Donald Trump‘s VP pick JD Vance spent last week sweltering in the spotlight after his past quotes calling Democratic leaders ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies’ went viral.
The comments, clipped from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, called out VP-turned-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris as one of many childless leaders, Vance said, ‘who are miserable’ and ‘want to make the rest of the country miserable too.’
His provocative theory drew retorts from Friends star Jennifer Aniston, pop star Kesha and VP Harris’ own step-daughter.
But Vance’s statement speaks to real demographic concerns: US birthrates are at their lowest ever, raising fear of economic misery, sky-high taxes and labor shortages ahead.
DailyMail.com drilled-down into the causes of America’s decade’s long population slump — which began with the housing crisis of the 2008-09 financial crash — to investigate what factors are really behind this generation-defining shift.
Trump’s VP pick JD Vance (left with family) faced scrutiny after his past quotes calling Democratic leaders ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies’ went viral – but the quote speaks to real concerns: US birthrates are at their lowest in a century, raising fear of economic misery ahead
American women are giving birth at record-low rates.
The total fertility rate – the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime – fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, the lowest rate since the government began tracking it in the 1930s.
For a population to stay the same size, countries must achieve a ‘replacement’ level fertility rate of 2.1.
If unaddressed over time, it can lead to an increasing aging population, with a significant proportion needing care and unable to work.
A study in the Lancet earlier this year warned this could have ‘immense’ consequences, with public services and economic growth at risk.
The researchers said America faces an ‘underpopulation’ crisis by 2050, a situation in which there are too few people to realize the economic potential of an area or support its population’s standard of living.
The only way to stabilize the population is for women to have more babies or for more immigrants to come into the country.
Whatever the cause and whatever the solution, experts agree this demographic shift toward less births and an aging population is a crisis in the making.
‘The aging of the population could further limit revenue growth and add to fiscal uncertainty,’ a recent Pew study found.
‘If low fertility persists,’ they warned, ‘states will need to look more for other ways to grow their tax bases or they could face challenges over the long term.’
Vance’s comments came in the context of his full-throated critique of the psychology of Democratic party and its governing style in Washington.
‘We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,’ as he explained it to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
‘It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttegieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,’ Donald Trump’s now running mate continued.
‘How does it make any sense,’ he asked, ‘we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?’
Regardless of which political party might be to blame, however, the issue of the lowering birthrate has began to concern state and federal policymakers.
California’s 2022-2023 state budget under Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, made explicit mention of the threat to state budgets as older generations retire with less and less younger people to replace them in the workforce and as taxpayers.
‘With rising cost of living and an already tight housing market,’ the budget report stated, ‘it could become increasingly difficult for the remaining working-age Californians to support the aging population.’
Decades of federal government data, suggests that little has changed across generations when it comes to the desire to start a family. ‘The vast majority of US young adults plan to have kids: about 88 percent of teenage girls and 89 percent of teenage boys,’ researchers found
State lawmakers in Montana, the governor’s office in Colorado and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City have all issued similarly dire reports in recent years.
‘Trends in fertility will also influence property taxes, a major source of revenue for many school districts and local governments,’ according to a report on the looming crisis put together by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Vance points to cultural or political explanations for this decline, blasting millennials as the ‘generation that refuses to grow up‘.
But broad evidence exists for other explanations for America’s shrinking fertility rates.
Decades of federal government data suggests that little has changed across generations when it comes to the desire to start a family.
One 2023 study, conducted by Ohio State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found young Americans still aspire to have on two children average.
The study pooled generations-worth of responses obtained by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for their National Survey of Family Growth.
‘Slightly more young people plan to have no children now than 30 years ago,’ the study’s authors, sociologists Karen Benjamin Guzzo and Sarah Hayford, wrote for The Conversation.
‘But still, the vast majority of US young adults plan to have kids: about 88 percent of teenage girls and 89 percent of teenage boys.’
Guzzo and Hayford found that financial and employment woes appeared to play the strongest role in why younger Americans have delayed starting families, or given up once their prime child-rearing years have begun to slip away.
And their work echoes other findings from researchers including a study from Australia’s University of Adelaide which found a link between the rise in temporary employment among white collar workers and declining birth rates.
‘Our results showed that 61 percent of women who had received a university education had at least one ‘casual’ job after achieving their first qualification,’ study coauthor Dr Lynne Giles said.
’30 percent of these jobs were managerial or professional,’ Dr Giles noted. ‘This highlights the fact that temporary employment is no longer the sole domain of low-skilled, poorly paid people.’
‘Our results also show that having children at an older age and childlessness are not just a matter of individual women’s choices,’ the public health researcher concluded.
‘They reflect the broader structural arrangements in society.’
While the scientific literature has also pointed to alternative explanations, even those putting them forward have tended to de-emphasize their role alongside these weighty economic pressures.
One study that tracked a subset of roughly 3,000 human genes that appear to be linked with a greater chance of childlessness, for example, found that their impact came to less than 1 percent as compared to those economic factors.
The study’s findings suggest that even alarming new data on declining sperm counts among men and other biological factors might not be as significant as the record-setting debts and soaring home prices faced by Americans trying to plan for parenthood.
America’s combined household debt shot up by $212 billion to a record $17.5 trillion in the final three months of 2023, according to Federal Reserve data this year, the highest since the 2009 financial crisis.
And median home prices have doubled in just the past five years, based on data collected by the real estate marketplace Point2.
State-level governments across America have had a vested interest in getting to the bottom of the problem, faced with threats to their tax revenue and local economies.
And their budget studies point to three other factors that have led the economic threat of underpopulation: a decline in unplanned teenage pregnancies, an overall decline in international immigration and a decline in US Hispanic pregnancies.
Of all these, the drop in teen pregnancies as a result of improved sex education and access to contraception, appears to be a public policy success story.
Government estimates from HHS found that the pregnancy rate for female adolescents aged 15 to 19 years was down to 13.5 per 1,000 females for 2022, down from 29.4 per 1000 individuals in 2019.
‘This decline is good news,’ according to sociologists Guzzo and Hayford. ‘There are fewer unintended births than there were 30 years ago.’
The other two findings by state budget planners appears to show unintended consequences of border restrictions.
One report from Colorado’s State Demography Office found that their state’s total population of recent immigrants declined by nearly 24 percent, a factor that they worried would ‘slow the growth of the labor force relative to the total population.’
A similar study documented a drop in fertility rates among the state of Arizona’s Hispanic women which dropped nearly 50 percent from level before the Great Recession, compared to a more 30 percent drop in fertility across the state.
