On 8/9/2022 at 4:53 PM, DEPACincy said:

 

Because unemployment is historically low. We have an extremely tight labor market. Imagine the job growth we'd have with sane immigration policies.

 

Can you imagine the economic and population growth we would have if we let more people in? My wife and I know a half-dozen people from Ukraine who want to come here and not just because of the war. They have nearly the same cost of living as the US but get paid horrible wages. My wife was a sales manager in Ukraine but was paid in a day what a minimum-wage job pays per hour in America. Here, my wife works for a refugee service that is seeing a large secondary migration to Cleveland. Ukrainians first move to New York and other expensive East Coast cities, and then realize they can't afford to live there. So they move inland to cities with large Eastern European populations like Cleveland. We could really use the population from this migration and we have the entry level jobs to sustain it. Although my wife says that half of the Ukrainians who come here have college degrees.

3 hours ago, KJP said:

 

Can you imagine the economic and population growth we would have if we let more people in? My wife and I know a half-dozen people from Ukraine who want to come here and not just because of the war. They have nearly the same cost of living as the US but get paid horrible wages. My wife was a sales manager in Ukraine but was paid in a day what a minimum-wage job pays per hour in America. Here, my wife works for a refugee service that is seeing a large secondary migration to Cleveland. Ukrainians first move to New York and other expensive East Coast cities, and then realize they can't afford to live there. So they move inland to cities with large Eastern European populations like Cleveland. We could really use the population from this migration and we have the entry level jobs to sustain it. Although my wife says that half of the Ukrainians who come here have college degrees.

The E-1 Visa program needs to be expanded and should be doubled. Start getting qualified and educated professionals in who are trained and can help with the labor shortage. Right now, they exhaust the supply by like the 2nd day after they open up applications for the year. It should take most of the year to get reach the app limit. 

Welcome back 13,000, it's been some time.

 

(pause)

 

Now f' off and bring your friend 16,213 to the party.

 

On 8/10/2022 at 9:58 AM, DarkandStormy said:

 

Inflation is over (for now).  No rise month-over-month.

I definitely wouldn’t say “over.” We’re barely down from a disastrous peak. Hopefully last month was a peak, but even if it was, we could still be looking at inflation over 5% into 2024 or later.

 

Inflation is principally a result of extra-high corporate profits

 

 

 

On 10/20/2022 at 1:48 AM, KJP said:

Inflation is principally a result of extra-high corporate profits

 

 

 

 

A big driver of inflation was the temporary switch from Asian to domestic suppliers in the B2B world.  Margins typically stay constant, so if a company aims for a 30% GP but its expenses increase 10% and its quotes rise by that same percentage, assuming that business remains steady, net profits will increase even though margins remain unchanged.  

 

There has been enormous pressure placed on domestic suppliers since 2021.  Crazy money was thrown at hiring and retention to keep production going at 2019 levels - don't even think about finding guys for a third shift, they're at home living off unemployment and stimulus checks.  FWIW, my company recently returned to ordering containers from Asia.  With many others falling suit, we'll see this piece of inflation relax in 2023 but domestic hiring will decline along with it.  In the event of a deep recession, we'll see 1-2% deflation as we did 2009-2010.       

 

 

Edited October 25, 20222 yr by Lazarus

I wish I could live 2.5 years off of $2400 worth of stimulus. Maybe it's more like G'nR in like 1984 where these 40 year old chicks down the street would keep them alive and high as long as they got to bang G'nR.

17 hours ago, GCrites80s said:

I wish I could live 2.5 years off of $2400 worth of stimulus. Maybe it's more like G'nR in like 1984 where these 40 year old chicks down the street would keep them alive and high as long as they got to bang G'nR.

 

Boomers favorite line right now if inflation or the economy in general comes up is..."people are just living off of free money" lmao

26 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

Boomers favorite line right now if inflation or the economy in general comes up is..."people are just living off of free money" lmao

Nobody want to work because they are living high on the hog with $2,400 for the last 3 years. 

LOL, that's a pretty low hog.

On 10/24/2022 at 2:21 PM, Lazarus said:

 

 

A big driver of inflation was the temporary switch from Asian to domestic suppliers in the B2B world.  Margins typically stay constant, so if a company aims for a 30% GP but its expenses increase 10% and its quotes rise by that same percentage, assuming that business remains steady, net profits will increase even though margins remain unchanged.  

