Like many Democrats who grossly exaggerate the size of things, RFK Jr doesn't understand that there were only 3.6 million births in the US last year

 

Having fewer children per family means having fewer rebel last borns and the more docile, compliant, trusting population we have today instead

 Having fewer children per family means having fewer rebel last borns in society and therefore the more docile, compliant, trusting population we have today, which is more easily led and misled.

 

Michigan deaths exceed births by 12,921 in 2020 due to pandemic: Births down 50% from peak Baby Boom year 1957

There were 104,166 births in 2020 in Michigan, 50% fewer than in 1957 when there were 208k, the peak year of the Baby Boom in the USA.

There were 117,087 deaths in 2020 in Michigan.

And ~ 99,000 deaths occurred annually in Michigan, pre-pandemic.

Story here.

Therefore ~ 18,087 deaths in 2020 are possibly attributable to the pandemic according to this accounting (117,087 minus 99,000), except NYT data shows only 13,010 pandemic deaths in Michigan in 2020, which is very close to the 12,921 net deaths minus births.

The 5,077 (18,087 minus 13,010) difference in deaths represents 39% more deaths.

Due to what, exactly?

Fake jobs boom: After 8 slow years of full time jobs recovery we're STILL not back to where Reagan got us in 4 years

Full time jobs are the sine qua non for family formation, births, homeownership, car sales, durable goods orders, retail, tax revenue and good schools.

You wanna know why all that sucks? Joe Biden's THREE LETTER WORD, J.O.B.S., right here:

It's hard to escape the conclusion that US GDP has been highly dependent on fertility

Peak Baby Boom 1952-1957 when births per 1,000 of population averaged 25.17 (graph 1) is probably the simplest explanation for outsized GDP performance during the years when this generation turned 22 from 1974-1979. More babies in the 1950s equaled more GDP come the late 1970s.

We only wish for that GDP now.

Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, still owns the best 4-year GDP record in the post-war, despite everything you've been told (graph 2). It's nothing special he did really, it's just that in 1975, the year before his election, you had the very peak of the Baby Boom turn 18, those born in 1957 when births per 1,000 hit 25.3 for the second and final time in the post-war. They and the rest of their cohort were ready to consume in numbers never seen before. Their era spanning from Nixon/Ford from 1972 when the first of them turned 20 through Reagan in 1984 when they turned 32 represents the coming of age of America's most powerful economic demographic and the period when America's GDP performance hit its highest levels (average 46.3%).

Their failure to have enough children themselves, however, is also a big part of the explanation for the GDP trend heading south after their time. They consumed, but they did not at all produce children like their parents had. In fact, the nadir of births per 1,000 before the current period occurred from 1972 to 1977, precisely the period exactly 20 years after peak Baby Boom 1952-1957. Births per 1,000 averaged just 14.92 during this period, a rate nearly 41% lower than their parents' era. So the most prolific fruit of the Baby Boom had gone on to become themselves the least prolific, having the fewest children ever.

Not surprisingly, without enough bodies the economy inevitably began to run out of gas starting about two decades after that. Clinton era GDP performance was never as good as Reagan's, and the era was marked by various warnings, not the least of which were the bond debacles of 1994 and 1999. The great Reagan bull market ended in August 2000, a recession ensued in 2001, average S&P 500 return has been reduced to 5.2% per annum over the last 17 years, and the GDP growth rate after Clinton has averaged just half what it averaged before Carter (16% vs. 32%). No wonder the trend is down so dramatically (graph 3).

The solution?

Have LOTS more kids, and wait 20 years, if you want America to still be America, that is. Otherwise, let in even more than the 1 million immigrants we already let in annually, and prepare to kiss your country goodbye.

But don't hold your breath. Births per 1,000 have fallen to an average of just 12.5 for the five year period 2011-2015.

