The U.S. currently faces a kind of “doomsday scenario,” one that is largely unseen by everyone except those who are trained to see it. This doomsday scenario is an economic and demographic one– so, based on that, you would think that a president with a Wharton business education, a president who, himself, made about a gazillion dollars, would be the perfect guy to confront this impending cataclysm, right?
Well, no. Truth is, Trump is fucking everything up and making it worse.
This disaster nightmare facing the U.S. traces its origins to the end of World War II. At the end of the war, the troops were welcomed home very enthusiastically.
Very enthusiastically.
In those days before birth control or legalized abortion, baseball was not really America’s favorite past-time– as proven by the incredible spike in the birth rate. World War II veterans returning home coincided with the greatest single increase in the birth rate in all of history. The number of children pumped out in just a handful of years following the end of the war created a logistical shit-fit for the public services infrastructure in the U.S. So much so, some schools divided their student body into group “A” and group “B,” forcing classrooms and other facilities to perform a kind of double-duty.
The generation born to those returning veterans bears the name “Baby Boomers” for no other reason that its shear size.
These Baby Boomers came of age in the early 1960s, entering the economic order as workers and tax-payers. They were an incredible, expansive force for the U.S. economy. The number of workers drove down wages and increased profits, while expanding growth and making it possible for just about everybody to get a piece of the pie. Working class folks could live out the American Dream– a nice house, a car, and a color television, with meat and potatoes on the dinner table every night.
But, this era also saw the advent of birth control. So, unlike prior generations, Baby Boomers had the available luxury of “family planning,” the means for preventing or forestalling births and limiting the family size.
Baby Boomers would be the first generation in the U.S. to consciously curb its own reproduction.
This generation, Baby Boomers, historic simply for its numerical size, would become historic also for producing a smaller number of children than prior generations.
Until Baby Boomers, each generation created a greater number of children than the last. One of the unspoken and unacknowledged consequences of that steady expansion of the population is that any retiring generation was incrementally replaced by a working population slightly larger than the new population of retirees.
That’s important when you consider that the retiring folks need to collect those retirement checks… and those retirement funds gotta come from somewhere. It is much easier on the working population to cover the costs of children and taxes and retirees when the working population significantly outnumbers the population of retirees who are absorbing limited economic resources.
Typically, what you have is a kind of “pyramid,” with the number of retirees forming the top peak and the working base represented by the wide, broad bottom.
But, with the Baby Boomers, not so. With the Baby Boomers, we have a huge population like no other… and the working population is significantly smaller. So, with the retirement of the Baby Boomers, what you have is the pyramid turned on its head. The broadest section is the retirees, with the smaller point represented by the working population.
An economic and demographic doomsday scenario.
As a consequence of this, we quickly approach a threshhold point where the limited economic resources being produced by a limited working population no longer cover the necessities. This is exacerbated by the fact that corporations now opt out of their share of the tax burden– increasing the worker burden from roughly 50% at the end of World War II to more than 80% at the end of the Reagan swindle– a tax burden that is probably closer to 90% now. It is also exacerbated by decades and decades of infrastructure decay as lawmakers funded trillions for useless oil wars and subsequent corporate-boondoggle-reconstruction contracts while bridges collapsed and schools crumbled at home.
All of this adds up to a shrinking work force in the looming shadow of the largest, most-expensive retirement population in the history of the country– a shrinking work force paying an insurmountable tax burden while corporations avoid their fair share, a shrinking work force facing systems collapse from crumbling bridges, roads, and schools that have been falling apart for almost half of a century.
The U.S. work force cannot meet all of these incredible burdens– not to mention the responsibility to pay down the national debt, the half a century of bounced checks that came before them as the politicians kicked the can down the road to the next generation and the next. So, this work force faces the very real, current doomsday scenario that the work they perform does not generate the necessary cash to cover all of those necessary expenses.
Something has to go unpaid.
In fact, lots of stuff has to go unpaid.
A cataclysmic amount of stuff is going unpaid.
And, in the meantime, everything is quickly unraveling, from real health care capacity to roads and schools, to retirement pay and social security for the growing number of the elderly.
So, what to do?
There are generally two methods for increasing a population and thereby increasing the work-force. One of them involves a great deal of genital friction. We can pretty much cross that one off the list because, even if we put our mind to it, and even if we were inclined to forego birth control and family planning to pump out as many children as possible, they still will not enter the labor market for another fifteen years. That may alleviate some economic pressures in 2032 if swivelization is still around by then, but it helps very little in 2018.