 

There has been enormous pressure placed on domestic suppliers since 2021.  Crazy money was thrown at hiring and retention to keep production going at 2019 levels - don't even think about finding guys for a third shift, they're at home living off unemployment and stimulus checks.  FWIW, my company recently returned to ordering containers from Asia.  With many others falling suit, we'll see this piece of inflation relax in 2023 but domestic hiring will decline along with it.  In the event of a deep recession, we'll see 1-2% deflation as we did 2009-2010.       

 

 

 

 

On 10/26/2022 at 2:29 PM, urb-a-saurus said:

LOL, that's a pretty low hog.

It's living high off the chitlins. I wish that was a clever joke.

On 10/26/2022 at 2:05 PM, freefourur said:

Nobody want to work because they are living high on the hog with $2,400 for the last 3 years. 

 

Many households got upwards or more than $10,000.  This incentivized people who were working full-time to not seek extra work, it incentivized people only working part-time not to work full-time, and it incentivized people who had been thinking about coming back to work to sit it out.

 

I know of a company that proactively increased warehouse pay in 2020...but the guys just started coming in less.  So they ended up with a worker shortage even though they didn't lay anyone off. 

 

 

 

 

6 hours ago, Lazarus said:

 

Many households got upwards or more than $10,000.  This incentivized people who were working full-time to not seek extra work, it incentivized people only working part-time not to work full-time, and it incentivized people who had been thinking about coming back to work to sit it out.

 

I know of a company that proactively increased warehouse pay in 2020...but the guys just started coming in less.  So they ended up with a worker shortage even though they didn't lay anyone off. 

 

 

 

 

10k is not gonna last 3 years either.  

It's been so long that people who went to college didn't have kids that the labor market is going to be like this. I'm 43 and don't have kids. In fact the only friends around I have with kids over 10 are military or tradies. And many still don't have kids at all. 

 

We've got employers trying to act like it's 1976 and everyone has 3 kids by 21 and that they NEED crappy jobs that pay a lot to feed these now-nonexistant kids. Parents today have no qualms about having their 30yo+ kids at home. In fact they want it.

The simplest explanations are the best. Look at this.

 

 

And also this:

 

 

And also this:

 

Wanna solve the labor crisis? Hint, two of these three things are hard to fix without forcing people to do things they don't want to do. One of these things is easy to fix if you just let people do what they want to do.

 

22 minutes ago, LlamaLawyer said:

The simplest explanations are the best. Look at this.

 

 

And also this:

 

 

And also this:

 

Wanna solve the labor crisis? Hint, two of these three things are hard to fix without forcing people to do things they don't want to do. One of these things is easy to fix if you just let people do what they want to do.

 

 

The top graph, legal or illegal?

1 hour ago, GCrites80s said:

It's been so long that people who went to college didn't have kids that the labor market is going to be like this. I'm 43 and don't have kids. In fact the only friends around I have with kids over 10 are military or tradies. And many still don't have kids at all. 

 

We've got employers trying to act like it's 1976 and everyone has 3 kids by 21 and that they NEED crappy jobs that pay a lot to feed these now-nonexistant kids. Parents today have no qualms about having their 30yo+ kids at home. In fact they want it.

 

Even in 1976, it was pretty rare for someone to have 3 kids by 21.  In fact, it was already getting rare for people to have 3 kids at all.  

 

https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/USA&statsVar=FertilityRate_Person_Female

 

TFR fell from 3.6 in 1960 to 2.48 in 1970 to 1.84 by 1980.  The seeds of the current labor shortage were sown more than 50 years ago.

 

On your other point: While parents might welcome their 30yo kids staying at home, they're generally less sanguine about said 30yo still living at home and being voluntarily unemployed, just because they don't want to be part of "the machine" or get caught up in "the grind" or whatever.

 

20 minutes ago, LlamaLawyer said:

The simplest explanations are the best. Look at this.

 

 

And also this:

 

 

And also this:

 

Wanna solve the labor crisis? Hint, two of these three things are hard to fix without forcing people to do things they don't want to do. One of these things is easy to fix if you just let people do what they want to do.