They don't call it the suicide of the West for nothing.

graph 1

graph 2

graph 3

Noah Millman at The American Conservative discovers the inverse of "Employment Population Ratio: 25 - 54 years"

Here, excitedly writing about the inverse of this chart which has been around for a long time:

The problem with measuring employment with this chart, or unemployment with its inverse as Millman advocates, is that this cohort (25 to 54 years of age) has been shrinking due to declining birth rates. The meaning it conveys has changed over time for this and other reasons.

Rising birth rates of the Baby Boom until 1964 help explain the dramatic upward movement in the chart thereafter in the first place, along with the entry of Baby Boom women into the workforce at the same time, a second most important variable.

Additionally, at the peak of the Baby Boom in 1957, the birth rate was 25.3. Twenty years later in 1977 it was only 15.1 and has remained thereabouts and even lower ever since.

The lower birth rates have been winding their way through the employment statistics while female employment was peaking at the same time, like the inverse of a goat going through the belly of a snake but undetectable because of the female phenomenon. The peak in the employment population ratio of this cohort notably coincides with the 1957 peak of the Baby Boom hitting 20 years in the workforce in January 1999, shown above. They hit 30 years in the workforce in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession.

Ask how many 52 year olds lost their jobs that year (29.5 million of all ages lost their jobs in 2009), and then passed out of the range of this chart within two years, only to be replaced by . . . not enough people born after 1964.

Interestingly, employment for women in this cohort, while still not fully recovered, is off only 600,000 from the 2007 peak, but for men is off 1.8 million, both on an average basis through 2016. That's a deficit of 2.4 million, but based on declining birth rates I'd estimate most of them won't ever materialize in the future . . . because they never existed.

During the Baby Boom between 1946 and 1964, births per year averaged 4.0 million. But between 1965 and 1992, today's 25 to 52 year olds, births per year averaged just 3.6 million per year.

That's 11.6 million fewer people to take up today's slack.

This is probably as good as it gets.

Middle class brick wall: Obama ends his presidency with new housing starts down 34% overall compared with 1959-2008

Not seasonally adjusted, new housing starts averaged 1.28 million per year from 1959-2008, but under Obama they averaged just 0.84 million per year, according to the December data out today, completing his eight year record down 34% from the post-war average.

The monthly average for 2016 annualized is 1.17 million starts, which will end up being Obama's best year but only just above the post-war average cyclical low of 1.13 million per year.

So under Obama all we have done is climb back to the average cyclical low point for new housing starts.

Housing booms have been marked by an average cyclical high of 1.97 million new starts per year in the post-war, but Obama's best performance in 2016 is over 40% off that average high.

2009 marked the low point since 1959, with just 0.55 million new starts, sliding all the way down from the 2005 cyclical high of 2.07 million, a collapse of over 73% for the new housing industry.

Since September 2008 through November 2016 there have been approximately 6.5 million completed foreclosures according to Corelogic here. That means that over 16 million people have been displaced from their homes during the Obama era based on the average household size of 2.5 people.

The homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2016 fell to its lowest point in five decades at 62.9%, the same rate which prevailed in 1965.

Pew reported in December 2015 that after more than four decades as the economic majority in the United States, the middle class had become out-numbered by the combined number of the rich and the poor. Pew reports that in 1971 middle class adults were 61% of their fellows vs. only 50% in 2015. The underclass has grown by 25% while the richest tranche has grown by 125%.

At least some of the decline in the relative size of the middle class has to do with the enormous number of illegal aliens flooding the country since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, and with a large number of Baby Boomers moving on up in an era of credentialism while eschewing larger families for themselves than they came from.

Births per 1,000 women fell to their lowest point since 1909 in the first quarter of 2016 at 59.8. The rate was 122.9 in 1957.

You can't have a decent country unless you give birth to it.

Ironman thinks the decline of the middle class is demographic, explained by fewer births between 1964-84

Here.

In other words, if you have fewer people in the middle of your data set (Generation X), you'll necessarily have a slump in the middle between old rich Baby Boomers and the more numerous than Gen X Generation Y, which is young and poor, as is everyone at that age.

The middle class decline is therefore most likely to be temporary.

