Who will pay for all these neat programs the government provides?

In the second part of a (short) series, Jeff Jacoby ponders negative population growth and the impact on an aging population in "A world without children"

Result: a dramatic and inexorable aging of society. In the years ahead, the ranks of the elderly are going to swell to unprecedented levels, while the number of young people continues to dwindle. The working-age population will shrink, first in relation to the population of retirees, then in absolute terms.

Now a determined optimist might take this as good news. In theory, fewer people in the workforce should increase the demand for employees and thus keep unemployment low and the economy humming.

But the record tells a different story. In Japan, where the fall in fertility rates began early, the working-age population has been a diminishing share of the nation for 20 years. Yet for much of that period, unemployment has been up, not down.

"Similarly, in the United States, the number of people between the ages of 15 and 24 has been declining in relative terms since 1990," demographer Phillip Longman observed in the Harvard Business Review. "But the smaller supply has not made younger workers more valuable; their unemployment rate has increased relative to that of their older counterparts."

Far from boosting the economy, an aging population depresses it. As workers are taxed more heavily to support surging numbers of elders, they respond by working less, which leads to stagnation, which reduces economic opportunity still further. "Imagine that all your taxes went for nothing but Social Security and Medicare," says Longman in "Demographic Winter," a new documentary about the coming population decline, "and you still didn't have health care as a young person."

Jeff Jacoby blames the Sexual Revolution (in part) for the drift away from the traditional family but I wonder if there isn't a finger to point at the Green Revolution and its push to limit large families. Here's a re-typed excerpt from P.J. O'Rourke's "All the Trouble in the World"

"Malthus," says Vice President Al Gore in Earth in the Balance, "was right in predicting that the population would grow geometrically." Al, as the father of four children, should know.

Everything you need to know about long-discredited Malthusian theory you can find in the Paul Ehrlich-Julian Simon wager. The Left wants fewer kids but they also want expanded government entitlements; as they say, something's gotta give.