 

 

I'm actually curious which of these three things you think could only be fixed by forcing people to do things they don't want to do.  I think you mean that they are hard to do, full stop.  Reducing our death rate would be rather popular, but it's unfortunately not something you can just vote to do.  Even with respect to retirements, while the graphic is correct that "rising asset values made it possible for many Americans to retire early," the pandemic was the last straw for many that made it necessary for them to retire early, or perhaps we should say changed the risk calculus so that staying in the workforce (in professions that couldn't go remote) was an unacceptable risk.

17 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

 

The top graph, legal or illegal?

Pretty sure it's legal only. FWIW, it's harder to form numbers about undocumented folks since they're...undocumented.

 

That being said, we were at multidecade lows of border apprehensions (a proxy for illegal migration) until very recently. And the major spike only brings us back to roughly 1999 levels. I'm not running numbers, just eyeballing charts, but by every metric we have, the 5-year moving average of net migration looks very depressed.

 

There's also a big gap in the kinds of jobs businesses are complaining they can't fill and the kinds of gaps illegal migrants often occupy. Not that there isn't some overlap, but it's incomplete.

32 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

I'm actually curious which of these three things you think could only be fixed by forcing people to do things they don't want to do.  I think you mean that they are hard to do, full stop.  Reducing our death rate would be rather popular, but it's unfortunately not something you can just vote to do.  Even with respect to retirements, while the graphic is correct that "rising asset values made it possible for many Americans to retire early," the pandemic was the last straw for many that made it necessary for them to retire early, or perhaps we should say changed the risk calculus so that staying in the workforce (in professions that couldn't go remote) was an unacceptable risk.

 

I was trying to say it in a funny way rather than being precise. We're not going to force retired people back into the labor force, and we're not going to tell people what they can and can't eat for the good of their health. Those are just ways that people naturally behave. Immigration, on the other hand, is always artificially depressed because we limit legal migrant flows. For example, I have multiple personal friends who were here on visas (I think H-1B), briefly lost their job, and had to leave. Because when you're here on a visa we don't let you take time to look for a job and we usually don't let you take a job that isn't within your field. My friends were prohibited from becoming a waiter or waitress even though there's a shortage in those positions.

Since my wife started working for USCRI, it opened my eyes to how difficult it is for someone to come to the USA, even if they're fleeing a war -- if they don't have a sponsor who is already a US citizen.

 

Finding a job as an immigrant in America is also very difficult. American employers want people who have work experience in America. And the process to get hired in America is unnecessarily complicated. If it's difficult for many Americans to understand, how difficult do you think it is for a foreigner? And, of course, for a foreigner to come here on a work visa, an employer has to show that they tried to find an American to fill the job that has special qualifications, couldn't, and therefore had to look overseas. That may be doable for Cleveland Clinic trying to find doctors, but what about XYZ restaurant trying to hire a busboy?

 

If we want to ease the worker shortage, better open the gates a lot wider to more immigrants. Yes, I realize that means more people moving into cities and increasing the Democratic electorate. But if you care more about country than a silly, self-interested political party, you'd better do it.

4 minutes ago, LlamaLawyer said:

 

I was trying to say it in a funny way rather than being precise. We're not going to force retired people back into the labor force, and we're not going to tell people what they can and can't eat for the good of their health. Those are just ways that people naturally behave.

 

Well, sure, and those of us who want to see our TFR get back up to 2.5+ aren't talking about forcing people to get married and get pregnant, either.  You can tinker with incentives on the margins, usually with only minor effects (that's been the experience of several European countries with even more severe demographic-decline problems than ours).  But more serious changes need both more sweeping structural reforms and more sweeping cultural ones.

 

The immigration angle is relevant but even if net migration were back up at that 1.1M peak range, it's only a small piece of the pie.  Enough to make a difference but not enough to make the difference, if I can frame it that way.  There were 3.65M births in the U.S. in 2021.  A TFR of 2.5 would have meant about 5.56M births; a TFR of 3.6 (Baby Boom peak) would have meant about 8.12M.  So the ~800k difference from peak to trough in net immigration flows is more than a rounding error, but less than a panacea.  We need more immigrants and more of our own children.

Competition for office jobs in the 2000s was beyond fierce unless you were in IT or engineering. It derailed an enormous amount of people's careers. Sure you could find "fun jobs" that don't pay and warehouse crap but the office doors were locked tight.

