You expect something as population-spanning as birth rates to hinge on the outcome of a single congressional midterm election?
If anything they're going to decline further, Republicans are back to their "obstruct literally everything" agenda that they always have when they're the minority. Any potential pro-natalist government policies will almost certainly require government spending, which will now die in the house. So we're stick with the status quo, which is low birth rates.
It goes to show that political tribalism trumps just about everything these days, including truth, objective facts, and the obvious.
It should also be obvious that just about every single leftist movement is destabilizing towards both the family as a unit and society in general, which, as you can guess, results in people having fewer kids. But don't let your tribalism get in the way of that either.
Chuck Schumer recently said that the solution to our population problem is to essentially encourage more illegal immigration. Note that his solution had nothing to do with supporting families. He couldn't do that even if he wanted to, because he would offend his left flank on every attempt.
No, I'm blaming Republicans for blocking initiatives that might actually help the birth rate. Including things like better funded public education and funding for childcare.
I can blame Democrats for a bunch of stuff too, but at least every once in a while they get something through that actually helps people. The current generation of Republicans are in "burn it all down" mode, and they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that they have more kids on average (perhaps unwisely) means nothing. If you want to get into quality of life statistics, Red States also on average have the highest suicide rates.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/...
> No, I'm blaming Republicans for blocking initiatives that might actually help the birth rate. Including things like better funded public education and funding for childcare
There’s pretty good evidence that weak public social safety nets, particularly around old age, disability, etc., contribute to higher birthrates, [0] so you should be applauding the Republicans and their attacks on Social Security and Medicare, if that is your highest concern.
[0] speculation is because in the absence of state support, family are your social safety net, and particularly younger family members.
Shockingly I have concern for the quality of life of said kids.
Theoretically you could increase the birth rate by using the army to force people to breed at gunpoint. But it probably isn't going to result in a high quality labor force, social cohesion, or high quality of life for those involved.
> Shockingly I have concern for the quality of life of said kids.
But do you really? Because, for instance, children in Sweden have shown a far more rapid decline in mental health than in other similar Nordic countries without government child care:
"An official Swedish government investigation in 2006 showed that mental health among Swedish 15-year-olds declined faster from 1986 to 2002 than in eleven comparable European countries."
If you cared about the well-being of children, you'd think you'd fully consider the effects of various policies on children before advocating for them.
“Children are tragically being trafficked across the border by illegal immigrants who falsely claim they are related,” Ernst added. “This needs to stop — for the wellbeing of these children and the security of our nation. ... Of the 100,441 arrests for illegal border crossings in February, unaccompanied children accounted for nearly 10%"
However, instead of supporting measures like school vouchers and charter schools that have been proven to help the most in inner cities, democrats have fought these policies tooth-and-nail at the behest of teacher's unions, who themselves have openly admitted they care about teachers, not students. https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...
Have you considered that your "care for quality of life of children" could instead be empty virtue signaling and a desire to parrot the partisan views of your political party, which has proven itself time and again to be bad for children?
Yes, because the world has always needed more government education and government healthcare to have children... I seriously wonder how much you actually critically consider your beliefs and how much you just take them in as indoctrination? https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/08/09/is-sweden-our...
"The conventional wisdom goes like this: ... countries such as Sweden, with its heavily subsidized, always-available daycare, generous parental leave shared by both parents, and a culture ordered around community and family life rather than work, hit the "sweet spot" of replacement-level fertility rates."
"Except that the notion of a replacement rate fertility in Sweden is itself a bit of a fantasy. As of 2018, the total fertility rate in Sweden was 1.76 children per woman. Among native-born Swedes, it was even lower, at 1.67. To be sure, this rate is higher than that of such countries as Germany (1.59 in 2016, or 1.46 among women with German citizenship), and even slightly higher than the record low rate of 1.72 recorded in the United States in 2018, but it's still not the replacement-level of 2.1."
Are you suggesting that Sweden would have a higher birth rate if it cut all of its social welfare programs? And are you further suggesting that those children would have a high quality of life?
Instead of just poking holes, what's your solution? What do you think the developed world needs to have more children? I can't see how making it easier through government spending would hurt.
