In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4 per 1,000.
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 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 . . . . .
Read the complete article at the Sultan Knish Blog
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