Make America Great Again: Make Babies

Births per 1000 population in 2013 fell to 12.4, less than half the 1957 level of 25.3.

The preliminary estimate for 2014 is 12.5 per 1000 population, as of June 2015.

Rush Limbaugh expresses astonishment that Germany will accept 500,000 refugees annually

Limbaugh said in the last half hour that he looked into it and discovered Germany's birthrate is so low they're happy to have the refugees as future workers.

How long will it take this doofus to figure out that our declining labor force is the result of retirees who aren't being replaced because our birthrates were also too low for too long?

The Baby Boom between 1946 and 1966 produced 83.1 million births. Unfortunately Baby Boomers produced just 72.6 million births from 1967 to 1987, a shortfall of 10.5 million or 12.6%.

What it means is there are 500,000 fewer replacements every year on average for retiring Baby Boomers, about 85% of whom more or less survive to retirement age.

Birth rate in 2013 reaches new all time low under Obama

The birth rate per 1000 women in 2006 and 2007 had been 14.3, but in 2011 it fell to 12.7 and then to 12.6 in 2012.

Things have gotten even worse in 2013: the birth rate per 1000 women is now barely 12.4, a new record low.

In the late 1950s the birth rate per 1000 women exceeded 25.0, and fell through the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing in the range of 15 for many years thereafter.

View the recent CDC reports here and here.

No babies, no GDP.

In 2012 births were 12.6 per 1000 women, but chlamydia infections were 456.7 per 1000 population

That means this sexually transmitted disease infection actually occurs about 36 times more frequently than pregnancy carried to term.

Stated another way, this venereal disease infection in America dwarfs actual reproduction by 3524.6%.

Story here at cnsnews.com:

In 2012, the average chlamydia infection rate in the U.S. was 456.7 per 1,000 population. Mississippi had the highest rate (774.0 per 1,000) while New Hampshire had the lowest (233.0 per 1,000).

Left untreated, chlamydia can make you blind.

Our brilliant masters raised the cost of youth labor by 41% in the teeth of the financial crisis, decimating their employment by 43%

The current deficit in the general employment level is about 1.55 million below the July 2007 peak (all figures are not-seasonally-adjusted as published by stlouisfed.org). Since the measurement typically is at its highest in the summers, it looks likely that after seven years we are finally going to dig out of this hole this coming summer. Swings up 2 to 4 million from the winter lows to the summer highs are not unusual for this measurement.

That said, deficits in the levels for some age groups remain, and reveal how far behind the employment level remains even as population has increased over the period by an additional 16 million.

The question is why.

Most importantly, workers in the core of the working age population 25-54 years old are today 5.7 million fewer in number than they were at their November 2007 peak, which is the largest deficit by age group.

The oldest of these workers today were born in 1960 when births per 1000 women were still 23.7. The youngest were born in 1989 when births per 1000 women had plummeted to 16.4. But it wasn't until 1965 that births fell below 20 per 1000. That means there are only five tranches left in the measurement today from the high birth rate years 1960-1964 inclusive, whereas seven years ago the picture was a little different. We had seven more high birth rate years represented than we do today. Those aged 54 seven years ago were born in 1953 when births per 1000 were pushing 25. Births per year from 1955 through 1964 reached as high as 4.27 million in 1961. Contrast that with 1973 through 1976 when births crashed to 3.1 million per year, a deficit of 4 million over just those four years compared to the pre-1965 levels.

It appears therefore that the fall-off in the employment level of those 25-54 can be explained entirely by the aging of their cohort in which many millions over the last seven years have moved on to the next level, and by the failure of the younger members of this group to bring up the rear in terms of their aggregate numbers because there just weren't enough of them born. The reason for the decline of their employment level is therefore structural, not economic, and will continue to be so for the next five years.

Indeed, workers aged 55 and older have escaped a decline in their employment level. There are in fact 6.9 million more working at this age right now in 2014 than there were exactly seven years ago, which is what one would expect from the data. The Baby Boom is simply aging and continuing to work as it did before, and it has a lot of room left to run.