Instead, our government has been increasingly hostile towards the practice of religion, especially from the judicial bench, for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. We need to do more to encourage and support religious belief and expression, but we are instead doing the opposite.
The study, titled, “The Ties That Bind: Is Faith A Global Force for Good Or Ill In The Family,” made some statements sure to upset the anti-religious members of the Times staff, including:
“When it comes to relationship quality in heterosexual relationships, highly religious couples enjoy higher-quality relationships and more sexual satisfaction, compared to less/mixed religious couples and secular couples.”
“When it comes to fertility, data from low-fertility countries in the Americas, East Asia, and Europe show that religion’s positive influence on fertility has become stronger in recent decades. Today, people ages 18-49 who attend religious services regularly have 0.27 more children than those who never, or practically never, attend.”
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Next solution. The sexual revolution and 2nd-wave-and-beyond feminism were highly detrimental to the family and to fertility, and the sooner we can unite against both, the better. The soviet union's sexual revolution predated ours by decades, but they were smart enough to roll it back after realizing just how disastrously it affected the country: https://poloniainstitute.net/recommended/the-bolshevik-sexua...
It's interesting to note that the Bolsheviks also wanted mandatory universal child care. That's not a coincidence, by the way! From the linked article:
"The Bolsheviks also wanted to take care of all children at birth, taking them from their parents and placing them in nurseries. Officially, they intended to free women from taking care of children so that they could devote themselves entirely to their work. In fact, for the indoctrination and creation of the so-called new man. Zlata Lilina, an official of the People’s Commissariat for National Affairs, stated in 1921 that when children were placed outside the home, one acted for their good: “The family is individualistic and selfish, and if a child is raised in it, it becomes largely anti-social and develops selfish tendencies … Raising children is not a private matter of parents, but the task of society .”"
Next solution. Reducing government spending means the people will have more money because there will be less inflation, less taxes, and less national debt. This will make it easier to raise families and for one parent to stay home and be a full-time parent.
Next solution. We need school vouchers, first and foremost because the public school system is doing terribly and it needs competition as an incentive to improve. Second, the morality and ethics generally taught in public schools and in our universities is anti-family and the opposite of what is needed to support families and society. As long as we are spending money on education, we should fund more private and religious schools that do a better job of both educating and teaching good morals.
We also need a return to a belief that Western civilization is something to be proud of and worth preserving. When you believe our very civilization is corrupt to the core, you're less likely to want to have children. This will be more likely to happen with school vouchers, but also by having government spend less money and time funding ideologies like CRT and the transgender movement, both of which are extremely anti-family.
We also need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility in people towards society. We don't just have children for ourselves. We do it for the next generation. Really, we need to restore the moral principles we used to have and even took for granted. Instead, today these very morals are labeled as "white supremacist" by CRT activists.
None of these things are accidents. Leftist movements are fundamentally atheist, anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-Western civilization. Supporting them makes people unhappier in general, makes them have unhappier marriages, and makes them have less kids. It comes down to your core belief system, and "progressives" are about as regressive as it gets in that arena.
Yes: simply observe whose interests are always catered to regardless of the party in power. It’s not the average hard-working American.
Check who the major political donors are, who funds the NGOs, think tanks, and PACs which guide policy-making. Check who employs politicians after they leave public office and who pays their speaking fees. Check who owns the major media outlets. Check who funds the endowments of academic institutions. Check declassified CIA documents which show direct collaboration with entrenched monopolies in carrying out foreign coups and military interventions.
Sorry for the nihilistic view, but sadly, we’d all probably be better off if we voted randomly regardless of the candidate’s party membership. Otherwise, we vote for the candidate that gets the most air time from our party of choice or issue de jeur, which is usually the most corrupt candidate.
Till voters wake up and realize that the problem is not with other people’s representatives or the other party, we are doomed to repeatedly make the same mistakes.
If anything they're going to decline further, Republicans are back to their "obstruct literally everything" agenda that they always have when they're the minority. Any potential pro-natalist government policies will almost certainly require government spending, which will now die in the house. So we're stick with the status quo, which is low birth rates.