Slashdot Mirror
US Birthrate Plummets To Record Low
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that the U.S. birthrate is at its lowest since 1920, the earliest year with reliable records. The rate decreased to 63.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age — a little more than half of its peak, which was in 1957. The overall birthrate decreased by 8 percent between 2007 and 2010, but the decline is being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, with a much bigger drop of 14 percent among foreign-born women. Overall, the average number of children a U.S. woman is predicted to have in her lifetime is 1.9, slightly less than the 2.1 children required to maintain current population levels. Although the declining U.S. birthrate has not created the kind of stark imbalances found in graying countries such as Japan or Italy, it should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, says Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. 'We've been assuming that when the baby-boomer population gets most expensive, that there are going to be immigrants and their children who are going to be paying into [programs for the elderly], but in the wake of what's happened in the last five years, we have to reexamine those assumptions,' he said. 'When you think of things like the solvency of Social Security, for example, relatively small increases in the dependency ratio can have a huge effect.'"
...who said they were illegal, and why would you assume simply refering to an 'immigrant' would result in only illegal immigrants?
Wow, just...wow.
They would always comment about how, when couples back-in-the-day got married, the first thing on their list of wants was children. Now, the list of wants usually starts with a house, two cars, living in a nice neighborhood, better insurance, a bigger TV, a good living room set... One's take on the matter: "America's so selfish nowadays it doesn't deserve children."
At least you'll get something back, geezer. I don't expect social security to be around when I retire.
Even if you are here illegally, you get payroll deductions. In fact, since you're afraid of the government you may decide not to file a tax return and claim your refund. You might consume more services at the local level, such as going to the ER for medical care which is expensive. There's a lot of data sloshing around; but it's clear that illegal immigrants pay some taxes. They definitely can't avoid sales tax which is pretty high in California now. For the types of jobs immigrants work, that sales tax is a pretty big hit since they'll be spending a large portion of their income right away--even if it's under the table and has no payroll deduction.
Note, I'm not defending the idea of coming to a country illegally. We need to secure the borders, and address the supply and demand for labor in a way that's fair, productive, and beneficial to the whole country. I'm just saying that it's not accurate to say they pay "no taxes".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
that's why the republicans does not want women to get subsides on their birth control pills!
My husband and I agreed not to have kids. By all rights we're in the sweet spot for it - young professionals, good careers ahead, own our house, etc. But.... I just don't see the need for it. We have his nieces and nephew any time we get the urge to play with kids or hold a baby. We have tons of friends with kids who are super glad to have us watch their rugrats for a night.
And let's not get into how expensive children are, or how hostile work environments are to parents of either sex (but especially women.) I believe both parents deserve equal maternity/paternity leave and for a far longer period than most employers are willing to give them. We'd have to both be comfortably working from home to even consider it.
So, we're not quite the couple in the beginning of Idiocracy, but we're close enough.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
How is being the very lowest it's ever been recorded as being since we began reliably recording it "not a record low"? Which word are we disagreeing on here, "low", or "record", since it certainly qualifies as a "record low" for any definition of either of these words I'm aware of. And if it's only a record low for most of our lifetimes, do tell us when it was lower? Which year? And how and where was that record recorded?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Seriously, the social security problem is easily solved by actually making the wealthy pay their proportionate share of the taxes. It isn't even a significant factor compared to the effects of uncontrolled population growth on the human race.
Our population is far too high as is and it going shrinking some isn't a bad thing. Just because we've been planning for overcrowding, increasing resource usage, etc doesn't mean should not demand that our population continue it's horrible growth increase to fulfill our fears.
People often like to claim that humans consume without bounds and replicate until all resources are used up and will eventually move on. A stop in population growth would indicate an equilibrium with our environment and disappoint them. Is that really so bad?
This is a problem with the US economy in general - it is based on growth. Those European/Asian countries that have been around for thousands of years are more stable, and have economies based more on sustainable goods and services. One of the main economic numbers that drives the US stock market is "new housing starts" - a number based solely on having the population continually increasing. Once that slows down - and can't even be propped up by the banks fudging mortgages - the entire country is headed for a depression.
