America's Baby Bust : The nation's falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems. And it's only getting worse.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the baby bust in America. Here's one partial solution:

In the U.S., the Social Security system has taken on most of the burden for caring for elderly adults, a duty that traditionally fell to grown-up children. A perverse effect of putting government in the business of eldercare has been to reduce the incentives to have children in the first place. One RAND study suggested that Social Security depresses the American fertility rate by as much as 0.5.

Getting rid of the welfare state would probably help population growth.