Here Passes the Buck

Each generation should try to add a little wealth to the next. A society is said to grow richer as its old people plant trees whose shade they will never enjoy themselves.

Source: Getty Images

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from Rancho Santana, Nicaragua

‘Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.’

--Yogi Berra

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Good lord...dios mio...

The empire really is in decline. Futurism.com reports:

Trump Is Causing the United States’ First-Ever Population Decline

According to Bloomberg, one well-regarded population estimate warns that 2026 is primed to be the year of the first real population decline in the 250 year history of the United States. One of the main reasons, Census officials say, is the Trump administration’s incredibly aggressive deportation campaign.

From July 2024 to July 2025, US Census data released this week shows the total US population only grew by around 0.5 percent, or 1.8 million people — a rate that seems all but certain to slip into the negative.

Things aren’t about to get any better, either. According to data released by the Congressional Budget Office, the US birth surplus — the number of births over deaths — is expected to completely collapse by 2030. When that happens, the US will be totally dependent on immigration to sustain population growth.

This is good news for us. We introverts don’t like crowded restaurants...long lines...or waiting rooms. We don’t take readily to people we don’t know...and some of us even cross the street to avoid people we do know.

But it’s a view few share. Newsthink:

Elon Musk warns that falling birth rates could threaten civilization itself. Global population growth has already slowed dramatically, and many countries sit below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. That means each generation is smaller than the last. The UN expects growth to nearly stop by 2100, and some experts think it will reverse sooner. The risk isn’t overcrowding — it’s decline.

Cause or effect, we don’t know, but Baltimore has been bleeding people for the last 75 years and the results are not attractive. There were almost a million people in the city the year we were born. The town bustled with activity — an active port...the smell of McCormick spices in the harbor...autos coming off the GM assembly lines down in Canton…and steel hot from the furnaces of Sparrows Point.

There were rows and rows of washed marble doorsteps...and neighborhood bars on every corner ready to quaff the thirst of stevedores, steelworkers, pipe fitters, dockhands, factory girls...clerks, cops, and “hedgerow whores” (as Jefferson indelicately described the women who worked on “The Block.”).

Most amazing, Baltimore had one of the most highly developed, upscale social scenes in the US. In the 1950s, one of our distant cousins, from England, even came to Baltimore for her ‘coming out.’

It was a real town, in other words, with real industries and real jobs, and real people who paid taxes to support it.

Today, it is a pale shell of itself with barely half as many people. The city is full of abandoned houses, trash, ambulance chasers, dusty museums and busy emergency wards.

In the place of money-making industries are non-profit institutions. And in the houses that once held honest wage earners, are welfare recipients and NGO beneficiaries.

From an economic standpoint, a population decline — at least in a modern, societies with debts they can’t pay — is thought to be catastrophic. More people equal more output...more demand...more houses...more roads...more GDP...more tax receipts...more activity. Take away the people and the result is grim.

Total debt in the US is about $110 trillion...or about a million per household. Not included are the costs of delivering Social Security and Medicare benefits to an aging population, said to be about $73 trillion more.

Larger, richer populations may afford to take on the debts of their parents. Shrinking, poorer populations cannot.

An age-old idea is that each generation should try to add a little wealth to the next. A society is said to grow richer as its old people plant trees whose shade they will never enjoy themselves.

What the next generation doesn’t want, however, is infrastructure it can’t afford to maintain, transfer programs it can’t afford to continue and debts it can’t afford to pay. And even before Trump stymied population growth, the next generations were feeling pinched. CNN:

Even though the US economy is growing — not everyone is prospering. Millennials are on track to be the first generation not to exceed their parents in terms of job status or income, studies show. Among Americans born in the late 1980s, only 44% were in jobs with higher socioeconomic status than their parents when both were age 30, while 49% had positions of lower status...

If the US wanted to treat its young people decently, it would trim its budget and avoid spending more than its current taxpayers are willing to pay for.

Instead, the deficits come hot and heavy...passing the buck on today’s overspending to people who have never shaved, never voted...many of whom haven’t even been born. MSN:

Treasury reports $1 trillion debt surge in under three months

This is not planting new trees. This is cutting down the old ones, grinding down the stumps and putting Round-Up on the roots.

Regards,

Bill Bonner