Legally immigrating to the US does not require one to do any of those things. Only those who wish to take US citizenship, which legal immigrants are eligible for only after years of living in the US, must do those things. And many legal immigrants to the US are happy to stay at the level of permanent residency, never applying for citizenship.
Why do you assume immigrants must be illegal? The law should allow the amount of legal immigration we need, and the immigrants that will help our country grow. Immigration is vital to our economy now, and will become more so as the population ages.
Young, vital, driven immigrants are just the sort of people we need, yet nativist know-nothings act as if immigrants are a blight, not paying taxes or contributing anything to the economy. If we shut off immigration, as the xenophobic fringe demands, we will look like Japan soon, with an aging population and not enough young people to support them.
The USA was built by immigrants. It would be the height of folly to excessively limit immigration now when we most need it.
However, it's the lowest it's been in 90 years. The US birthrate was very high before the 20th century. The population was relatively small, most people were farmers, and needed all those kids. My mother is 83 and the baby of the family, and she has three brothers and six sisters. Back then, that was normal. before 1900 the average family was even bigger.
This is only a record low for most of our lifetimes.
I'm confused, you claim this isn't a record low because it used to be much much higher 100+ years ago? Your post honestly doesn't make any sense to me. This really is almost certainly a low for the US, since as you yourself point out, before the advent of modern medicine and technology, many women would have 5+ children. They needed to: not only was the help around the farm vital to succeed, but with the death rate being so high, especially among infants, the population could only stay steady if everyone who could had a lot of kids.
Also, I should point out that it is a record low, quite literally: it's the lowest on record, which by definition is a "record low". It may or may not be the lowest ever for the US, but it quite likely is.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Close to 10%.
At least you'll get something back, geezer. I don't expect social security to be around when I retire.
... and for less contribution. I once saw a chart someone compiled where it showed the average tax rate paid by people of each age. For example, someone born in 1950... they added up the median income for a 16-year-old in 1966, a 17-year-old in 1967, etc, to get an idea of how much money they've earned over their entire life (adjusting for inflation, of course). They then looked at how much tax they paid, on average, at each of those ages to figure out, over your lifetime, what percentage of your earnings went to the 'gummint'. What they found was that, for senior citizens, because they paid such low tax rates back before the 70's or so, their effective lifetime tax-rate was something like less than half of someone in their 20's today.
used to be you had 5 kids and 2 of them would die by 5 or 10. smallpox, typhoid, cholera, polio, death in child birth. add in your normal bacterial infections spreading and making your kids blind or some other disability because anti-biotics weren't available.
these days we have vaccines, antibiotics and other drugs to treat conditions that used to kill.
my older kid had pneumonia a few years back. a little zithromax and he was ready for day care in 2 days.
one of my school teachers once said that pneumonia put her in the hospital for a month
before that it wasn't that unusual to die from it
I suspect that people with education and stable incomes continue to have children at the already low rate that they have historically.
That immigrants are also reducing the number of pregnancies hints that they understand the consequences and costs of raising children. Or maybe it hints that with access to free medical services (and yeah, lets not kid ourselves, for them it is free), they have managed to throw off the traditions of the third world of having many children even when living in squalor in the hopes that some of them will survive to take care of them in their old age.
(You would sort of expect this, since anyone willing to abandon their homeland and go on a long and dangerous journey risking arrest, and sometimes life, in the hopes of improving their conditions, would seem unlikely to fall back into the trap that they left).
Its been a long time since this country had a depression lasting 5 years, (with another 4 years on the horizon). Long enough for even the clueless to begin to understand the costs involved of feeding kids while out of work.
So who is still having those kids? I suspect the least able to support them. Unmarried teen age girls living in poverty. Despite nationally declining rates, teen birth rates in the United States remain persistently high, at 34.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. And these rates are dramatically higher than in other developed countries. Twice as high as Canada.
Also those living on public assistance, of one form or another, where having another kid means another increase in their assistance check.
