The peace and love generation was good at neither

If only we baby boomers had been a bit more promiscuous, America wouldn’t be in this fix.

Instead, we blundered into an economic crisis of our own making — or rather not making. As in not making enough babies. (It turns out the peace and love generation was proficient at neither.) We started a long, disquieting, downward trend in baby-making.

According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, America’s annual birthrate started dipping below “replacement-level fertility” rates way back in 1971. (The same year Disney World opened in Orlando. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.)

Demographers calculate that a society requires 2.1 births for every woman age 15 to 45 to maintain a stable population. Fall below the magic equation, the population shrinks, gets older and considerably more crotchety.

Since 2007, the decline has become precipitous. Nowadays, Americans are cranking out barely 1.6 children per woman, according to the CDC study. Just 3.8 million babies were born in

2020, the fewest since 1979.

You’ve got to ask, what the hell have these iPhone-addicted pollywogs been up to? (ESPN started broadcasting in 1979, which might explain why American males neglected their reproductive obligations that year.)

These findings indicate that the great ongoing labor shortage crippling America’s economic recovery might well be attributable to this 50-year decline in fertility.

Of course, this doesn’t jibe with the conservatives’ contention that American workers were spoiled rotten by last year’s $1,400 stimulus checks. And by the temporary $300-a-week supplement the feds added to unemployment benefits last year.

But the extra unemployment money was eliminated last June in Republican states, a strategy to get those indolent slugs “off the government dole,” as Gov. Ron DeSantis put it. (Money for blue state workers ran out last September.)

All these months later, with the COVID money long spent, why hasn’t the labor crisis ebbed?

“We’re hiring” signs are still taped to shop windows. Hotels and restaurants need workers. Airline staff shortages over the Fourth of July weekend caused a cascade of flight cancellations. A dearth of 911 operators in Broward County has led to unattended emergencies. The Broward School District can’t hire enough school bus drivers. A Florida Education Association report in January warned that public schools statewide had 9,000 teacher and staff vacancies.

South Florida needs more computer programmers, construction workers, store clerks and warehouse workers to keep the economy humming. Florida, where retirees make up a fifth of the population, lacks enough health care workers to keep us oldsters kicking.

This startling news was reported last month by the Sun Sentinel: South Florida can find enough qualified candidates to fill lifeguard vacancies, an occupation that seems considerably more attractive than — to pick a random example — newspaper columnist.

It’s the math that’s killing the recovery. The U.S. has 11.4 million job openings but only six million jobless workers. Expired COVID benefits didn’t cause this massive disparity.

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study released in June blamed the labor crisis on overly generous federal handouts. Not surprising from that bunch. But the Chamber also found that a third of U.S. working mothers whose jobs disappeared during the pandemic can’t return to work because of unaffordable childcare.

But most of the blame for the shrinking workforce belongs to us baby boomers. According to a Pew Research study, nearly 29 million boomers retired during the pandemic year of

2020. Leaving too few youngsters to replace them.

It’s as if the U.S. is running a giant Ponzi scheme that requires a constant supply of new workers to keep the scam from collapsing. Somebody has to pay the taxes needed to fund boomers’ Social Security pensions and Medicare insurance. We depend on youngsters to buy the homes and stocks where we’ve stashed our life savings.

I can think of a couple of obvious solutions to the labor crisis, though neither would be palatable to conservatives.

First, like other wealthy nations, the U.S. could fund affordable childcare, freeing up thousands of women, whose current participation in the U.S. workforce is the lowest since 1970. And we need a sensible immigration policy unfettered with hateful rhetoric designed to attract young, skilled foreigners to replenish our geriatric workforce. Germany, with a similar worker crisis and an even lower fertility rate, has enacted new immigration policies designed to attract 400,000 skilled immigrants each year.

“We can only get the aging labor market under control with a modern immigration policy,” Christian Duerr, leader of the Free Democratic Party, told reporters.

An influx of young workers into the U.S. would also fix our birthrate predicament. I’m afraid our Millennials just can’t get the job done.