1 hour ago, LlamaLawyer said:

Pretty sure it's legal only. FWIW, it's harder to form numbers about undocumented folks since they're...undocumented.

 

That being said, we were at multidecade lows of border apprehensions (a proxy for illegal migration) until very recently. And the major spike only brings us back to roughly 1999 levels. I'm not running numbers, just eyeballing charts, but by every metric we have, the 5-year moving average of net migration looks very depressed.

 

There's also a big gap in the kinds of jobs businesses are complaining they can't fill and the kinds of gaps illegal migrants often occupy. Not that there isn't some overlap, but it's incomplete.

 

2.2 million?

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/22/border-patrol-migrant-encounters/

53 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

Well, sure, and those of us who want to see our TFR get back up to 2.5+ aren't talking about forcing people to get married and get pregnant, either.  You can tinker with incentives on the margins, usually with only minor effects (that's been the experience of several European countries with even more severe demographic-decline problems than ours).  But more serious changes need both more sweeping structural reforms and more sweeping cultural ones.

 

The immigration angle is relevant but even if net migration were back up at that 1.1M peak range, it's only a small piece of the pie.  Enough to make a difference but not enough to make the difference, if I can frame it that way.  There were 3.65M births in the U.S. in 2021.  A TFR of 2.5 would have meant about 5.56M births; a TFR of 3.6 (Baby Boom peak) would have meant about 8.12M.  So the ~800k difference from peak to trough in net immigration flows is more than a rounding error, but less than a panacea.  We need more immigrants and more of our own children.

 

We need workers now. Not 16-18 years from now.

12 minutes ago, KJP said:

 

We need workers now. Not 16-18 years from now.

 

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

 

The second best time is now.

 

And I don't disagree with you about the immediate needs of the moment.  But people sometimes act like America won't even be here in 20 years and so thinking about the fact that we could be back at this moment in 20 years, or 30, or 40, seems too speculative to care about.  It isn't.

 

RE: KJP

Exactly. If the economy isn't considered stable enough due to dot-com and 2008 events white collar employers lock the doors like that but the blue collar stuff doesn't stop now. Immigrants typically did that stuff anyway but in the 2000s we tried to rely on teens and people who went to college for the "wrong" degree (all of them were "wrong" except engineering and healthcare) to fill in but it didn't work and everyone involved got pissed off since they were trying to make people with no kids work like someone with 4. Meanwhile Immigrants DO have 4 kids and work like it!

Edited October 28, 20222 yr by GCrites80s

1 hour ago, LlamaLawyer said:

 

My friends were prohibited from becoming a waiter or waitress even though there's a shortage in those positions.

This!!  We are the dumbest country. But somehow a whiff of same sex talk in schools, book bans, coaches with fake religious freedom infringements, and confusion over pronouns is all our politicians can talk about.

^ Right. I was recently offered a Data Analyst position for United Healthcare and I've been retired for 5 years. We need more workers  now. 

33 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

 

The second best time is now.

 

And I don't disagree with you about the immediate needs of the moment.  But people sometimes act like America won't even be here in 20 years and so thinking about the fact that we could be back at this moment in 20 years, or 30, or 40, seems too speculative to care about.  It isn't.

Eh, the way politics is going in this country, the US could possibly be unrecognizable in 20 years. 

2 hours ago, Gramarye said:

We need more immigrants and more of our own children.

 

Well, if you want to encourage couples to have kids, how about free maternal healthcare, free childcare, paid parental leave, advanced child tax credit -- all things that would make it easier for couples to have and support kids.  All policies more heavily favored by Democrats (and Jesus) than Republicans.  If you just want tax cuts for the rich and policies of "we can't afford that" then you vote Republican, the Be Afraid Party -- They're Coming For Your Job/Guns/Religion.

That stuff helps, but if people are 35, college educated and still working in warehouses pouring coffee at 3am Saturday morning with a bunch of people of the same sex they're still not going to have kids.

5 hours ago, Gramarye said:

 

The immigration angle is relevant but even if net migration were back up at that 1.1M peak range, it's only a small piece of the pie.  Enough to make a difference but not enough to make the difference, if I can frame it that way.  There were 3.65M births in the U.S. in 2021.  A TFR of 2.5 would have meant about 5.56M births; a TFR of 3.6 (Baby Boom peak) would have meant about 8.12M.  So the ~800k difference from peak to trough in net immigration flows is more than a rounding error, but less than a panacea.  We need more immigrants and more of our own children.