The birth rate for women 15 to 50 years old receiving public assistance income in the last 12 months was 155 births per 1,000 women, about three times the rate for women not receiving public assistance. See page 15.
With no skills, and no prospects, there seems to be an entire population of breeder-class individuals. And they are not necessarily the immigrants that we all thought they were.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Stop your whining. It was your generation in power that decided that starting multiple wars, deregulating the financial system, and then cutting taxes at the same time was a good idea. Your generation doesn't deserve shit for retirement compared to how your generation looted and pillaged the country thinking that your kids would clean it up.
Frankly, I'm repulsed by this notion that "Hey, we gotta keep pumping out more kids so that we have a big base paying into social security to offset all the geezers taking their benefits". In any other situation, the notion of needing lots of new contributions to help fund the payouts to the holders of mature shares would be called what it really is: a pyramid scheme. Every pyramid scheme, eventually, runs out of sources of new influx as the system grows exponentially. And, in the case of population, it brings with it all sorts of negative consequences, like soaring housing costs in places that don't suck.
Frankly, I view population growth as akin to deficit spending... you can only get away with it for so long. So, rather than wait until we've exceeded the earth's capacity to support us, let's bite the bullet now. Let's embrace policies which encourage either zero-growth or population reduction and just accept the fact that it means that we'll all have to work a longer % of our life-expectancy.
I do remember many times seeing the reports of how over-population was going to put such stresses on resources that it would be catastrophic to the globe. Well, looks like the problem has been solved. Yes it will be painful for a moment in time, but once population stabilizes, or even falls, there will be more for folks.
So over-population and global warming aren't intertwined at all? Carbon emissions are only half the problem. The other half is ALL THE FREAKING PEOPLE using the technologies which emit carbon!
Seriously? This is an issue?
It's an economic bubble. Our country is based on debt, which is based on inflation, which is based on population expansion. More hands out means more hands to put money into which means more debt which means more money in the money system which means you can keep collecting interest. Issued debt grows and grows, but work gets done.
Now when people start working their way out of debt and paying on assets, stop taking loans, etc, that fails. Stop taking mortgages? Credit crunch, recession, depression. Stop taking student loans? Credit crunch. With a credit crunch, we don't have as much money in the system. That means less money flowing around to pay off loans, making it harder for people to get high-paying jobs to pay down their debt, meaning defaults on debt, meaning people are foreclosed on and banks are left with worthless assets and lose money. Loss of money means the federal government doesn't get paid back, and banks fold, and the taxes go up--or the banks raise interest rates and add fees to take more money away from people. Economic damage.
The whole system is based on population expansion. More population, more credit issue, more debt, more money flow. Stable population means suddenly a lot of things don't work. Thing is the population is basically an economic bubble--it grows, it shrinks. It can't grow and grow and grow any more than the spot price of AAPL.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Except for Hawaii. Their earliest year with reliable records was 1962 apparently.
You've got it backwards. The Dems generally want Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security kept out of the regular budget, and not means tested. Doing those things would make the programs, in essence, just more welfare programs, and thus more easily cut in hard times. You are also mistaken about the "trust fund." The trust fund currently consists of Federal government bonds, because all the money was used at the time it was raised, to make the deficit appear lower. The net effect is that when it's time to make payments from the trust fund, the government must either inflate the currency to make those bonds less expensive in real terms to buy back (thus hurting people who actually save money), raise taxes to get more revenue to pay off the bonds (thus hurting those who will then be paying in to benefit those who are paying in now), sell other bonds to pay off the earlier bonds (thus increasing the national debt/interest on net, and on the assumption that US government bonds haven't gone off a cliff), or not pay the promised benefits. Some combination of these three is most likely. But the reality is that there is no trust fund in any meaningful sense; there is a set of promises that will have to be redeemed by hurting someone or everyone at some point in the future.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I was amazed at all those large Okie families in the PBS series on the Dust Bowl. Of course most of them were formed in the 1920s when the rain, crop yields and WWI reconstruction demand were good. Maybe they most stopped having kids during the Depression and Dust Bowl.
