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Originally Posted by Pete F.
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The article admits that we have a low fertility rate and that it is a problem. But it avoids a deeper analysis of why that is. It claims that Republican policies are the problem. However, it doesn't mention that low birth rates, even lower than in the U.S., are endemic to all Western societies, especially in Europe which has the kind of economic policies that the article says Republicans should promote.
It doesn't mention the impact of the thousands of babies aborted every year for convenience. It doesn't mention leftists policies that push free birth control. It doesn't mention environmentalist's (I'm sure WAPO is in favor of environmentalist policies) call for lowering population numbers. It doesn't talk about Progressive deconstruction of genders which normalizes various sexualities which don't reproduce. It doesn't reflect on life style choices in the West that call for less and later birth choices--it claims that these choices are due to economic policies. It takes money to raise children. If you want more and better things, having less or no children helps to pay for that.
But it's not that middle or upper America can't afford more children. It's that they choose not to for what Ryan might consider selfish reasons.
It's the poorer (and yes "minorities are a large part of the poor) who are more "careless" about getting pregnant, who we want to get, and to help get, abortions. But we already have policies to help the poor raise children. The child tax credit favors middle and upper income families way more than the poor. And the middle and upper can afford children, but choose to have less or none or later because they value more goodies than more children.
The article blames the Republican tax plan for potentially suppressing birth rates. But lower birth rates have occurred already before the implementation of the tax plan. And the plan gives some more money back to the lower economic ladder. And generous European social welfare plans do not help boost birth rates. If the resulting lower birth rates are any evidence, they seem to suppress or lower birth rates.
So, rather than change the Western cultural shift which trends toward pleasure rather than parenthood, the article suggests that since the Republicans won't fix our "demographic difficulties" with government economic manipulation, we should resort to immigration to fill the void. It doesn't explore what demographic and cultural changes will result from such a solution. Perhaps the WAPO, being leftist, knows the change would favor the election of Progressives to power and the ensuing growth and power of government--the power of the State rather than of the individual. And that is perfectly reasonable for those who have been acculturated into the me-without-responsibility type or offshoot of individualism--the selfish "me generation" Boomers who have now come of age in the power circles of our country. Those who have accepted the Faustian bargain of selling their souls to the power of government to take care of all their society's functional needs as well as many of their personal ones so that they can spend their time and money on having the materially "good life."
Western Europe, especially Germany, has long used immigration as a means to supplement its working class to compensate for it's low fertility rates. It is now reaping an unanticipated result. There has been a demographic shift from a Post WWII freer democratic society to a more authoritarian one where the "native" Europeans have less to say about a maintenance of their characteristic cultures and are forced to change into a global view of their identity. And as the immigrant families have higher birth rates complimented with the continuing influx of even more numerous immigration from other cultures antithetic to the European's own, European culture is gradually replaced. Culturally and individually complex Western civilization "evolves" into a homogenous one world dominated by a strong "politically correct" centralized government, but a weak population of disempowered (but nice "life style" for the few better offs) citizens.
Ultimately, the responsibility of maintaining a free society rests on the people, not the government. Government is the antithesis of freedom. The more powerful and expansive the government is, the less free are individuals. The old adage still applies to a free society--that government which governs least, governs best."
Selfishness has its good use. What you are selfish about determines the type and quality of life you have in a free society. Of course, under forms of predominantly authoritarian government you have limited ability to be selfish. In a society of free people, if you make the wrong selfish choices, you endanger your freedom. If you choose not to produce the next generation that will maintain your culture of freedom, the children you do produce may well lose that freedom. If you are selfish to preserve that which you consider being free and being good, you had better not constrain your natural drive of bearing children to the point that there are not enough to maintain what you desire.
And then, there is also that Progressive contradiction--the notion that we must somehow preserve the natural world against our degradation of it. Yet, there is this unnatural predilection of progressives to denature us. To make us these automatons of the State who can be manipulated into various genders and sexualities, who can be artificially manipulated from one class into another, who can be transformed into a universal "correctness" in which we are somehow "diverse" yet essentially the same and equal. Somehow, the power in the natural universe must not be endangered by humans, but the natural proclivities and power of humans must be molded into a preferred image concocted by some supposedly super class of technocrats. And the triumph of this ideology, of course, will solve all problems including the obsolescence of nations and cultures and discriminations and any need to "immigrate" or to choose life styles or to choose the number of children to have. The "nature" of child birth is reduced to some form of central planning. And the embedded, artificially created and implanted notion of some blissfully controlled future surely has an effect, subliminally if not actually, on the psyche of those when they think about having children.
But more to the immediate point, if you choose to keep bringing in more people from other cultures who have different views of government and different selfish goals, and they have birth rates which exponentially and naturally expand, while your birth rates fall below even replacement numbers naturally devolve into a smaller and disappearing population, then the "logical conclusion" is obvious.