Reasons for Not Having Children

Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Rachel Minkin et al. at Pew:

The U.S. fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, with a growing share of women ages 25 to 44 having never given birth.

And the share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have kids rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023 (from 37% to 47%), according to a Pew Research Center survey.

In this report, we explore the experiences of two groups of U.S. adults: 

• Those ages 50 and older who don’t have children
• Those younger than 50 who don’t have children and say they are unlikely to in the future

About four-in-ten of those in the older group (38%) say there was a time when they wanted to have children. A smaller but sizable share (32%) say they never wanted children, and 25% say they weren’t sure one way or the other. Few say they frequently felt pressure to have children from family, friends or society in general. 

The Founders and Current Events

 Many posts have discussed the Founding.

David Frum at The Atlantic:

Two political myths inspired the dreams and haunted the nightmares of the Founders of the American republic. Both these foundational myths were learned from the history and literature of the ancient Romans.

Cincinnatus was the name of a man who, the story went, accepted supreme power in the state to meet a temporary emergency and then relinquished that power to return to his farm when the emergency passed. George Washington modeled his public image on the legend of Cincinnatus, and so he was depicted in contemporary art and literature—“the Cincinnatus of the West,” as Lord Byron praised him in a famous poem of the day.

Against the bright legacy of Cincinnatus, the Founders contrasted the sinister character of Catiline: a man of depraved sexual appetites who reached almost the pinnacle of power and then exploited populist passions to overthrow the constitution, gain wealth, and pay his desperately pressing debts. Alexander Hamilton invoked Catiline to inveigh against his detested political adversary, Aaron Burr:

He is bankrupt beyond redemption except by the plunder of his country. His public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandisement … If he can, he will certainly disturb our institutions to secure to himself permanent power and with it wealth … He is truly the Cataline of America.

Jessica Gavora at The Atlantic:

The notion that America is an idea has always lifted up our country, and for good reason. The fact that America was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the governing limits of the Constitution makes us unique among nations. Most countries trace their origins to tribal identity. But America has its origins in the revolutionary idea that the government cannot deny men and women an equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Both our friends and foes have recognized this difference. No less than Joseph Stalin railed against American “exceptionalism” when our workers refused to join in solidarity with his murderous revolution of the proletariat.

Local News

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

From Pew:

Americans want information about local government and politics. Most say they are at least somewhat interested in news about local laws and policies and local elections. And about two-thirds say they often or sometimes get local political news – higher than the shares who get news on several other local topics, including the economy and sports.

But among Americans who get news on local politics, only a quarter are highly satisfied with the quality of the news they get, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Those who get news about weather, traffic and several other topics are more likely to be satisfied with the news they get in those areas.

Americans also do not widely see it as easy to find the news and information they need to take part in the local political process. Fewer than half of U.S. adults (45%) say it is very or somewhat easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions in local elections. By comparison, 59% say it is easy to find the information they need for presidential elections.

In both cases, much higher shares of Americans say they are at least somewhat interested in news about elections than say it is easy to find the information they need to vote.

 

Legal Challenges to the Harris Nomination

 Some Republicans want to mount a legal challenge to the nomination of Kamala Harris.

They have no case.

Stef Kight at Axios:

Biden was "not the official nominee—nobody is, until there's a vote. So Biden need not be replaced, because he was never the official candidate," legal scholar Rick Hasen wrote in an op-ed on Monday.

"There is a zero point zero, zero, zero percent chance that Mike Johnson and his fever dream of somehow there being legal action to prevent Kamala Harris... to keep [her] off the ballot, there is no chance that will happen," top Democratic attorney Marc Elias said on Democracy Watch, a Youtube series hosted by Brian Tyler Cohen.

The bottom line: Hasen noted that Democrats "would be smart to still do that virtual roll call by Aug. 7" to avoid any potential litigation in some states related to technical arguments around ballot access timing.

People are talking about John Eastman's goofy legal theory that argues Kamala Harris can't be president because she's not a "natural born citizen."

Many have rebutted his legal theory, but I focus on the facts he got wrong.https://t.co/OrTANm1q2v

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) July 23, 2024

Presidential Dropouts

 Louis Jacobson at PolitFact:

By now, most of us are used to living in "unprecedented times." But just how unprecedented is Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race a little more than three months before Election Day?