Hi there. Immigrant to the US from Canada here. I figured I'd just respond to the parent (mostly a troll) and some of the siblings here.
Immigration to the United States requires a significant amount of money and time. First, you have to qualify for either one of the immigrant visa categories, or come across on what's called a dual intent visa and then adjust status to Permanent Resident. These processes variously require interviews with USCIS and a significant wait for certain categories (more than a decade in a few, months to years for most), not to mention that the filing and other fees for the whole process can run into the thousands of dollars. (Did you know that USCIS, like the Post Office, doesn't take taxpayer dollars and instead is self-funded from filing fees? Good for you, not great for immigrants.)
If you came over on a nonimmigrant visa, like a visitor, work, or educational visa, you're likely going to have to return home before you can start the real immigration process, unless it's "dual intent" like the K-1 fiance(e) visa as I mentioned before.
Reason has a very good overview of the various paths available.
No, we aren't required to take a test on civics and English. That is required when one naturalizes, or becomes a United States citizen. This has a prerequisite of legally residing continually in the US for three or five years, depending on the visa category in which you entered. (Oh, and another thousand dollars, thanks.) The process, like other USCIS processes, takes about a year in wait and processing time. The process is also entirely not required; one can continue to be a permanent resident for as long as one likes, as long as one continues to file for an extension of one's Permanent Resident status (i.e. green card).
I personally plan to become a US citizen (well, dual citizen) as soon as possible though, because it allows one to obtain a US Passport (faster border travel), means one is done with USCIS forever (barring very specific, very rare circumstances), and allows one to vote.
So I guess what I'm saying is, the next time you want to make assumptions about legal immigration, look into it first. It's quite complicated, expensive, and not for the faint of heart.
"Give me your tired, your poor"? Not so much.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Most white people in the USA are illegal immigrants. Just ask any American Indian.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not just the overall birth rate, but also the break down of birth rate to various segments of population that matters.
The linked article displays population projection from now to 2050, broken down by segments. It also shows the education levels of each segment. What it imply is we will end up with a less educated work force moving forward unless we are doing some heavy investing now.
So, your $20 in 1969 may turn into $0 (albeit in 2050) unless we can somehow shore up "the kids these days".
"You do know there are millions of legal immigrants flooding into the country right? "
Stop listening to Rush Limburger and the other members of the idiot brigade.
there are NOT millions of them FLOODING into the country.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There is no actual money in the SS Trust fund. Reagan took a bit of it, Clinton took most of it, and Bush Jr finished it off. There's only an IOU there with no economic value.
This can be hard to understand: why is it bad that there's one kind of bond there instead of another? Here's a very close analgy to explain. Let's say you had good retirement savings in your 401K. But then you borrowed the entire amount for some emergency. There's *still* a financial instrument in your 401K - the record of the loan you made to yourself! But that loan has no economic value - at this point each dollar that you want in retirement you have to first put back in. You've got nothing to retire on - as you would expect, given you've already spent it.
We already spent the SS trust fund, sorry about that, but I'm sure the Baby Boomers enjoyed it and will be very sand when their grandkids have nothing. "Oops, our bad".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Illegal by what law? You can't be illegal if there is no law.
Illegal immigration is the vast majority of current immigration. No need to assume, when you can measure.
However, most immigrants, illegal or otherwise, pay Social Security taxes! It's amazing how often that's overlooked in debate. The number of cash-only dayjob workers is statistically small, and most immigrants (legal or otherwise) have some social security number associated with their job! Given that social security is the primary tax most people pay these days, the notion of the "illegal working tax-free" is unfounded.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
1. Advanced material wealth and higher education suppress birth rates.
2. Advanced material wealth and higher education attract immigrants.
3. Emigrating is difficult under the best and most legal circumstances. Therefore, immigrants tend to be more ambitious and harder working than average.
4. Consequently, immigrants can supplement native birth in broadening the economic base, while simultaneously adding economic dynamism via their own ambition and the more generalized effects of cultural diffusion.
