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The CDC also noted that this is the fourth straight year of declines. That’s because slight gains made by women in their late 30s and early 40s, were more than offset by record-low birth rates for women in their teens and 20s. More ominously, the total fertility rate also hit a record low of 1.728 births per woman — meaning there aren’t enough babies being born to maintain current population levels.

Why does this matter? “A country’s birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health,” columnist Ariana Eunjung Cha explains. “The number needs to be within a certain range, called the ‘replacement level,’ to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there’s a danger that we wouldn’t be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable.”

Those who responded to the report cited obstacles to child-bearing that included a lack of child care and parental leave, high insurance costs and job instability, as well as a lack of other policies to help younger adults cope with student-loan debt and housing costs.

University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers believes those obstacles reflect an overall feeling of hopelessness. “The birthrate is a barometer of despair,” Myers asserts, explaining that people don’t have children unless they’re optimistic about the future.

No doubt, but quite likely something more insidious is in play here. Previous generations of Americans have coped with similarly pressing problems, yet continued to have children and raise families.

So what’s changed? While the opposite of optimism is pessimism, the bet here is young Americans have heartily embraced nihilism: Traditional values and beliefs are unfounded, and existence itself is both senseless and useless.

That’s not hard to understand, since they’ve been fed a steady diet of nihilism beginning as early as kindergarten. That’s where they begin learning that America is an inherently flawed, hopelessly bigoted nation in need of “fundamental transformation.” Transformation that wholly embraces the nihilistic dogma that men are “toxic,” whites are “privileged,” minorities and women are “victims,” gender is “fluid,” Christians are “bitter clingers,” the rich are “greedy and selfish,” certain speech is “hateful,” and social justice must transcend the Rule of Law.

More telling, as one moves up the educational ladder, the level of infantilism increases, as students become coddled by “trigger warnings,” attuned to “micro aggressions” and comfortable with safe spaces — replete with Play-Doh, therapy dogs, and coloring books.

Unfortunately for many young Americans, it’s a seamless transition from their “helicopter parents,” who are firmly convinced that even the slightest dent in their child’s self-esteem has the makings of life-long catastrophe — especially in a world where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. This one-two punch has produced a generation of Millennials that considers itself the most stressed generation in history.

Thus, growing up — as in the primary prerequisite for responsible child-bearing — is to be feared.

Yet the most nihilist agenda force-fed to America’s youth is global warming. “It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging,” The New York Times  reports. “And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43.”

Those interviewees felt “saddled with painful ethical questions that previous generations did not have to confront,” the Times adds.

Really? Wholly inaccurate doom-and-gloom predictions have been an integral part of the leftist agenda for decades. In 1970, Nobel laureate and Harvard biology professor George Wald insisted the world “will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” The same year Population Bomb author Paul Erlich declared that the “death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” Erlich further insisted “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

In 1975, British science writer Nigel Calder warned that the world will endure a new ice age, a threat that “must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

And who can possibly forget the pronouncements of scumbag-Al Gore and commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who predicted the end of polar ice caps by 2014, and the end of the civilized world itself in 12 years, respectively?

Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst Patrice Onwuka views such rhetoric as counterproductive. “I would love to see a national campaign that says, ‘If you want to have kids, you should,’” she stated. “What we should not be hearing particularly from the far left is, ‘No, don’t have children right now because they are going to die in 12 years.’ And unfortunately, that’s what is picking up steam.”

What else is counterproductive? The Left’s ongoing love affair with abortion on demand right up to — and on occasion, beyond — the moment of birth. Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973, this nation has endured 60 million abortions.

Coupled with declining birth rates, that genocidal level of carnage ought to elicit a slew of proposals regarding ways to incentivize child-rearing and the moral responsibility necessary to undertake it properly. Instead, exactly like the EU, America’s Ruling Class has a “better” idea: incentivize a wholesale invasion of the nation by illegal aliens, coupled with it unsupportable levels of legal immigration — and tell Americans it’s all for their own “demographic good.”

