America is good. Americans are good. We should try to add 600 million of them in the next 80 years.
That’s the challenge MattY gives us. His “Why” can be broken down into two reasons: The first is to combat the rise of China and hedge on India. Disregard that one. It’s to get China-hawks (Republicans?) on his side. The second one is more subtle and more seductive but also blatantly obvious and true and philosophically endearing: people are good and we should want more of them. We should want more of them to be American, simply because they’d be happier as Americans- because they want to be Americans.
This is probably the most controversial point -the “why” of it all- because once you get down to the brass tacks of how to actually do it, anybody who reads this will probably agree with any random policy that MattY recommends. The more people you have, the more differentiation you have, the more options you have, the more joy you can collectively and personally have. Having more people to interact with is like having a camera with a higher resolution. Sharp lines and beautiful colors and wonderful shades make a tighter and more powerful image.
People are beautiful.
We need 600 million beautiful people. That requires an annual growth rate of 1.52%. That’s almost triple what it is now. America gets about 1 million immigrants a year. We have 4 million births a year and about 3 million deaths a year, for a net gain of 1 million lives. In other words, America’s population grows yearly at a paltry 2 million people a year, roughly split by domestic births and immigrants.
MattY’s plan is set around these two wheels. He shows us in the General Social Survey that American women claim to want to have 2.5 children. The actual number is 1.77. In other words, there are 2 million missing babies that women WANT to have but are unable to. The reason is simple: kids are too damn expensive. The answer to this is a bunch of policies that alleviate the strain on American families: reduced college tuition, universal childcare and preschool, child allowances, and required maternal *and* paternal parental leave. On the Left, none of these are particularly outrageous, but there are questions of fairness about them on the Right. The answer should be clear though- these are pro-family, pro-life policies. Contrary to popular conservative opinion, the government did not squash The Family in the 60s and 70s, but rather let corporate American subvert it.
So, we found an additional 2 million children a year simply by changing policy to allow American families to do what they already want to do.
We only need an additional 1 million people to get to our goals. How do we do that? Well, immigration. Where do we find all those immigrants? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. More than 750 million people want to come to the United States. We can afford to be choosy in who we let in like those in the most need, like refugees, and those with the most to offer, like foreign scientists, athletes and artists. We can literally take top 1% and we can do this year after year till the end of the century.
And, because of our current President, we are choosing not to. We’re in fact choosing to cut down the little that we’re letting in now.
I hope these numbers are useful for approaching 1 Billion Americans, because there is a lot I haven’t touched. MattY goes into a bunch of the things that you might bring up- traffic congestion, not enough water resources, or homes and then he counters with an obvious policy used in other countries that can be applied here. He shows not only is this something that America should do, but that it is imminently possible and that it will increase rather than decrease our standard of living.
Let’s do it.
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