5. Profit!!!
6. GOTO 1.
Having been born only a little bit after you were - I was raised with the assumption that it won't exist by the time I'm of retirement age, so I better find a better way to save.
Why would it not exist? It can't run out of money. If you think otherwise, you're terribly misinformed about exactly what it is and how it works. It currently has a surplus, and at some time down the road it's likely the surplus will be gone. At which point, either it will continue to pay, but not in excess of the amount of money it takes in, or congress will weasel out and start running it in the red. Expecting any other option to occur is ridiculous. No politician is going to eliminate it, and it can't possibly cease to exist without congress eliminating it. The worst that can happen is the benefits will be not so great. But they never were...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I think you are mistaken unless you are not speaking about the US which would be odd. The marginal tax rate has been relatively stable and dramatically decreased on the highest earners over the time period you to which you refer (see this article).
That's why you don't look at the highest earners (who actually enjoy some of the lowest rates, ever, right now). Back in 1928, people making less than $52k/year (in adjusted dollars) were actually in the lowest bracket, paying 1.5%. By 1935, those making less than $65k/yr paid 4%.
This lasted until the start of WW-II, when tax rates went up and the thresholds for the brackets went down... to the point where someone making $60k/yr was in a 30% bracket. But, someone who had appreciable income earned before WW-II would have enjoyed some ridiculously-low tax rates averaged into their lifetime average.
The bar for legal US immigration is low and it is intentionally made easy to immigrate.....They essentially bypassed taking a couple days to learn the Constitution and a basic English test and an oath of loyalty to the US.
If the bar is that low, then why are people coming here illegally? Perhaps you are buying into some sort of illusion of how easy it is to get in, because based on the number of people sneaking in, I don't buy it. You do realize that sneaking in isn't easy or safe, right? Why would anyone sneak in if getting in legitimately is really that simple? I call bullshit....
People who have a problem with those requirements aren't our kind of people.
You know, I actually would welcome those people. Because to sneak in, you have to deal with possibly dangerous characters, risk injury, imprisonment, or even death sneaking across miles of desert. Anyone who wants freedom that badly is OK in my book. These are the people who will appreciate its value, because they had to earn it. The people I don't think we need are the lazy, self-centered assholes already here who expect that freedom is safe, easy, and free.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is not how intergenerational transfers work. This is no ponzi scheme, unless the people in the US collectively decide to produce no more children and forbid all immigration. In which case I guess you'll have other, more urgent, problems. Ponzi schemes break down because eventually, you cannot grow the base fast enough. Intergenerational transfers work as long as there are new generations, which there will be for as long as there is a US of A. There are transitions between demographic structures, but these are temporary problems and require no long-term fixes : you can smooth out problems through borrowing.
Basically, the US is broke exactly when people stop wanting T-bills, and not a moment before. The moment that happens is when people stop believing that the US will produce stuff in the next 3-10 years. And the rest of the planet offers significantly better prospects with very little risk.
This will not happen. At least, not in the forseeable future.
It doesn't matter that there is no money in the fund. In fact, it is a good thing: it is a terrible and wasteful thing to have large sums doing nothing in a bank account, and at the kind of scales we are talking about, this is nothing short of criminal. Because the ability to keep paying SS depends on the promise that the US is a place where riches are created (by which I mean goods and services, not bullion) it is an excellent strategy to invest the money in the fund to pay for whatever stuff makes Americans happy and productive.
You want to know what happens when people start thinking like accountants? Look at Europe! Or think about outsourcing of IT departments, to give an example dear to the slashdot crowd. A country is not a household.
Bullshit. And why bother measuring, when you can just make up numbers?
According to Wikipedia, there is 7 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the US.
According to the US census bureau, there are 40 million immigrants in the US as of 2011.
Doesn't quite seem like a "vast majority", or actually any kind of majority, does it?
Seriously. 2 minutes of googling. But why bother if you already have the wrong answer in your head?
