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New House Speaker Mike Johnson Wants Women to Pop Out 'Able-Bodied Workers' to Fund Social Security (jezebel.com)

submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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In his remarks, not only does Johnson claim Roe “gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children,” but he rails against the imagined economic detriments of abortion, pushing his caucus’ outlandish claim that by depleting a hypothetical workforce, abortion has defunded social security: “Think about the implications of that on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest,” Johnson says. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this... Roe was a terrible corruption.” Mind you, social security and health care have been gutted in the last several years by Republican lawmakers, not people who choose to end a pregnancy.

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[-] NateNate60@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

"Demographic decline" is when the population of an area shrinks because more people are dying off than being born. From an economic standpoint, this is bad for a few reasons (regardless of the underlying economic system)—

You could lose economies of scale with things like public infrastructure. If you have millions of people contributing to the upkeep of, say, a metro line via the fruits of their labour (directly or through taxation), then that's all fine, but if your population suddenly shrinks to half of what it was, the cost of upkeeping the metro line hasn't halved, but the amount of total wealth in the area has halved, as now there are only half as many people contributing to the communal wealth.
The labour pool has shrunk. This is important because some things have a fixed amount of labour required and do not scale well. For example, a train always needs exactly one conductor regardless of how long it is, but now you only have half the number of conductors available. Again, it doesn't matter whether we're looking at a communist or a capitalist system, it's easy to see how this is bad in both systems.
People tend to get poorer because the vast majority of economic activity (and therefore wealth) is generated through people interacting with each other. This also results in a reduction of government budgets because revenue is generally tied to group wealth and economic activity. This happens at a disproportionate rate compared to the actual percentage of population loss, meaning the amount of revenue per capita goes down as well.

Some countries are already experiencing demographic decline. It's bad for everyone, but it's much worse for rich people than for poor people (in absolute terms), at least in capitalist countries, because rich people have much more direct exposure to the macroeconomic forces that result from it. Additionally, a lot of rich people's wealth is tied to growth. Infinite exponential growth is impossible; it's not a sustainable model for wealth. But they have a lot to gain from at least postponing the pyramid's collapse until after they die.

this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023

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