What are they really saying? Americans must sell out their culture, customs, language, and borders to maintain the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Does it get more cynical? The Trump administration has announced a comprehensive plan to deal with illegals, but every sentient American knows it’s a non-starter, because every sentient American knows that when each party had two years of unassailable control of Congress and the White House, the border remained wide open, and visas continued being overstayed with impunity. Moreover, the cap on H-1B visas for legal immigrants has already been filled — for the year 2020.

“Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date,” writes Victor Davis Hanson. “But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.”

Not without hope. And for an American Left that embraces the institutionalization of victimhood and the grievance culture that sustains it, the choice between keeping civilization alive and “saving the planet” is becoming irreconcilable.

That’s the essence of nihilism. And unless Americans become willing to reject the intellectual and moral bankruptcy that sustains it, expect the “birth dearth” to continue.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63106?mailing_id=4285&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4285&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Not that he’s calling for some sort of renewed constitutional view of federal involvement in education, mind you. According to Vox, “He wants to triple federal Title I funding for schools that serve a large number of low-income students, set a national salary floor for teachers of $60,000, and provide universal school meals: breakfast, lunch, and snacks for every student year-round.” It’s part of commie-Sanders’s 10-point plan to address K-12 education nationwide. We’re shocked — shocked — to note that all 10 points increase federal involvement, including the 10th plank that serves as a catch-all for immigration, gun control, and the Rainbow Mafia’s “equality” agenda.

But if you’re wondering how curtailing choices and market function helps children in failing schools, well, you’re not alone. Nevertheless, in a Saturday speech timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling — which, if you’re keeping score, was a good example of overturning precedent — commie-Sanders argued that charter schools and for-profit models are “exacerbating educational segregations.” Furthermore, he insists, “We do not need two schools [sic] systems; we need to invest in our public schools [sic] system.” And how many billions of additional dollars have we thrown at the Education Dept. with nothing to show for it but lower test scores and learning?

His race-based appeal isn’t entirely convincing, however. Amy Wilkins, senior vice president of advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says, “commie-Sanders’s call is out of touch — as usual — with what African Americans want. More disturbing, the senator — for personal political gain — would literally lock African-American students into schools that have failed them for generations.”

That’s exactly the point. commie-Sanders and other socialists vehemently oppose any competition for government schools run by the powerful National Education Association. That’s because they want all of America’s children to undergo a centralized indoctrination agenda that will train tomorrow’s Democrat voters.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63112?mailing_id=4285&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4285&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also decried the bill, saying, “The Democrats’ latest piece of legislation is another mirage, packaged with a deceiving title, that ultimately chips away at our religious freedoms, would jeopardize Title IX sports programs, and puts our children at risk by eliminating parental consent in life-altering medical procedures.”

What does the Equality Act do? It updates the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of protected characteristics. But McCarthy is exactly right about its effects.

Religious liberty would suffer greatly. The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson lists several ways this would happen. For example, “The Equality Act would force employers to pay for sex ‘reassignment’ procedures in their health insurance plans, and require medical professionals to perform them.” That goes for the military, too. Anderson adds that it would “force all schools and businesses to open their women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams to boys who ‘identify as’ girls and to men who ‘identify as’ women.” Faith-based adoption agencies would be forced to place children in homes they deem unfit. The alternative will be to shut down entirely.

As for women’s sports programs, they’re already in jeopardy because of the participation of biological males. And we’ve documented numerous tragic cases of child abuse over supposed gender dysphoria. Instead of getting help, these children are being subjected to life-altering hormone manipulation and even physical mutilation — and then given “reality” TV shows, to boot. The Equality Act could end up taking away the rights of parents who want to stop this insanity. Think that won’t happen? Look to Canada.

On a final note, amidst the nationwide fight over state abortion laws, the Equality Act would aim to trump them all. It does this by adding “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” to the aforementioned list of protected characteristics. Thus, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins warns, “The Equality Act doesn’t just torch religious freedom and the First Amendment, it guts every pro-life protection ever passed into law.”

The good news is that the Equality Act won’t get a vote in the Senate and President Donald Trump has indicated he would veto it in any case. The bad news is that Democrats will campaign on it for years to come in their ongoing bid to dupe more women voters with appeals to emotion.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63081?mailing_id=4280&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4280&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Introducing his plan, Trump stated, “We are proposing an immigration plan that puts the jobs, wages, and safety of American workers first. Our proposal is pro-America, pro-immigrant and pro-worker. It’s just common sense.”

