On the menu today: Hey, remember in mid-June, when President Trump and the Pentagon ordered 200 U.S. Marines into Los Angeles, and that it was a sign of an authoritarian takeover of law enforcement and an attack on the Constitution? Every Senate Democrat signed a letter declaring the deployment “an alarming abuse of executive authority” that “continues to inflame the situation on the ground, and undermines the constitutional balance of power between the federal government and the states.”
I’ll bet you forgot the Marines were there. Our Noah Rothman notes that on Monday the Pentagon announced those Marines are being sent home; the threat to federal buildings and personnel has passed. Elsewhere, our James Lynch reports that Hunter Biden sticks to what he knows, which is blaming everyone but himself and his own family for the Democratic Party’s problems.
Today, however, we turn our attention to the fact that the U.S. fertility rate has now declined to approximately 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime — and yet only a small fraction of Americans feel that raising the birth rate ought to be a priority for our government. Our capacity to ignore long-term problems is real, and it is spectacular.
America’s Concerning Birth Dearth
Earlier this month, the AP published the results of an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,158 U.S. adults, asking their views on the declining birth rate.
Just 12 percent said “encouraging families to have more children” should be a high priority for the government; 26 percent said a moderate priority, and 62 percent said a low priority.
It is extremely difficult to solve a problem if people refuse to recognize that something is a problem. God knows how many people in that “low priority” category have a musky copy of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb sitting on some shelf, and/or remember the overpopulated dystopia and Charlton Heston revealing the secret ingredient of food in Soylent Green.
As the New York Times summarized the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “More than 3.6 million babies were born in the United States last year, a meager rise from the record-setting low in 2023. The fertility rate, approximately 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime, is well below the 2.1 births needed to maintain the country’s population through births alone.”
Now, the birth of 3.6 million babies sounds like a lot. But in the year 2007, we had 4.32 million born in the United States. In 2010, we had 4 million. We remained close to 4 million per year until 2016 (3.95 million). And then in 2020 — go figure, with the pandemic shutting down normal life for at least a year in most of the country — it dropped to 3.61 million. It’s been around that lower level since, which adds up to roughly 400,000 fewer children around each year than if we had continued the rate from 2010 to 2016.
We don’t think about population shifts much, because it doesn’t discernably change much from year to year. Only a handful of cities and towns experience dramatic shifts in population from year to year.
If you have 3.6 million babies born in the United States in 2024, then you will have, at maximum, 3.6 million 18-year-olds in the year 2042.
Now, the year 2042 might seem awfully far away. The American voting public has a remarkable ability to ignore long-term problems. In June, the trustees of the Social Security trust fund announced they “expect to run out of cash in eight years. Unless Congress acts before then, benefits for more than 60 million retirees and family members will automatically be cut by 23 percent.” The Hospital Insurance fund for Medicare Part A is expected to be able to fully pay scheduled benefits until 2033. Among the general public, almost no one noticed, or cared.
(And yet, soon I will be sending a beloved child to college. Trust me when I tell you, 18 years can go by in what feels like the blink of an eye.)
If you have significantly fewer children than previous years, this has far-reaching effects throughout the economy and nation.
In 2007, 4.32 million babies were born in America. In 2008, 4.25 million. But in 2009, that dropped to 4.13 million, and by 2010 it was an even 4 million. That 320,000-baby decline over four years reflected the arrival of the Great Recession, with far-reaching repercussions for American families.
You would think America’s teachers’ unions would be apoplectic about the trend of declining birth rates. Fewer children being born means fewer kids enrolling in schools down the road:
Across the country, public school enrollment has failed to rebound to pre-pandemic levels — and data suggests the decline is far from over.
According to projections from the National Center for Education Statistics, public K-12 enrollment peaked at 50.8 million students in autumn 2019, but is expected to fall by nearly 4 million students to 46.9 million by 2031, a 7.6% nationwide drop.
