Why do some nations’ birthrates fall? And can Big Government boost them?

[Germany] spends some €200 billion ($270 billion) on promoting children and families per year…But its birth rate, at 1.39 births per woman aged 15 to 49, remains among the lowest in Europe…

…The web of benefits is so complex that even experts don’t fully grasp it: There’s a “child supplement,” “parental benefit,” an “allowance for single parents,” a “married person’s supplement,” a “sibling bonus,” “orphan money” and “child education supplement,” not to forget the “child education supplementary supplement.”

The article suggests that the reason that German women don’t have kids is because the government isn’t funding enough daycare and preschools to make it easy for them.

I have a different theory. My guess is that birthrates fall:

1. because living standards rise. (Kids stop being a help on the farm; start being expensive.)
2. and because the Welfare State gives people the illusion that government will take care of them in old age.

My second point would mean that Big Government measures won’t, over time and on average, raise a nation’s birthrates. The more the State does – the more it hands out benefits and asserts its dominance in citizens’ lives – the less urgent its citizens will feel about procreating. Agree/disagree?

Monday night when returning from our Meatless Mondays Steak Dinner, I asked a reader who had traveled with me to there event if he noticed that there were more chain stores opening up across LA.  On the way back from Burbank (to West Hollywood), within fewer than five minutes, we passed a new Walgreen’s and two Rite-Aids, one of them new.

There do seem to be more such drug stores opening up across LA, not to mention fast food restaurants, with a Chipotle replacing a flower shop on Melrose and La Brea and what appears to be an Old Navy moving into space on Beverly vacated by an independent furniture store.

Given that big companies have large staffs to help them maneuver through regulatory hoops — and making the cost of compliance (through economies of scale) cheaper per storefront than for an independent operation, it seems that big government makes it easier for the big guys and more challenging for individual entrepreneurs.

Ironic that more often than not, those who lament the increasing presence of chain stores tend to vote for the politicians whose policies serve to give a competitive advantage to those chain stores.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  David Boaz suspects

. . . there might be two things going on. Chain stores probably have efficiencies of scale, bigger marketing budgets spread over more stores, more research on what consumers like, etc. But yes, it is also often argued that compliance is easier for larger companies. They have lawyers, HR departments, and so on. Charles Murray — maybe in his book “In Pursuit” — has argued that increasing complexity requiring verbal and paperwork skills benefits educated people — the sort of people who write regulations and get hired by big companies. Small business folks may be less likely to be college-educated and proficient at navigating bureaucracies.

David’s book Libertarianism: A Primer is quite a good read — and highly recommended.

Conservative and libertarian pundits have compared the increasing centralization of power in Washington, D.C. along with the concomitant growth in the city’s wealth (particularly compared to the rest of the country) with that of the Capitol of Panem, the brave new nation, in the Hunger Games universe.  The nation’s wealth flows into the city and power flows out from it.

In December, the Washington Examiner reported that six of the country’s 10 richest counties were in the D.C. area. Obama won all of them.

Tonight, at 9 PM EST, Peter Schweizer and Stephen K. Bannon will be exploring this very notion in a one-hour special on FoxNews, “Boomtown: Washington, the Imperial City” which, according to Breitbart News will report “how Washington’s power elite leverage their crony connections to vacuum taxpayer wallets, bankrolling their lifestyles of luxury and opulence—all under the guise of what’s best for America.”

H/t: Reader R, through this link, who though we should promote it.

Back in August, 2011. when reporting that the national debt has increased by $4 trillion under President Obama, CBS News’s Mark Knoller reported that:

Mr. Obama blames policies inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt. He singles out:

• “two wars we didn’t pay for”
• “a prescription drug program for seniors…we didn’t pay for.”
• “tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that were not paid for.”

Mr. Obama has now been reelected to a second term. The debt continues to increase.

At the outset of Mr. Obama’s term, shortly after passing the $800 billion stimulus, the Democratic 109th Congress passed a budget spending $400 billion more in FY2009 that Mr. Obama’s predecessor had requested in his last budget.  Will any reporter ask Mr. Obama about these spending increases he — and his party — didn’t pay for?

Just asking.

George Will nails it:

Because 82 percent of American earners pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes, no politically conceivable or economically feasible middle-class tax rate can fund the entitlement state. And America’s political culture rules out funding it with new consumption or energy taxes. By rescuing almost everyone from the restoration of Clinton-era rates, liberals abandoned any pretense of paying for their program of ever- expanding entitlements. Instead, they made trillion-dollar deficits their program.

