They're puzzled by the total fertility rate dropping and staying below the replacement rate.
Reported here:
But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86 [in 2013], the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.
Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country's five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent. ...
[T]he U.S. only reached a TFR above 2.1 in 2006 and 2007, at the height of the housing bubble years.
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The total fertility rate in the US has been below the replacement rate since 1971 except for the two years noted. This is the real reason behind the immigration liberalization push by Republicans, who didn't have enough children themselves and still don't understand as a political party that it's impossible for America to look like it did in the past, now or in the future, without having done so. They are as guilty as liberals in eschewing family.
It raises the question of what comes first: the GDP or the population which goes on to consume it. Arguably, just as banks create money by writing loans, not by the Fed printing dollars, people actually create future economic growth by having children in the present. It really isn't the other way around, but we haven't been smart enough as a culture to grasp this. Women naturally grasp this. They not only naturally want children on a time schedule dictated by human biology, but also grandchildren. But the liberal war on this natural instinct has succeeded in killing off the goose that laid the golden egg of American greatness. It should not come as a surprise that GDP was negative again.
We do not live. We just survive.
A little Larry Norman from 1973, from the not coincidentally entitled "Nightmare Number 71":
We kill our children swap our wives
We've learned to greet a man with knives
We swallow pills in fours and fives
Our cities look like crumbling hives
Man does not live he just survives
We sleep till he arrives
Love is a corpse we sit and watch it harden
We left it oh so long ago the garden
