Population explosion puts pressure on U.S. social service programs

What is not well-known and even less talked about is that the U.S. population of over 310 million has doubled in the past 50 years. At the current rate of growth, both from immigration and natural biological expansion, demographers predict a mind-boggling 450 million-strong population by the end of this century.

Although this factor is the direct opposite of First World nations such as Western Europe and Japan, which face the specter of shrinkage in population growth, it’s become a toss-up of which evolution is the greater of two evils.

While the Euro-Japanese nation group faces the problem of rapid aging, and a disproportionate number of retirees in relation to the productive workforce, the U.S. confronts the calamity of unrestrained entitlements, most of which were tailored to the much more limited recipients in the middle of the past century.

Food stamps, welfare support, medicare and medicaid, and a disproportionate segment of the population that pays no federal taxes, with a substantial component even getting tax credits; they have become an entitlement legacy not only embracing a much larger number of U.S. citizens than ever imagined when these programs were formulated, but as a proportion of this much greater population entity.

Such a poorer segment of the total of today’s unanticipated doubling population is much larger than the relative breakdown that existed before 1950.

Source:
Population explosion puts pressure on U.S. social service programs
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