Via Powerline picks. Read the whole thing.

The long and the short of it is this:  liberals want bigger government without the political burden of asking the “middle class” to pay for it.

I found myself laughing last night when watching a report on a local newscast about the rising cost of health care despite the passage of the “Affordable” Care Act.  Perhaps, it would have sounded differently had I heard the newcaster’s voice instead of reading the closed captioning.  (Again I caught the news while doing cardio.)

I laughed because the individual reporting a story seemed incredulous that a government program designed to reduce cost had actual led to the increase.   Might have been nice had the journalist had some economics education, an education where they studied not just abstract theories as articulated by astute economists, but the real-world results of increases in government regulation.  He would then have known that enterprises pass the cost of increased regulations onto their customers.

In commenting on a New York Times article on rising health insurance rates, Glenn Reynolds asked in a seemingly rhetorical tone, “Who could have seen this coming?”  Who indeed.  Will be interesting to see just how many conservative bloggers, pundits and public figures predicted this.  And how many liberal pundits and Democrat politicians assured that such “right-wingers” were talking nonsense.

Interesting also to speculate whether the local reporters in Los Angeles would have picked up on this story had the New York Times not covered it.

Obama loves to blame his predecessor for the problems he “inherited,” even as most of his other predecessors merely acknowledged the problems they inherited and set about solving them.

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked this chart illustrating “that things were actually improving until we got a Democratic Congress in 2007, and got worse when we elected Obama.” When will Obama start taking ownership for his record? Will when the media hold him to account for his failure to contain the growth of spending?

Yes, George W. Bush and the Republican 108th and 109th could have done more to contain federal spending. W and the divided 107th Congress did see an acceleration of federal spending, but next Republican Congress did get the message and started to rein in federal spending. As Jim Hoft reminded us last November:

In 2004 the federal budget deficit was 412 billion dollars. In 2005 it dropped to 318 billion dollars. In 2006 the deficit dipped to 248 billion dollars. And, in 2007 it fell below 200 billion to 162 billion dollars.

Under back-to-back Republican Congresses, we had three successive years of declining deficits.  That represents, as Jim reports, a “sixty percent drop” whereas the Politico article that Glenn links reports that the national debt has grown by the same amount since Obama took office.  And he’s only been in office for four years.

And he’s still pretending Republicans were responsible for the increase in debt when Democrat Congresses stopped the progress being made by the GOP.  And it doesn’t seem our friends in the legacy media are “fact-checking” their deceptive claims.

If politics of taxes have changed in the Democrats favor, as they seem to argue, why aren’t they willing to ask all Americans to pay a little more for the huge increases in spending President Obama has given us?  Instead, the Democrat so demagogued the tax issue, making it appear that he favors cutting middle class taxes (having even hinted in his reelection campaign that Republicans wish to increase such levies).

In her post earlier today, attempting to put a positive spin on the fiscal cliff deal, Jennifer Rubin also speculates about the politics of taxes:

Many on the left have seemed convinced lately that the politics of taxes had changed dramatically in their favor, and that the opportunity presented by the cliff could result in the kind of surge in revenue that could put off the coming fiscal crunch for years (until, they seem to think, it will just magically go away at some point) and so could save our entitlement programs from the need for reform. . . .

But that hasn’t happened here. This deal is projected to yield $620 billion in revenue over a decade—increasing projected federal revenue by about 1.7% over that time. And that’s about it. The Democrats have made the Bush tax rates permanent for 98 percent of the public, which Republicans couldn’t even do when they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.  . . .

[ellipses in original]  Read the whole thing.  Again this gets to the crucial point of the Democrats’ failure.  They want us to believe that we just need raise taxes on the rich in order to pay for all their programs, but the fact remains that they have increased federal spending without paying for it.

Obama’s Democrats are not willing to make the tough choices that, in the past, such increases entailed:  ask the American people to pay for them–with higher taxes.

And this from a president who faulted his predecessor for not paying for his policies.

NB:  After posting this, wonder if I should have changed the title to read, “The higher spending Obama (& his Democrats are unwilling to pay for).

RELATED: Has leverage switched to Republicans on spending cuts?

Had I been a member of Congress, I would have voted against the fiscal cliff deal that passed the House earlier today.  Given the current political environment, I could accept the higher taxes on the “wealthiest Americans”, had Democrats finally agreed to real spending cuts.

