What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear? | The American Spectator

The U.S. faces a crisis that has yet to make itself widely known: Women are having fewer and fewer children with each passing year. Whereas in 2007 the U.S. averaged 2.12 births per woman, that number has continuously fallen ever since, decreasing in 2023 to reach another record low of 1.62 births per woman. That’s well, well below replacement levels.
The fertility crisis has yet to make a significant impact on the U.S. economy, but according to a report released this week by Pew, we are beginning to see the first effects of the crisis on state budgets.
Those effects obscure the trouble on the horizon because they seem positive. States are having to devote less of their budgets to education and children’s health care, as those costs are declining as fewer children are born.
But the good times are the calm before the storm. Next year, the first cohort of children born in this age of declining fertility will reach adulthood. What will follow soon thereafter will likely be a shrinking tax base as well as limited revenue growth. These problems “will only intensify over the next several years,” says the Pew report.
The report doesn’t say much about how severe these problems will be. But it does give us a taste of the panic that is beginning to hit some state capitols. A budget forecast in Montana released this year warned: “[A]nemic growth among the younger age cohorts in Montana is troublesome for the future of the prime working age population and by extension economic growth.” This will bring reduced income and payroll tax revenues at a time when health care costs for the elderly are increasing.
The Pew report analyzes the decline in fertility rates state by state. Troublingly, recent declines are particularly pronounced among red states that had previously bucked the trend of decline and maintained higher fertility rates, such as Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, and Idaho. Nationally, the fertility rate in 2023 represented a 10.6 percent decline over the 2011-20 average. …