The Washington Examiner reports, “Under the Trump plan, the share of legal immigrants permitted entry based on job skills would rise from 12% to 57%. Family bonds as a justification for legal entry would fall from 66% to 33%. Asylum and diversity admissions would fall from 22% to 10%.” Trump also noted, “Future immigrants will be required to learn English and to pass a civics exam prior to admission. Through these steps we will deliver an immigration system that respects and even strengthens our future, our traditions, and our values.”

A senior administration official offered an olive branch: “[The plan] can be what [Democrats] want it to be. If [Democrats] don’t want to engage, then it will be part of the election. If they want to engage, then it could be part of a negotiation. That’s going to be up to them.” Trump hopes his proposal will help to unite congressional Republicans and in so doing pressure Democrats into serious policy engagement.

And make no mistake, “This is his proposal,” the official added. “[President Trump has] been intimately involved in crafting it. We’ve shown him kind of where some of the criticism might come from on the Right, and his response is, ‘I’m happy to talk to them and I’ll convince them of why this is the right thing.’”

Predictably, House Speaker Nancy Pulosi declared Trump’s plan to be “dead-on-arrival” because … it’s Trump’s. In a complete about-face from her own advocacy for a merit-based immigration system back in 2013, Pulosi fallaciously blasted Trump’s plan as “greenlighting the Administration’s barbaric family detention policies, reviving the President’s ineffective and wasteful wall, completely abandoning our patriotic and determined Dreamers and gutting our asylum and refugee protections, which the evangelical community has called the ‘crown jewel of American humanitarianism.’” Pelosi then sought to spin her own past support for merit-based immigration, insisting, “To say that this plan’s application criteria are ‘merit-based’ is the height of condescension.”

Clearly, Democrats have no intention of taking up the issue, as they’d rather divide Americans with their “Hate Trump” agenda. That’s why this is effectively Trump setting up a prominent issue on which to campaign in 2020.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63061?mailing_id=4280&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4280&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In fact, in a Trump-bashing Washington Post column  advocating for an atheist in the White House, Max Boot asks if there’s “any reason to believe that China is a less moral place than the United States.” In a devastating  response, columnist Ben Weingarten explains that Boot’s contemptible assertion of moral equivalency is belied by “the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens living in the world’s leading surveillance state,” as well as “the 1 to 2 million Uighurs currently imprisoned in ‘re-education camps’ or countless others held captive for challenging the Party line.” Above it all is Mao Zedong, whose policies killed between 40 and 70 million people — more than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined.

Unfortunately, if we’re restricted to talking about members of the Ruling Class in both countries, Boot has a point. No doubt there are as many Chinese leaders as their American counterparts talking about the net plus of international trade — as in a net plus that benefits the few at the expense of many.

Ordinary Americans? Buy your cheap consumer goods and shut up. If tainted pet food kills Americans’ pets, or defective drywall poses risks to American homes and their owners’ health? “It’s overwhelmingly in our interests that China prosper, that Mongolia prosper, that nations big and large, east and west, in Latin America and in Africa prosper,” said Joe Biden in 2013. “We want everyone to have a little money to make sure they can buy American products.”

Really? Here’s a chart of our trade balance with China from 1985 through March 2019. Note there isn’t a single year where America broke even, much less ran a trade surplus. Thus, it’s Americans who are doing the lion’s share of the buying, while many of the countries to which Biden refers, including China, still pay what amounts to slave wages to their workers. Workers with whom Americans must nonetheless compete to serve the globalist economic agenda. Americans, who as a result, suffered decades of wage stagnation, while the wealth gap between them and the country’s richest people has become so wide, an argument could be made that we’re already living in a plutocracy.

And in line with globalist ambitions, it’s a plutocracy where multinational giants like Google were perfectly willing to collaborate with the Chinese government’s oppression of its own people, until a huge backlash from both inside and outside the company dissuaded them. It’s a plutocracy where hand-writing elitists wonder what kind of hit Apple stock will have to endure because it sells and manufactures iPhones in the Communist gulag.