But, they haven’t; they’ve just kicked the can down the road.  Democrats just aren’t willing to face the fiscal crisis facing our country, a fiscal crisis largely of their own creation.  (Until the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006, deficits had been declining for three successive years–a fact of which many Americans, including a good number of Republicans, remain ignorant.)

I haven’t been following the debate as closely as I normally follow political issues because, well, I’m on vacation and would rather spend time with my family or read a book on Hawai’ian mythology than follow politics, especially given the media coverage of this issue.

President Barack Obama effectively took us to the cliff and many in the media are giving him a free pass.  We are here because he and his Democrats ramped up spending in the first two years of his term when his party had large majorities in both houses of Congress and now are effectively asking Republicans to join them in paying for his spending spree.

And as they ramped up spending, Obama Democrats, to borrow an expression, gave us a vast expansion of the federal government they didn’t pay for.

Their fiscal irresponsibility notwithstanding, thanks in large part to the slanted coverage of the fiscal cliff negotiations — and to Speaker John Boehner’s reluctance to make the Republican case to the public — Democrats won this thing.  And not just legislatively.

But, should Republicans play their cards right, it could well prove to be a Pyrrhic victory.  In the 2012 election, Obama really only had one big issue which seemed to resonate with voters, that of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  He no longer has that issue and he hasn’t even begun his second term.

In a great piece on the left and the cliff, Yuval Levin concludes with the crucial questions, “Now they have gotten their tax increase, and what has it gained them but the prospect of an even slower economy? What’s their game plan?”

Exactly.  What is their plan? (more…)

Just learned nder the so-called Affordable Care Act, the cost of my monthly premium (that I pay for myself) is about to increase another 52%, meaning that it will have doubled in cost since President Obama signed tthat unpopular legislation.

I expect to write a strongly-worded letter to my soon-to-be Congressman Adam Schiff and to Senator Feinstein and Mrs. Boxer and expect them to express concern for my situation and then proceed to do absolutely nothing.

This is what happens when government meddles.

Oh, and Mr. Obama, Mrs. Feinstein, Ma’am Boxer, Mr. Schiff, this means that I now have less money to give to charitable causes.

“For the first time in more than three weeks,” reports David Kerley of ABC OTUS news, “President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner met face-to-face today at the White House to talk about avoiding the fiscal cliff.” Emphasis added.

It’s about time.

Wonder why the president dilly-dallyed so long, delaying this meeting.  This appears to be the first time since the election that the president met alone with the top Republican in Washington.

If he had been more serious about avoiding the fiscal cliff, he would have met more regularly with Boehner and other congressional leaders.  And have countered the Republicans’ offer made earlier this month.

The article goes on to note that “some Republicans were showing more flexibility about approving higher tax rates for the wealthy, one of the president’s demands to keep the country from the so-called fiscal cliff — a mixture of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that many economists say would send the country back into recession.”  Kerley did not indicate what some of the president’s other demand were.

And now that Republicans are showing some flexibility about raising taxes, will Democrats show some sincerity about cutting spending–and not just cuts from increases anticipated by the president’s past budgets, but real cuts.

As one Democrat put it, “spending is the biggest part of this problem, and the biggest part of that problem is the fact that healthcare is growing at a faster rate than GDP.”  And this even after Democrats passed (what they called) the Affordable Care Act.

SOMEWHAT RELATED: WH Running Out Clock on Fiscal Cliff Negotiations? FYI, that article was posted before the Boehner/Obama meeting, but I read it only after posting this post.

In a column which really must rank as one of the silliest on “fiscal cliff” negotiations, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank calls on Mitt Romney to delay his retirement so he can help Republicans reach a compromise.

Milbank, like many liberal columnists based in the nation’s capital, seems to think that the problem is really controlling the “Republican backbenchers.”  He fails to acknowledge that the president has failed to compromise himself, not having specified significant cuts to the federal budget he’d accept as part of a deal (you know that “balanced” approach which he talked about on the campaign trail).

If Republicans need to compromise on taxes, shouldn’t Democrats compromise on spending?

Milbank does at least recognize that fiscal cliff negotiations have reached an impasse.  In calling on Romney to come in and help resolve things, he seem to have acknowledged that Obama has failed to forge a workable compromise.

Democrats and the media may be trying to make Grover Norquist a fall guy in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations, but at least that fan of small government gets what’s going on, telling Aaron Task of Yahoo! Finance:

I didn’t think this was case three weeks ago but do now think [President] Obama has decided to drive country over the fiscal cliff and blame the Republicans. . . . I spoke with people today — not are only there no [private] meetings going on, there are none planned . . . .

