I'm sure there'd be higher birth rates if we could fucking afford them.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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Seems like the ruling class are trying to normalize pedophilia ahead of more Epstein news.
Encouraging more teen pregnancies seems like it might cause problems for the education system, but that's okay; Fox News loves the uneducated.
Personally I suspect that the best cure for a low fertility rate is a good 60 to 100 years of declining population size. It's worth a try anyway.
My biggest concern is not that fertility rate is low/population decline is happening, it's that it's happening way too quickly for society to be able to handle it.
We're talking like 4 old people per child (estimated number). Not only would it be a massive strain on the economy to have so many elderly people/retirees to take care of, older people will also have a highly disproportionate account of political power due to their relative abundance. If it's already such a big deal that boomers were twisting the political landscape for their gain, I shudder to think what would happen at this larger and longer scale.
All of this is going to be a breeding ground for misogyny and right-wing ideology when people start thinking that it's [opposite gender]'s fault that they're not living as well as they were promised by the previous generation. We've already seen it in South Korea, and we're seeing it now with the rise of isolation and inceldom.
Plus, without younger people to take up the mantle, many industries that we rely on will need to downsize, and a lot of institutional knowledge will be lost. Many roles that require a "master-to-apprentice" style of learning will be lost and will be unable to recover, even if the population started growing again.
Fox News has the wrong take here, as it is wont to have. But we genuinely should be really concerned that birth rates across all developed countries are this low below replacement rate and are still dropping
Well the solution would be END FUCKING CAPITALISM ALREADY, but since none of the younger generations actually care to do so we get to enjoy a rest period on the environment, maybe enough of one to slow some of the later effects of climate change.
We're already dead as a species within 500 years. No matter what we do CO2 PPM is going to triple by that time and that will, at the very least, eliminate higher-order thinking and shrink brain development far below what is necessary to have more than a passing visage of human society.
So maybe with fewer people we can skip the worst of the water wars (which started in 2014) and maybe even skip some of the worst of the food and migration wars (already starting, will escalate over the next five years as major producers like the us fail to produce excess thanks to shifting seasons and lack of workers).
Honestly best case scenario is natural population decline.
Even without capitalism the math doesn’t math.
If there’s only one working person for every four old people, and those four old people each need one or two caretakers a piece then there’s not enough workers to go around.
And that doesn’t count every other job in society that needs done to support the caretakers, like growing food and fixing toilets.
Oh I see the problem you're having, you still think most jobs need doing.
They don't.
The majority of jobs under a capitalist society are not needed to produce goods, nor distribute goods, nor consume goods.
We could just eliminate health insurance. Entirely. Just completely remove the concept from our society. There are now 1.6 million people that need work. Median age of 32.
Remove all insurance and we get up to 3 million. That's about 5% of the working population.
Insurance is only needed under capitalism. so let's eliminate that.
Now eliminate Marketers. Now all advertising. and so on. Eliminate middle management.
Congrats. we keep going like this and we can easily get a quarter or more of the working population doing something useful.
Now let's bring in incentives for the chronically unemployed, the majority of which just can't compete in capitalism, but still have both the skills and capability to flourish under alternative economic systems that don't require 40-80 hour work weeks after begging for a job through the least efficient hiring process ever developed.
The more you dig into the facts, the more you realize that not only do we not need most people working full time, we don't need most people working.
And with more free time that increases innovation, and without a capitalist structure preventing automation vis-a-vi complete societal collapse, congrats you now have incentives to reduce work even further to the minimum amount.
This not only allows for depopulation, but actively encourages it, naturally, as despite having more free time and resources and less stress, people would only have kids if they wanted kids. Not because they need someone to take care of them in their old age, or other such coercive, frankly evil excuses to have kids.
I don’t think most jobs need doing. I don’t want any jobs at all period.
But if you have four old people who need four workers to care for them and there’s only one worker to go around no amount of firing social media managers and insurance adjusters that’s gonna fix it.
This isn’t an economic problem, it’s a demographic one. Which is why it’s a problem across the world and not just in capitalist nations. (And is in fact worst in China due to the effects of the one child policy.)
You don't need one worker per old person. The best care homes in the world still do 10-1. Most care homes get by with minimal incidents at 20-1. Heck you won't even get investigated for neglect in the US until you're at 30-1 or higher (depending on the state.)
As someone who was a CNA for a short while -- either the old people are doing fine, in which case they mostly take care of themselves with 'reminders' and 'structure' provided by the carers, or they're REALLY not doing fine in which case they're going to the hospital and statistically will not need constant care for much more than a few hours.
Old people are shockingly self sufficient, almost like they're people, even in terrible condition; one good nurse and a CNA can handle a 20-odd crowd from breakfast (including wiping) to settling in for bed (including wiping, so much wiping). Technically a nurse can do it alone if they have no overweight or PITA patients to oversee.
Okay, let’s assume it’s 10-1. How many other people, in a perfectly efficient system, would it take to provide a decent quality of life for that caretaker and the 10 elderly people? Growing and transporting food, building and maintaining infrastructure, researching and providing medical care, producing electricity and clean water. Nothing extra.
And how many people to support these people.
Probably more than we’d have available to work.
There’s a reason China started taxing condoms.
Wanting children to fuck more is at least a little pedophilic
Again, this is why they're against abortion and want immigrants out of the country. They want a white nationalist population that are slaves to them. This is all a class war, not an immigrant or age war.
They need the poors to fight their wars and work on their factory floors.
Spitting bars, dude. I hope you don't mind if I borrow this.
And mind you: money have absolutely nothing to do with the situation!
I don't know the reasoning of that fox news analyst. But it is true that the declining birth rates are to a large extent due to less teens and early 20s women having kids. The amount of late 30s and 40s women having kids has actually increased in the same period. Kinda ironic how the young single moms conservative media have been shaming and demonizing for decades were actually the ones keeping the birth rate up. And now that they are far fewer suddenly that's a problem as well.
The overall fertility rate decline in the U.S. extends beyond just teenagers, Siegel noted.
“Dana, people are having kids in their 30s now, not their 20s,” he told the anchor. “And again, that’s leading to one thing I want to point out. The replacement rate is down to 1.56, meaning every couple is having, on average, 1.56 children in the United States. We need two or above to keep the population at the same amount.”
It's actually a bit more than 2. About 2.07, IIRC.
EDIT: Though you'll often see it rounded to 2.1.
EDIT2: Basically, at about the Great Recession (~2007), it took a major wallop and didn't recover, and then kept declining through the COVID-19 era. My understanding from past reading is that it had been expected that the Great Recession would send it down
economic uncertainty causes fertility rates to drop
but the problem is that it didn't rebound afterwards.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US
Ah... it's so cynically amusing when one of the toxic assholes who has actively made this country into such a shitty place to live that more people every day decide there's no fucking way they're going to subject a kid to that (or that even if they wanted to, there's just no fucking way they could afford it) tries to blame the resulting declining birth rates on some idiotic red herring.
And just that much more amusing when, as happens very often, their red herring just serves to advertise their ephebophilic fantasies.
A veiled endorsement of rape if I ever saw one.