Ordinary Americans might ask themselves if they’re equally willing to abet the nation a 2018 State Department report on Chinese human rights referred to as one where there are “arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; arbitrary detention by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members.”

Our elitists certainly are. In 2010, hack New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wistfully wished we could emulate China “for a day” to “you know, authorize the right solutions” to our problems. As Victor Davis Hanson  explains, Thomas and his fellow elitists assumed all Chinese improprieties were “just speed bumps on the eventual Chinese freeway to liberalism. Supposedly the richer China got, the more progressive it would become.” Along the way, the “now-worrisome huge trade deficits and Chinese cheating were further contextualized as ‘our fault,’” Hanson adds.

Thus, the long-held elitist position that American values, often framed as “jingoistic” patriotism, should have no bearing on the free exchange of goods between nations — or worse, that those values are inimical to such exchanges — took hold among those who further insisted that free trade is far more often exercised between consenting non-government actors who shouldn’t be inhibited from pursuing their economic dreams.

Yet does anyone seriously believe anyone in China could trade with anyone else without government approval? As Weingarten reminds us, “The Chinese regime is the dominant force in Chinese society, pervading every aspect of its citizens’ lives.”

Moreover, China’s ambitions couldn’t be clearer. “The U.S. no longer possesses clear military-technical dominance, and China is rapidly emerging as a would-be superpower in science and technology,” said Elsa B. Kania, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, in 2018. She further asserted that Chinese People’s Liberation Army “might even cut ahead of the U.S. in new frontiers of military power.”

Those advances were powered by a military budget that “grew at an average annual rate of 10 percent from 2000 to 2016,” according to a 2019 report published by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

More to the point, Americans financed every bit of it — more than twice over. In 2018, China’s entire military  budget was $175 billion. The same year, our trade deficit with China reached $419 billion.

Are cheap consumer goods more important than national security?

It seems the Trump administration knows the answer. As ConservativeTreehouse columnist Sundance explains, the president has been laying the groundwork for “multiple trade alternatives to China” since 2017. “Long before media pundits starting noticing/considering how serious President Trump was about structurally resetting the entire landscape of a U.S-China trade relationship, President Trump quietly and methodically laid the groundwork with personal visits to: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (Japan); President Moon Jae-in (S-Korea); President Tran Dai Quang (Vietnam); and President Rodrigo Duerte (Philippines),” he writes.

In other words, an American public told they would be irreparably harmed by a trade war with China will be able to purchase similar products from other nations. Nations with no ambitions to completely rearrange the world order — on totalitarian terms.

It’s about time. Ever since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, Americans have been assured by administrations from both parties that it’s only a matter of time before China’s emulation of capitalist economics evolved into democratic governance.

It was a mistake then. Forty-seven years and trillions of dollars in deficits later, it’s devolved into self-serving, elitist propaganda.

“Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free,” argues Pat Buchanan. “The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.”

That’s the disease. “Make America Great Again” is the antidote.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63046?mailing_id=4278&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4278&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

Except that crybaby-Abrams has been anything but gracious.

First of all, Abrams founded a nonprofit through which she flooded then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office with incomplete, inaccurate, and outright fraudulent voter applications — only to cry “racism!” and “voter suppression!” when some of those applications were thrown out. And that was before the election. In other words, she seeded the narrative for her loss even before her defeat.

Second, as our Louis DeBroux noted in November, “Democrat crybaby-Abrams lost her race for governor with more votes (1.9 million) than current Republican Governor Nathan Deal won reelection with in 2014 (1.3 million).” Yet she stubbornly clung to her “voter suppression” narrative, frequently airing her phony grievances since the election. Indeed, she now insists record turnout among minorities only “led to even more of those voters being subjected to voter suppression.”

And socialist-Beto calls that “grace”? He does need the 2020 votes from minorities, after all.

That brings us to drybaby-Abrams’s New York Times op-ed just yesterday, titled “Why I Am Determined to End Voter Suppression.” Spoiler alert: No she’s not; she’s committed to perpetuating and expanding the myth for nationwide political advantage.