 

Why limit it to 1.1 million? We accept (per capita) less than half the immigrants Canada does. If we were at the same rate as Canada, that would be 2.2 million per year. By the way, that's about the per capita immigration rate we had in the late 90s.

 

And I agree that increased birthrate would be nice too. But how exactly do you accomplish that? Places are trying and nobody's figured out how. Increasing immigration is as simple as hiring more staff and tweaking a couple laws. We know exactly how to do it and (in the grand scheme of things) it's not expensive.

Edited October 28, 20222 yr by LlamaLawyer

6 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

That stuff helps, but if people are 35, college educated and still working in warehouses pouring coffee at 3am Saturday morning with a bunch of people of the same sex they're still not going to have kids.

 

I've recommended to younger women I know that if they don't have super-marketable skills at something else and are guy hunting, they get jobs in manufacturing or something related.   Even part time.  One of our inspectors a few years back married one of the owners.  It's not the least bit uncommon.

Won't take long at all at a sausage fest job.

1 hour ago, Foraker said:

Well, if you want to encourage couples to have kids, how about free maternal healthcare, free childcare, paid parental leave, advanced child tax credit -- all things that would make it easier for couples to have and support kids.  

 

All of this. The medical expenses and "startup costs" of having a kid are brutal, and any unpaid time off work right after makes sure those expenses will be full felt. Then there is the cost of childcare once you go back to work, assuming you can even find it right now. This year when our son switched from daycare (~$200/week) to Kindergarten ($400/month for full day - at a public school) it felt like getting a huge raise. And we'll get to pay for daycare again this summer, which I'm not looking forward to.

 

My wife and I waited until our mid-late 30's before we felt like we were in a position to have a kid, and we are fortunate enough that we both have good, stable jobs and bought a house before the market took off. Interestingly, my company (in a pretty conservative industry none the less) just started offering 12 weeks fully-paid maternity AND paternity leave to all employees late last year. If that had been in place years ago, we might have even moved our timeline up a few years. Will be interesting to see if we suddenly have an in-house baby boom.

 

It's very understandable that so many Millennials, under-employed with tons of student debt and little chance of home ownership anytime soon, would have little interest in having any children right now. Maybe we start offering full student loan forgiveness in exchange for having a kid :)

 

1 hour ago, Foraker said:

 

Well, if you want to encourage couples to have kids, how about free maternal healthcare, free childcare, paid parental leave,

 

Europe has all of this and their birthrate is even lower. 

 

I'd love to see the stats on the birthrates of trust funders.  The people who never have to work and who can afford nannies never seem to have 5+ kids. 

 

 

39 minutes ago, Lazarus said:

Europe has all of this and their birthrate is even lower.

 

They also have much smaller houses.  But I don't have any idea why they have smaller families.  I do know that raising a child in the US is ridiculously expensive (see mrCharlie's post above), and like our healthcare system, we should do something about it to make raising a child less of an economic burden, because we know that's something we can fix.  Then we can move on to the next problem of getting couples to actually have more children.

 

1 hour ago, LlamaLawyer said:

 

Why limit it to 1.1 million? We accept (per capital) less than half the immigrants Canada does. If we were at the same rate as Canada, that would be 2.2 million per year. By the way, that's about the per capita immigration rate we had in the late 90s.

 

And I agree that increased birthrate would be nice too. But how exactly do you accomplish that? Places are trying and nobody's figured out how. Increasing immigration is as simple as hiring more staff and tweaking a couple laws. We know exactly how to do it and (in the grand scheme of things) it's not expensive.

 

I think this is the better solution.  The US population is around 330 million.  Why not boost immigration to 3.3 million -- just 1% of the population -- and immigrants tend to have larger families.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/26/foreign-born-moms-have-a-different-demographic-profile-than-u-s-born-moms-and-among-the-foreign-born-there-are-sharp-differences-tied-to-region-of-birth/

 

It still might not be enough to keep the population from dropping, but it seems like the best option.  Part of immigration reform should include not just increasing the number of immigrants, but providing support services to help those immigrants integrate into US society and get their feet planted so that they can succeed here.