If there is an economic problem revealed by the employment level, it has to do with the youngest workers.

Consider teenagers 16-19: 3.2 million fewer teenagers are working today in that age range than at their pre-recession peak in July 2006 at 7.5 million. That's a 43% decline in teenage employment levels in almost 8 years, an utter catastrophe which has nothing to do with demographics. Birth rates have held steady between 1987 and 1998 at 15.4 per 1000.

Unfortunately, teenagers paid the biggest price because in the teeth of the first economic depression in the post-war this country decided it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage in 2007, again in 2008, and again in 2009. When wages came under severe pressure for every other age group and millions took pay cuts just to keep working, our brilliant masters decided to raise the cost of youth labor by 41% since 2006. And then the dopes voted for a guy who wants to raise the cost of their labor another 39%.

  

College age workers 20-24 by contrast, are in deficit from July 2007 by only 0.8 million.

The declines for the three age groups of 9.7 million minus the gain of 6.9 million for those 55 and older implies a net loss of 2.8 million in the employment level, impacting workers primarily 16-19.

If you want less of something, tax it. And that's what the minimum wage is, a tax on labor which reduces the quantity of it naturally.

Estimating Retirements Added To Those "Not In Labor Force" 2009-2013

It is often forgotten that retired people are classified as not in the labor force. The measure of those "Not in labor force" has grown to a staggering all time high of 92.338 million, not-seasonally-adjusted, as of December 2013.

Between 2009 and 2013 alone, the figure has grown by 11.05 million, and people like Rush Limbaugh thump loudly about all these people "not working" because of the bad economy.

The question is, though, how many of these are retirements?

I say it's theoretically possible that all of them are.

Those turning 66 years of age each year from 2009-2013 were born between 1943 and 1947.

And here are births from 1943 to 1947:

3.1 million 1943

2.9 million 1944

2.9 million 1945

3.4 million 1946

3.8 million 1947.

How many of these survived to age 66?

The CDC publishes annually the life tables, the latest of which came out a few days ago for the year 2009. A person aged 63 in 2009 (born in 1946) was among the 86% who survived to 63, according to the tables. In the 2008 tables from a year ago, that same person at age 62 was among the 87% who survived to 62. In the 2007 tables at 61 he was among the 88% who survived to 61. Extrapolating forward to 2012, we will estimate that at 66 he was among the 83% who survived.

So for persons born earlier than 1946 we can estimate their survival rate as follows:

Born in 1943, retiring at 66 in 2009: 80% survive, or 2.48 million

Born in 1944, retiring at 66 in 2010: 81% survive, or 2.35 million

Born in 1945, retiring at 66 in 2011: 82% survive, or 2.38 million

Born in 1946, retiring at 66 in 2012: 83% survive, or 2.82 million

Born in 1947, retiring at 66 in 2013: 84% survive, or 3.19 million.

Total theoretically possible retirees: 13.22 million, 2.17 million more than actually left the labor force.

Obviously, not everyone retires at 66. Some keep working. And especially these days some keep working because they have to. The employment level of the 55 and over set has grown by 4.5 million over the period 2009-2013.

It appears to be the case, however, that an even larger number are deferring both Social Security benefits and work because they can afford to: Social Security reports that retired workers and their dependents receiving benefits grew only 5.6 million from the end of 2008 to the end of 2013.

Of the 11.05 million added to "not in labor force", I'd estimate at least 5.4 million are well off enough to forgo both work and Social Security until they reach age 70, and perhaps more than that if Social Security recipients who continue to work according to the rules are counted instead as part of the labor force.

US Birthrate Declines From Replacement Rate To 1.87

So says a report in USA Today, here:

As the economy tanked, the average number of births per woman fell 12% from a peak of 2.12 in 2007. Demographic Intelligence projects the rate to hit 1.87 this year and 1.86 next year — the lowest since 1987. ... The U.S. fertility rate has been the envy of the developed world because it has remained close to the replacement rate of 2.1 (the number of children each woman must have to maintain current population) for more than 20 years.