The steepest enrollment losses are in elementary and middle grades, with districts in the Northeast, West and Rust Belt most affected. When public school enrollment fell by 3 percent in 2020, it was the largest single-year decline since World War II.
The NCES 2024 December report, which accounts for fall 2023 data, found that 18 states saw public school enrollment declines of more than 4 percent. Ten states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and West Virginia declined more than 5 percent.
Some of that steep decline reflects a rise in private-school enrollment and homeschooling, but year by year, there are just fewer kids around for adults to educate, no matter which path the parents choose. In June, ProPublica reported that for years, Chicago Public Schools has operated in what can only be characterized as willful blindness about the rapidly declining enrollment:
There are 47 schools, including those inside DuSable, operating at less than one-third capacity, by the district’s measure. That’s almost twice as many severely underenrolled buildings as Chicago had in 2013, when it carried out the largest mass school closings in the country’s history, Chalkbeat and ProPublica found. The most extreme example is Frederick Douglass Academy High School, which has 28 students this year and a per-student cost of $93,000.
Someone out there will likely cheer smaller class sizes, but eventually, local boards of education will start to ask if they need as many teachers, administrators, and staff if the number of enrolled children keeps shrinking this year.
From 2007 to 2011, there were more than 74 million children ages 0 to 17 in America.
This year, there are 70.9 million of them. By 2030, that number is projected to further decline to 69.1 million of them. By 2035, 67.9 million.
Think about the number of Americans employed in making, marketing, and selling products for children — toys, bikes, children’s books, shopping-mall Santas, summer-camp counselors. You’re not going to see those industries disappear, but the size of the potential market is shrinking.
We’re coming up on the 18-year anniversary of the Great Recession, and with fewer 18-year-olds coming along . . . well, that’s really bad news for higher education institutions. NPR, in January:
Demographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this year. That’s when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors.
But the downturn isn’t just a problem for universities and colleges. It’s a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.
“The impact of this is economic decline,” Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says bluntly. . . .
This comes after colleges and universities already collectively experienced a 15 percent decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That includes a drop-off of more than 350,000 during the first year of the pandemic alone, and it means there are already 2.7 million fewer students than there were at the start of the last decade.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia published an in-depth study of the demographic phenomenon in December and concluded that as many as 80 colleges could close in the next five years. Your big-name colleges are probably going to be fine. But in 2024, at least 16 nonprofit colleges and universities announced closures. Delaware College of Art and Design, founded in 1997, closed its doors when enrollment declined to just 107 students.
In certain progressive circles, everyone’s talking about the Trump administration’s alleged war on college education. Very few are bothering to discuss the serious long-term threat of fewer students applying and fewer students walking through the door when classes begin. (I’m sure many colleges and universities will turn to foreign students, paying full freight, as the solution.)
We have fewer Americans being born, which means down the road we will have fewer students, fewer workers, fewer customers, and fewer potential members of the armed forces. We will also have fewer entrepreneurs, fewer doctors, fewer innovators and geniuses, and fewer problem-solvers. Legal immigration can mitigate these problems here and there, but the reputation of immigration as a whole has been tarnished by too many years of an insecure border and, at best, lax enforcement of immigration laws.
Our old friend Kyle Smith responded to the news that CBS was canceling The Late Show by attributing it to the hubris of Stephen Colbert. The host no doubt understood the show was losing $40 million per year. He could have led the way years ago, by taking a pay cut (Colbert was making $20 million) and encouraging everyone else to do the same and looking at the budget for manageable cuts. Instead, Colbert shrugged his shoulders and continued operating as usual, convinced that the network valued him and his show so much they were comfortable losing $40 million per year on it.
You get the feeling that that sort of arrogance and denial are pervasive among the elites of America these days.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Politico has found yet another little-known Democrat who is going to “turn Texas blue,” and Kamala Harris marks the one-year anniversary of the start of her abbreviated presidential campaign . . . and once again has nothing to say about state issues in California, which is just one more reason to doubt she’s all that interested in being governor.