It often seems like I see people saying both that there aren't enough workers, and that jobs don't pay enough, all without acknowledging how these things are related. If the supply of labor is low it puts an upward pressure on wages. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but why not let that pressure work some magic for a few years?

 

A bit of upward wage pressure could also push the fertility rate as economics is a small part of the reason why people are choosing to not have kids. It isn't a silver bullet, but allowing workers to maintain above average bargaining power for a bit without immediately increasing the labor supply doesn't seem like the worst idea to me. 

12 minutes ago, Foraker said:

But I don't have any idea why they have smaller families.

 

Hell, the old lady in the shoe is down to a mere five kids:

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Foraker said:

Well, if you want to encourage couples to have kids, how about free maternal healthcare, free childcare, paid parental leave, advanced child tax credit -- all things that would make it easier for couples to have and support kids.  All policies more heavily favored by Democrats (and Jesus) than Republicans.

 

And all of which have been tried in other countries with almost no impact on the birthrate.  And I say this as someone who supports at least half of those policies.

 

2 hours ago, LlamaLawyer said:

And I agree that increased birthrate would be nice too. But how exactly do you accomplish that? Places are trying and nobody's figured out how.

 

I'm aware.  See above.

 

1 hour ago, Foraker said:

I think this is the better solution.  The US population is around 330 million.  Why not boost immigration to 3.3 million -- just 1% of the population -- and immigrants tend to have larger families.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/26/foreign-born-moms-have-a-different-demographic-profile-than-u-s-born-moms-and-among-the-foreign-born-there-are-sharp-differences-tied-to-region-of-birth/

 

You say "just 1% of the population," but that's not the right framing; you're talking about somewhere close to 50% of new population (3.3M immigrants, 3.6M live births and dropping).  I think you and @LlamaLawyer look at immigration through far too rose-colored glasses if you're bandying about numbers like that with a straight face.  Maybe you don't believe the kind of civil unrest you'd generate from a ratio like that, or maybe you think that the people who would be anxious about such a ratio and be part of the backlash against it are simply bad people and deserve to be either ignored or outright suppressed, unrest or not.  (Though of course, thinking that way is exactly how you get civil unrest and backlash.)  Either way, that kind of number is a political nonstarter.

  

46 minutes ago, Ethan said:

It often seems like I see people saying both that there aren't enough workers, and that jobs don't pay enough, all without acknowledging how these things are related. If the supply of labor is low it puts an upward pressure on wages. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but why not let that pressure work some magic for a few years?

 

A bit of upward wage pressure could also push the fertility rate as economics is a small part of the reason why people are choosing to not have kids. It isn't a silver bullet, but allowing workers to maintain above average bargaining power for a bit without immediately increasing the labor supply doesn't seem like the worst idea to me. 

 

Because people are both producers and consumers.  We last went through a wage-price spiral like this in the Carter administration and it did not lead to broad real wealth increases nor did it encourage larger families.  Now, maybe things would be different if we somehow managed to have broad wage increases without broad consumer price inflation, but that's not what happened 45 years ago and it's not what's happening now.

Rates were that high in the late '90s

 

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/net-migration

5 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

Rates were that high in the late '90s

 

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/net-migration

 

No, they weren't.  Look at your own chart.  The peak of that graph (which is a fairly prominent outlier) is 6.48 per 1000 population for one year in 1998 (0.00648).  So 1% would be another 50% higher than that (0.01).

 

And our TFR was an even 2.00 in 1998.

Whoops, I was doing it the hard way trying to convert 2016 being one million people to 1998. I should have done it your way to get the correct rate.

 

Nonetheless, the rate was double what it was in 2016 for three years with no strife.

The reason I picked 2016 is that it was the last non-Trump, non-COVID year and it is approximately the average over the sample period.

On 10/28/2022 at 1:37 PM, GCrites80s said:

That stuff helps, but if people are 35, college educated and still working in warehouses pouring coffee at 3am Saturday morning with a bunch of people of the same sex they're still not going to have kids.

You sure about that? I know many non traditional str8 couples that have adopted a lot of unwanted children. Most these couples have at least two adopted children. There will be a bumper crop of unwanted children with the recent Roe reversal.

But the truth is, affording children is the #1 reason people don't have any, or more than they do. Politicians have done little to change that. 

There are 8 billion people on this planet.  How is that not enough?  Why do we need higher birthrates?