline is far steeper: junior postings in software development and data analysis have fallen by as much as 67 percent, according to sector-level tracking across major job boards.”
Of course, some of this may just reflect unrealistic expectations on the part of employers. It may be an urban legend that a listing for a job opening stated, “Must have 10 years of experience with ChatGPT” when ChatGPT has existed only since 2022. But many job seekers can tell tales of job listings requiring unrealistically high levels of experience to perform mundane tasks, and for meager pay. In some cases, the process of finding a job in 2026 means using an AI program to tailor your résumé to match an AI-written job listing so that the AI will put you in the “deserves an interview” pile. And that’s separate from the worsening problem of “ghost jobs” — perhaps one out of every five jobs — that companies do not intend ever to fill.
These are just five looming problems that our elected leaders are mostly or entirely ignoring. Because I am a congenital and creative pessimist, I have six more — but if I laid them all out, that would make this newsletter epic length. So I intend to address them tomorrow. (Hint, many involve the consequences of an aging population.)
* If you get your drinking water from a public system, the chances of that water being polluted are extremely low. The U.S. has spent $2 trillion on water-treatment and -distribution systems since the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, and “the share of readings exceeding current health standards fell by half from 2003–2019.” According to the CDC, each year, about one in 300 Americans gets sick from germs found in drinking water; but keep in mind, “from 1971 to 2006, the proportion of waterborne disease outbreaks in public systems declined while the proportion of outbreaks in private well systems increased.” If you get your drinking water from a well, you have a higher risk of waterborne disease; the CDC funds drinking water programs at health departments to improve access to safe drinking water in private systems in their communities.
** I find it a little strange that, according to a recent survey, “government tracking of personal data” ranks among the top ten American fears, given that every year, every American sends in a document detailing his or her name, date of birth, home address, telephone number, Social Security number, marital status, and number of dependent children, together with complete financial records of income, investments, and bank accounts, and in some cases expenditures that allow one to claim deductions — charitable donations, mortgage interest, medical expenses, student-loan interest, local or state tax payments, records of adoption, higher-education enrollment, and childcare expenses, among others. Many Americans also list their direct-deposit routing and account numbers for tax refunds or payments.
So, the question is, What personal data do you fear the U.S. government having that the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t already have?
ADDENDUM: The Morning Jolt, May 15: “What If Fully Autonomous Combat Drones Are Already Here?” In that edition, I reported on a Latvian official who works in national security, speculating that a Ukrainian drone that went off course and hit a fuel storage depot in Rēzekne, Latvia, back on May 7, may have hit that target because it was autonomous, using some sort of AI algorithm or other visual-data-recognition program to spot a targeted Russian oil facility.
The New York Times, this morning, discussing a recent strike by a Russian drone:
They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have died in Russian airstrikes, but the circumstances of their deaths came with an ominous twist. The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and the forensic team that examined wreckage from the deadly strike and others in the city.
The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said.
Russia’s AI-driven drones are powered by a miniature Nvidia computer.
That’s Nvidia, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.