Occasionally, incumbent presidents have decided to not seek reelection. But dropping out midcampaign is incredibly rare. And it has never happened this close to an election.

...

The two closest political shake-ups to Biden’s were withdrawals by President Harry S. Truman before the 1952 election and President Lyndon B. Johnson before the 1968 election.

Both Truman and Johnson had assumed office following a president’s death and served a full term of their own; they each would have been eligible to run for a second full term had they wanted to. But following poor showings in each of their respective New Hampshire primaries in 1952 and 1968, both exited the race.

Truman withdrew his name from the presidential election on March 29, 1952, or 220 days before Election Day. Truman, who was suffering from low popularity amid the Korean War, dropped out less than three weeks after losing the New Hampshire primary. (In that era, there were relatively few primaries; in many states, party insiders controlled the nomination process.)

Ultimately, Adlai Stevenson II won the Democratic nomination but lost in the general election to Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star U.S. Army general from World War II who ran as a Republican.

Johnson dropped out of the race March 31, 1968, 219 days before the election. Johnson — who had become broadly unpopular because of another war, Vietnam — had not formally filed to run, and was on the New Hampshire ballot only as a write-in. But after a poor showing, and facing primary challenges from two strong contenders, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Johnson dropped out.

In the end, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was nominated but lost the general election to Richard Nixon.

Biden’s move is far closer to Election Day — 107 days — and comes after all Democratic voters have had their say in the presidential primaries.

The Politics of the Federal Debt

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Brian Riedl nails it at Reason:

Paradoxically, the faster government debt escalates toward an inevitable debt crisis, the less politicians and voters seem to care. In the 1980s and 1990s, more modest deficits dominated economic policy debates and prompted six major deficit reduction deals that balanced the budget from 1998 through 2001. That era is long gone. In the past eight years, President Donald Trump and then Biden enacted $12 trillion in deficit-expanding legislation even as Social Security and Medicare shortfalls drove baseline deficits higher. When even liberal economists warned politicians that the post-pandemic economy faced a modest degree of rising inflation and interest rates—and that a federal spending spree would pour gasoline on that fire—lawmakers responded by enacting the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan. When inflation and mortgage rates resultantly surged to 9.1 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively, lawmakers brazenly continued the inflationary spending spree.

Why are we no longer responding to soaring debt and its economic consequences? While there are many factors, the three most important are these: 1) We've convinced ourselves that deficits do not matter; 2) partisan politics and the collapse of lawmaking have turned deficits into a weapon to be politicized rather than a problem to be solved; and 3) few of us are willing to face the unpopular reality that this issue cannot be resolved without fundamentally reforming Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes.

Regulation and Messaging Votes

Don Wolfensberger at The Hill:

[On] three consecutive days (July 9-11), the House flexed its anti-over-regulatory chops by passing three measures disapproving executive agency regulations ranging from women’s rights to home appliance energy standards.

Then, on the final day, the House turned around and voted 205-213 to defeat its own funding bill for fiscal 2025, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act. Ten Republicans and all but three Democrats voted against the measure. To say the House was sending mixed signals as to its self-worth as an institution would be an understatement, though the 15 members who did not vote might have produced a different result. Some leaders are still puzzling over why the House would bite the hand that feeds it — which is to say, its own hand.

 ...

According to a Congressional Research Service brief (updated Feb. 27, 2023), the Congressional review Act has been used to successfully overturn 20 rules: one in the 107th Congress (2001-02), 16 in the 115th Congress (2017-18), and three in the 117th Congress (2021-22).

...
The partisan votes on all three regulation disapproval measures and the legislative branch appropriations bill are telling. The two parties obviously differ on many policy issues these days, and that is reflected in the marked increase in strictly partisan votes. It is also understandable that a House Republican majority will push back on regulations promulgated by a Democratic administration.

The fact remains, though, that in a Congress with split party control of the two chambers, and with a Democratic president to boot, the exercises we witnessed last week were little more than partisan messaging, doomed ultimately to fail.

Until Congress gets serious about strengthening the resources of its committees and support agencies so that it can resume bipartisan deliberations and legislating, finding common ground will be impossible. Last week was a zero-sum game, only spitting-out campaign fodder that doesn’t do a thing about solving the country’s problems.