She claimed, “My home state, Georgia, for example, suffered a vicious blend of electoral malfeasance, misfeasance and mismanagement during my race for governor last fall. But Georgia is not alone.”

Neither is crybaby-Abrams alone. Democrats in general are sowing distrust in the American electoral system, all while claiming it is Republicans who are undermining elections. And Dems are pushing numerous rules changes — from dumping the Electoral College to blocking citizenship questions on the census — that would stack the deck in their favor. Meanwhile, people like Elizabeth dinky-Warren are telling the American people that “if all the votes are counted, [Democrats will] win every time.”

If this is “grace,” we’d hate to see spiteful, divisive partisan bitterness.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63047?mailing_id=4278&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4278&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Before President Trump announced that he was imposing 25% tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods, he got encouragement from an unlikely source: Sen. Charles scumbag-Schumer, D-N.Y. The Senate Democratic leader, who has little good to say about Trump most days, tweeted, “Hang tough on China, @realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down. Strength is the only way to win with China.”

That should have been a wake-up call for Beijing. When Chuck scumbag-Schumer is tweeting support for Donald Trump, it’s time to cut a deal.

But China didn’t cut a deal — and now it is paying a price. Those who suggest Trump started this trade war with China have it backward. Beijing has been waging economic warfare on the United States for years — stealing our intellectual property, forcing our companies to transfer technology as a price of doing business in China and subsidizing state-owned enterprises to prevent U.S. businesses from competing in dozens of sectors of the Chinese economy. The difference now is Chinese leaders are facing a president who is willing to fight back.

China apparently didn’t think Trump would do so. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese negotiators believed they had leverage because Trump “was worried about the future course of the U.S. economy and therefore may be more eager to do a deal.” Big mistake. The U.S. economy is strong, unemployment is at the lowest level in five decades, and wages are rising. In fact, America’s biggest economic problem is that we have more job openings than unemployed people to fill them.

China’s economy, by contrast, is in trouble. Last year, China reported its slowest economic growth since 1990, and the Financial Times reports that many experts “believe its official data understates the true extent of the slowdown.” While the United States has added about half a million manufacturing jobs since Trump took office, China’s manufacturing sector is shedding jobs. And the Chinese population is aging rapidly as birthrates are falling, which means the workforce is becoming smaller and less productive.

Our economic strength against China’s relative weakness gives Trump leverage in this standoff, and he is using it. Trump knows the United States can better withstand a trade war than China and that President Xi Jinping needs a deal more than he does.

Trump is wrong when he says tariffs are good for our economy because China is paying us “hundreds of billions of dollars” in tariff revenue — money he can use to help farmers withstand the blow of lost sales to Beijing. China is not paying the cost of tariffs. American businesses and consumers are paying. But the fact that Trump mistakenly believes tariffs are good for the economy should be a wake-up call for Beijing. He thinks he’s in a win-win situation, and that means, in this game of chicken, Trump is not going to blink.

And while China is not paying the cost of the tariffs, their impact on U.S. consumers may not be as bad as some observers predict. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors points out, our low rate of inflation neutralizes much of the costs of higher prices from tariffs, which will diminish over time. “If the US places 25% tariffs on all Chinese imports and no substitution for those goods and services occurs, the additional cost would be $145 billion. That’s a bit over one percent of 2018 consumer spending,” Scissors writes, but “the cost will certainly not that be that high, because substitution will occur. And the cost will fall over time as more producers enter to replace Chinese.”

In other words, our dynamic, growing, low-inflation economy can handle a trade war with China. That does not mean China will buckle easily. State ownership is the means by which the Communist Party directs the Chinese economy. Getting China to stop subsidizing large sectors of its economy, and to cease its theft of U.S. intellectual property, will be extremely difficult. But Trump knows he has no chance of doing so by filing complaints with the World Trade Organization. He is right to take a hard-line stance.

It’s much easier to question the wisdom of launching trade wars with allies such as Canada and the European Union. But we should all be able to agree that China is an economic predator against which we need to fight back. Trump is using tariffs to force China to open its markets to free trade and competition. Every American should be standing behind the president as he does so — just like Chuck scumbag-Schumer.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63016?mailing_id=4274&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4274&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body