Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down

There are so many red flags with this administration that I lost count. Policing speech, suppressing information, cutting research funding, cutting social programs, increasing spending and intensity for deportations, deporting people for political affiliation, an unnecessarily disruptive economic policy and many reports of general incompetence, lying and corruption.

It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?

The new tax bill, which benefits asset owners (wealthy), older people, and the beneficiaries of the wealthy.

When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.

The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.

Right, because that’s a “smart” way to tackle the demographic collapse/crisis while totally not making the problem worse.

I don’t see a way to avoid population decline, assuming women have freedom and access to 100% effective birth control.

The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.

Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.

The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.

Immigration.

Yes, that's part of it but helping to ease the economic burden of child rearing would definitely help.

The documentary Idiocracy has some interesting insights into the issue -- it's worth the watch.

Of course. My response was overly simplistic, simply because the parent comment seemed to suggest that there existed no solution.

What do you mean? I see no success so far across the world, and simply paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive (since badly raised children are worse than no children).

> paying people to have kids is the wrong incentive

I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.

Even the Scandinavian countries with world’s most generous childcare subsidies are nowhere near a replacement total fertility rate (~2.1).

Expecting other societies less egalitarian and less rich than them is pie in the sky thinking.

My point is that this is a problem that can be solved, the only thing stopping us is us.

As this thread happening in a post about machinations by the current regime, the likelihood of it being solved (let alone correctly) borders on near impossible. The only thing that they'll do that will affect this is take away reproductive rights and that will lead to more unplanned births.