What does America's falling birth rate mean to the economy? Just look at Arizona

[IronLionZion]

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/27/news/economy/arizona-birth-rates-economy/index.html

When Laura Pedersen opened her clinic for young pregnant women in Tucson nearly 20 years ago, her job seemed overwhelming — around 12,000 babies were born to teens in Arizona a year, with all of those young moms requiring special counseling and support. The program, called Teen Outreach Pregnancy Services, even opened a second location in Phoenix to keep up with the need.
But 18 years later, demand has fallen off a cliff. In 2016, fewer than 6,000 teens gave birth in Arizona.

"We have definitely experienced a decline in the number of referrals," Pedersen says. "There's not as great a need for our services."

Arizona, which in the early 2000s had one of the highest fertility rates in the country, saw the largest decline in the number of births of any state over the past decade. It went from nearly 103,000 births in 2007 to about 81,000 last year — a 20% drop.

What's happening in Arizona is an extreme example of a wider trend occurring across America. The "total fertility rate" in the United States, representing the number of kids the average woman will have in her lifetime, sank to an estimated 1.76 in 2017, down from 2.12 in 2007. (This isn't the lowest point, however. The nation's birth rate reached 1.74 in 1976, after a huge spike from the Baby Boom, when American women had more than three kids each on average.)

Do it for America.

Or simply be less racist about immigration policy.

[Squinch]

1. We're wrecking the planet. Fewer of us is a good thing.

[smirkymonkey]

4. Yes, pretty soon they will be begging immigrants to come here.

There are plenty of people in the world, we don't have to encourage people here to have more babies.

[silverweb]

6. Exactly!

I get so frustrated when I hear these cries about declining population. That's exactly what we need for this over-burdened, over-exploited, over-populated world!

Sometimes, though, I can't help hearing a whispered "white" between the words "declining" and "population," and something tells me that this is the real concern for many.

[Squinch]

7. No question.

[genxlib]

2. All things considered

The world needs fewer people so I am not certain this is a terrible thing.

However, our economic system depends to a large degree on a certain balance of age demographics to function.

If they really cared how many kids that Americans were having, they would do something about the cost of raising kids.

My daughter is 16 and college preparation is overtaking our household. I knew college had gotten expensive but the sticker shock is beyond what I had imagined. It makes me glad I only had one and I can't recommend more to anyone else starting out today.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. The planet's current population, 7.6 billion people,

is unsustainable. There should probably be no more than 1 billion people, although the environmental and ecological damage that has already been done is probably fatal.

[Retrograde]

5. It's tripled in my lifetime

I'd like to get the total population down to about 3 billion (by making education for girls and reliable birth control universally available) but that's going to take a long time.
T
There's at least one example of what happens to the economy after drastic population fall - Europe after the Black Death wiped out a third of the population or more in the Middle Ages. Working conditions and wages improved for a while, but people being people the population crept back up again.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. What happened in Europe with the Black Death (although that term did not come

into common usage until at least the late 17th Century, at least 400 hundred years after the events it refers to) that drop in population, even though it resulted in many economic benefits to the working class, in the long run barely affected demographics. In the short run, it was devastating, and made enormous changes in things like wages. But it wasn't that long before things went back to where they'd been.

[Demovictory9]

9. I remember when in was about to surpass 4 billion, it was big news