No meetings planned?  But, aren’t meetings one way opposing parties resolve their differences?  Well, the president for “the first time in days” did talk with Boehner by phone.  And Republican leaders do want to sit down with the president to talk specifics, but no meeting appears forthcoming.

If President Obama and Democrats really wanted to get something done, he would be working on an offer to counter that Speaker Boehner put forward instead of criticizing and taunting Republicans in public fora.

But, I would wager the Democrats will present no counteroffer this week.

And with Obama’s apparent unwillingness to meet with Republicans to work out a compromise, it’s not just Grover Norquist who thinks Obama is trying to blame the GOP.   Even an AP reporter gets the president’s game:  ”Presidential aides have even encouraged speculation that Obama is willing to let the economy go over the ‘fiscal cliff’ if necessary and gamble that the public blames Republicans for any fallout.”*

LIke Charles Krauthammer said, the president’s stance on these negotiations is all about playing politics and not about governing the country.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

* (more…)

Just caught this from Jennifer Rubin:

Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), emphasizes that the president, in all likelihood, lacks the support among Democrats to pass his wish-list. He tells me, “To date, not a single Senate Democrat has come forward to endorse the President’s job-killing tax hike and bizarre request for a permanent authority to raise the debt ceiling whenever he wants for as much as he wants.”

RELATED: Reid Won’t Allow Vote on Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Plan

Last quarter, I wrote a guest post called Does government spending help the economy? Phrased as a question, because it reviewed an Arthur Laffer article that (in my view) fell just a little short of proving its case.

But yes, we know government spending hurts the economy. And Philip Bagus of the Mises Institute illustrates why. (Hat tip: Zero Hedge)

Tom wants to open a restaurant. He makes the following calculations. He estimates the restaurant’s revenues at $10,000 per month. The expected costs are the following: $4,000 for rent; $1,000 for utilities; $2,000 for food; and $4,000 for wages. With expected revenues of $10,000 and costs of $11,000 Tom will not start his business.

Let’s now assume… reduce[d] government spending. Let’s assume that the government closes a consumer-protection agency and sells the agency’s building on the market. As a consequence, there is a tendency for housing prices and rents to fall. The same is true for wages. The laid-off bureaucrats search for new jobs, exerting downward pressure on wage rates. Further, the agency does not consume utilities anymore, leading toward a tendency of cheaper utilities. Tom may now rent space for his restaurant in the former agency for $3,000 as rents are coming down. His expected utility bill falls to $500, and hiring some of the former bureaucrats as dishwashers and waiters reduces his wage expenditures to $3,000. Now with expected revenue at $10,000 and costs at $8,500 the expected profits amounts to $1,500 and Tom can start his business. (more…)

As part of the “Fiscal Cliff” negotiations,

The White House has said it wants tax rates on household income above $250,000 to rise, with the other rates holding pat. A full return to Clinton-era rates would have households paying a 36% rate on income earned between $250,000 and $388,000, compared with 33% today, and 39.6% rate on income above that level, up from 35%.

Now, much as I don’t want to see tax rates go up, let me put forward an idea (note this is in the Random Thoughts category) where Republicans could go bold on the issue, say they are willing to compromise with the president on hiking taxes on the “wealthy.”

They could first offer to compromise on the higher rate, say raising the highest rates to a rate half-way between the current rate and the president’s proposal.  But, given how Republicans would have to break with their base to do this, Speaker Boehner could ask for a significant concession from the White House in return, say, ending of federal funding for all public broadcasting, that is, requiring National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

It would be a bold move and put Democrats on the defensive.  Republicans would have be prepared to fight back quickly, wondering why, at a time of trillion-dollar deficits, we are subsidizing television and radio.  And remind Americans that many such stations survive in the private sector.

And to show that Republicans don’t want to destroy public broadcasting, Boehner, in announcing his plan, could pledge that as a private citizen, he will donate a few extra bucks to WCET, the Cincinnati PBS affiliate.

Just a thought.  And one which put the Democrats on defense.
—-
*federal funding of.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  V the K  offers an intriguing suggestion:  ”Make the tax increases expire unless the White House implements spending cuts.”

Obama Accuses House GOP of Holding Middle Class Tax Cuts ‘Hostage’

Instead of taunting his partisan adversaries from a campaign-style trip to Pennsylvania, the Democrat should instead sit down with them and try to hash out their differences without attempting to score political points.