The other method for increasing a labor population is through immigration.
The history of U.S. immigration, contrary to the country’s self-congratulatory mythology, is pretty dismal. Even prior to the hysteria of 9/11, the U.S. immigration policy was the strictest in the industrialized world except for maybe Australia. Maybe.
But after 9/11, U.S. immigration policy made the pre-9/11 immigration policy look like carnival seating at a Who concert in 1979. Every U.S. president outdoes his predecessor in cracking down on illegal immigration and on forced deportations of so-called “illegals,” with Obama far surpassing Bush II.
The harsh immigration policy can only be explained by American xenophobic idiocy and racism– nothing less.
Fact is, immigrants come across the southern border because there are jobs for people who are willing to accept a bewildering level of exploitation. Those jobs are available most prominantly in the food industries. Desperate migrants make up a large segment of those who harvest fruits and vegetables and also those who process meat at meat-packing plants, still some of the most brutal and dangerous work in the world.
The other fact is, no American wants those jobs– which is why they are so available for desperate migrants coming across the southern border. The availability of those jobs acts as a kind of supply-demand dynamic that essentially sucks the migrants north, right into the country.
For better or worse, this available cheap labor coming into the country is a windfall for the average, xenophobic American. The slave-wage labor of migrants keeps the costs of food down, making fruits, vegetables, and meat available much cheaper than if union-scale U.S.-born laborers were working in those industries. So, the exploitation of so-called “illegals” essentially benefits every American pocket-book from California to Maine.
Given all of these exigencies, as a matter of practicality rather than morality, it would make great sense for the radical right, in the interests of the corporate elite they serve, to do everything possible to expand the working class by introducing more migrants rather than less. In fact, an exponential increase in the number of migrants from poorer, southern nations could facilitate the introduction of cheaper labor into every sector of the economy. That is, rather than corporations moving their factories to Mexico, immigration policy could figuratively move Mexico to their factories and, in the process, increase the tax base and pay into the Baby Boomer retirement coffers and finance the biggest infrastructure project in the history of the country.
Doomsday scenario averted.
Unfortunately for stupid, xenophobic Americans, their stupid, xenophobic politicians are more dedicated to whiteness than they are to general prosperity. Leaders like Trump bemoan the willingness of poor people from “shit hole” countries coming to the U.S., and they remain perpetually befuddled as to why more people do not want to emigrate from countries like Norway or Denmark.
You know– white, European countries.
The dynamics at work in all of this are easy to grasp for anyone not a neo-fascist: People in countries that are less-well-off are willing to go to places where they can get more-well-off. So, the trend is that people in the poorer south wish to migrate into the U.S. to find opportunity. But, folks in countries with a higher standard of living– like Denmark and Norway –have absolutely no desire to migrate to a place like the United States where their standard of living will go down rather than up.
News flash: A number of countries in the world have higher standards of living than the United States.
News flash: Folks in those countries don’t want to move here.
So, part of the befuddlement experienced by the neo-fascists like Trump is due in part to a lack of acknowledgement that the U.S. does not have the highest standard of living in the world and we therefore cannot “cherry-pick” our migrant populations from wherever we want them. Reasonable people from countries with higher standards of living, if asked to come to the United States, will really think you are joking. As for the mythology of “American Exceptionalism,” many folks in countries with higher standards of living never seem to have gotten that memo…
While Trump and his neo-fascist friends cannot seem to stop staring at that memo, as fraudulent as it may be.
And so, facing a doomsday scenario that could easily be resolved by exponentially increasing immigration and expanding the worker base from poor nations, the Trump neo-fascists, motivated by a dedication to whiteness and mesmerized by the false mythology of American Exceptionalism, would rather turn away the brown and black migrants that are more than willing to solve America’s economic and demographic dilemma, while stupidly waiting for migrants from European nations with higher standards of living– nations that want absolutely nothing to do with the United States.
As a consequence, the immigration crack-down initiated by Trump exacerbates a growing problem, hastening and contributing to the cataclysmic systems failure that confronts the U.S. as worker dollars cannot meet the growing demands of a burgeoning retirement population, supply an inordinate percentage of the tax base, and also finance an impossible reconstruction of the crumbling national infrastructure.
It could be that in just a few short decades, some curious anthropologists will marvel at the wall that Trump will have financed, and they will wonder at what may have caused the downfall of the lost empire that built such a thing…

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Sean Swain
DOC #A243-205