(DCNF)—The steady decline of birth rates in the U.S. creates considerable concerns for the future of the American economy, which relies on a robust working-age population, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Birth rates have steadily declined for a number of years in the U.S. and currently total around 12 births per 1,000 people, which is lower than the 14.2 birth average seen in 2000 and far lower than 24.3 in 1950, according to Macrotrends. The decline in birth rates poses major issues for long-standing economic and government institutions that depend on larger labor forces, but the worst of the effects could be avoided if proper policy actions, like addressing runaway government spending and entitlement programs and investing in measures that improve productivity, are taken, experts told the DCNF.
“Declining birth rates are a major problem for America. Our greatest economic resource is not land, or water, or energy, but people,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the DCNF. “Fewer births mean less economic growth, all else being equal. Additionally, we face another problem in many of our entitlement programs, which have been set up like Ponzi schemes, such as Social Security. These programs require a much higher birth rate than we currently have in order to prolong their solvency. We are already seeing this effect, with major entitlements moving toward insolvency faster than previously anticipated because the birth rate has been so low.”
Both the federal and state governments are facing huge debts and unfunded liabilities in terms of entitlement spending like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and pensions. Working-age populations have increasingly been unable to provide the necessary funding for these programs as the number of older Americans grows, resulting in more than $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
There is a strong correlation between higher incomes and lower birth rates, with countries where gross domestic product per capita is below $1,000 per year usually seeing women give birth to more than three children, while women in countries with $10,000 per year tend to have no more than two children, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Economists speculate about a number of different reasons why this relationship exists, such as the cost of educating children in richer countries, higher infant mortality and people in poorer countries more commonly having to take care of their parents as they age.
“It is possible for a shrinking, aging society to maintain and increase prosperity, but that isn’t going to happen automatically,” Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “We’ve got reasons to be cautiously confident, since there are constantly improving technological possibilities, since in general, we kind of hope that health is going to be improving. And since, in general, we think that education is going to be improving. All of those things can lay the foundation for more productive, wealthier Americans, even if the headcount is shrinking.”
Demographically, Japan is done pic.twitter.com/HN70JndcKn
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 28, 2024
Investors have been increasingly optimistic that technology related to artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to generate huge increases in productivity, with semiconductor companies leading the charge on AI, like Nvidia, seeing massive gains in stock prices in the last few years.
“What does not work so well is when you have some of the things we see today, with health stagnation, with troubles in education, with a completely feckless inattention to budget discipline in our public finances,” Eberstadt told the DCNF. “Those are not the sorts of things that are going to help lay the foundations for an increasingly prosperous country.”
Government debt has continued to grow at a fast pace under the past few administrations, currently totaling nearly $34.4 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. The U.S. added over $800 billion to the national debt in just the fourth quarter of 2023 and spent $659 billion on debt payments in the fiscal year.
“If this continues, the symptoms here in America will grow to the same magnitude as in Japan, China, Korea, and others,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Legal immigration has helped alleviate the problems of America’s low birth rate, but illegal aliens are actually exacerbating the problem. Not only are the latter less likely to pay taxes than legal immigrants, but they’re also eligible for government handouts in several more liberal states. Thus, they simultaneously generate less revenue while adding to outlays.”
The employment level of foreign-born workers in the U.S. has climbed from 27,697,000 in February 2020 to 29,842,000 in 2024, while the level of native-born workers has declined from 130,320,000 to 129,807,000 in that same time frame, according to FRED. In the 2023 fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection saw more than two million encounters at the southern border.
Japan has long experienced issues of an aging population and declining birth rates, with the number of births reaching an all-time low in 2023 and current trends indicating that the country’s population could shrink 30% by 2070, according to Independent. The country has experienced widespread economic trouble since the 1990’s, with some referring to 1991–2011 as the Lost Decades, according to Investopedia.
“Over the long term, a shrinking labor force is going to put a constraint on US economic performance,” Eberstadt told the DCNF. “How much of a constraint it puts on US economic performance is going to depend upon a lot of other things we do politically, like how we schedule and structure our entitlements, the sorts of incentives and the sorts of arrangements we make for our national health care incentives.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.