In the weekly Republican remarks, U.S. Sen Orrin Hatch of Utah reminded Americans that Obama did campaign on the type of plan his team proposed to Congress earlier this week:

The President has said he wants a so-called balanced approach to solve this crisis.

But what he proposed this week was a classic bait and switch on the American people—a tax increase double the size of what he campaigned on, billions of dollars in new stimulus spending and an unlimited, unchecked authority to borrow from the Chinese.

Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall him asking for any of that during the presidential campaign. These ideas are so radical that they have already been rejected on a bipartisan basis by Congress.

UPDATE:  Commenting on Hatch’s remarks, Ed Morrissey disagrees with the Democrats’ defense of the president’s big-spending plan:  ”The problem with negotiating under those circumstances is that it’s clear Obama isn’t negotiating in good faith.  In fact, he’s not negotiating at all — he’s campaigning.“

The only way President Obama can win public relations battle over the fiscal cliff is with media cover

And CNN seems to be doing just that.  Anchor Joe Johns began the “Situation Room” earlier today, almost reading from the Administration talking points, “Happening now: President Obama says he’s keeping a list of who’s naughty and who’s nice in the fight to keep middle-class taxes from going up and is asking the public for help in getting through to the ones he sees as naughty.”

So, they present Obama’s fight as one to “keep middle-class taxes from going up”.

“For his part,” Johns added. President Obama is trying to break that stalemate by asking voters to put more pressure on the Republicans.”  He may be trying to put pressure on Republicans, but he’s not putting forward a serious proposal.

The network’s Chief White House Correspondent did acknowledge that the president’s proposal “was sort of a Democratic wish list”.  But, after paying lip service to criticism of Democrats, she went on to trash Republicans, “And so Democrats have sort of put out the ideal Democratic version of a starting position and are asking Republicans to come up with a response. And instead of listening — response, Republicans are going — sort of balking at it.”

Of course, they’re balking.  The proposal, by failing to rein in federal spending. doesn’t address the problem.  Miss Yellin makes it seem like Republicans are the ones responsible for the statement.

The real culprit, however, is the president. Obama may contend that he’s pressing Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff, but he hasn’t signed onto any plan to address the nation’s burgeoning federal debt.

The issue is not Republican intransigence, but Obama’s failure to negotiate in good faith.  It would be nice if our friends in the legacy media pointed out that the Democrat hasn’t put forward a proposal which meets his own criteria for a “balanced” approaching, cutting spending and raising taxes (on the wealthy).

To understand why many on the right are upset by the reelection earlier this month of Barack Obama as President of the United States, all you need do is look at his administration’s supposedly “balanced” approach to facing the fiscal cliff.

Simply put, it is not a serious proposal and shows (once again) that the Democrat is not serious about governing.  At a time of fiscal crisis, with annual deficits topping $1 trillion for four successive years, instead of coming out with spending cuts, the Obama team is proposing spending increases.

And we could have told you what was coming.  Despite his 2008 campaign talk of a “net spending cut” and his promise once in office to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, Barack Obama has shown no commitment to reducing federal spending — or to cutting the debt.  As Doug Powers wrote yesterday, when learning of the White House’s latest proposal, “there’s one thing I take comfort in with this bunch, it’s their predictability“.

And we conservatives are left here, saying, “Well, we told you so.”

President Obama, as Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standards, has touted his “‘balanced’ approach to averting the fiscal cliff“, that is, a package which includes tax hikes as well as spending cuts.

Yet, the proposal Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner showed to House and Senate leaders failed to include any significant cuts, but did, in addition to higher taxes on “on wealthy Americans as well as higher taxes on capital gains and dividends“, it also included a “multiyear stimulus package with at least $50 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.” (The proposal even includes $600 billion in revenue “from unspecified revenue sources.”)  Among the other proposal, there is a promise, at some future date, to try to find $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs.

In short, it includes no specific spending cuts.

No wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “burst into laughter” when Geithner outlined the proposal.  He said “nothing good” was “happening” in the negotiations because Obama was unwilling to “embrace serious spending cuts.”

As Charles Krauthammer put it, “there not only are no cuts in this, there’s an increase in spending with a new stimulus” (at 0:28 in the video at the link).

And they called Obama the grown-up in the room?  He — and his team — are not behaving like grownups.  They’re not putting forward a serious plan to address the nation’s debt problem.

Will the legacy even report how laughable this proposal is–at a time of record deficits and the president paying lip service to spending cuts, he offers a plan that increases federal spending?

He seems to be counting on something which carried him through the presidential campaign — media cover.  Don’t count on it.   (more…)