Now just before Bush came into office in 2001, as an example, 1 American dollar was worth about 1.75 British pounds...After Bush left office...1 American dollar was worth about .55 {cent/pent} in British currency.
You are clearly mistaken about the exchange rates. The USD has never been worth anywhere near 1.75 GBP, at least going back to 1953.
The rate was 1.48 GBP to 1 USD in Jan 2001 (when Bush takes office) , and 1.45 GBP to 1 USD in Jan 2009 (when Bush leaves office). It did go as high as 2.10 in the interim, but there was no trend even close what you are suggesting.
Not that I'm defending Bush, nor do I think that any of the rest of your post is remotely accurate, but those figures just stuck out to me as being entirely wrong.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Stop your whining. It was your generation in power that decided that starting multiple wars, deregulating the financial system, and then cutting taxes at the same time was a good idea. Your generation doesn't deserve shit for retirement compared to how your generation looted and pillaged the country thinking that your kids would clean it up.
Except that it wasn't the OP's generation that did all of that, at least not alone. It was all of the voting generations. Oh, and you forgot to include massively expanding entitlements (particularly Medicare) and bailing out the banks in your list of fiscal irresponsibilities.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Whoa now, you're not one of those people that thinks we need to bring back manufacturing are you?
Because it never left.
That's right, robots, computers, and better manufacturing processes have automated away the manufacturing jobs. And that's a good thing. We may not be able to have a society without people, but we can certainly have a manufacturing industry with a lot less people then we did before.
So if you talk about "bringing jobs back", you're going to have to look somewhere other than manufacturing. (Same goes for bean counters and secretaries. We have computers now. While there will ALWAYS be some paper-pushers, not every company needs a mail department, and not every boss needs a secretary.)
All Government bonds, including those owed to SSI, are considered part of the Debt (well, if you are going with the $14 trillion number). The only way to pay off the debt is to buy back the bonds and when you lower the deficit you will by definition be selling less bonds to all customers, including SSI. So the trust fund was used to "fund" the deficit, but it never changed the apparent size of the deficit. One consequence of this is that paying less benefits doesn’t lower the debt or deficit in any way. It DOES allow us to more easily continue to fund the deficit however with the net result of lowering taxes.
If you don’t like looking at SSI as separate, that is fine, but then you need to cut that debt number nearly in half.
Not that we don’t have some real decisions ahead. Let me give you a hint, when granny finally squares off with the military, granny is gonna win. The cards are in her favor and until the SSI fund actually runs out, everyone else gets the short stick.
Of course politicians on both sides love to play smoke an mirror with this.
Yes. There. Are.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_legal_immigrants_does_the_us_take_in_per_year
People with mod points. Please stop modding people up informative when you can paraphrase their argument as "nuh uh" just because you agree with their politics.
Here's a CBO report on illegal immigrants and their effect on taxes. While illegal immigrants do use services, they seem to pay quite a bit in taxes, too. They pay sales taxes and by renting property they are indirectly paying real estate taxes that fund local governments and schools.
they also had much, much higher wages and a larger share of the profits. Wages have been falling for 40 years. Right now the the only way to get anything out of the rich is to tax it out of them. Also, if you just look at the top 1% taxes are the lowest they've been since 1920. It's the middle and poor that are getting hosed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You're misplacing your anger. It was not his generation. It was a few select people that used their wealth and power to trick, cow and frighten the entire USA. They use sentiments like you just expressed to divide us so they can conquer us. Stop thinking in terms of punishment for mistakes. Start asking what people REALLY deserve. Food. Housing. Health Care. You ARE entitled to those things. Don't let the Mitt Romneys of the world tell you otherwise. Don't let them set you at each other's throats....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For making more resources available for mine.
That's because in 1960 corporations paid 40% of the taxes collected by the government and the wealthiest 10% paid tremendously more tax than they pay now. Corporations now only account for less than 5% of the total taxes collected so the entire tax burden now rests on the shoulders of the middle class. Also, by the way, when CEOs complain about the ridiculous taxes they pay call bullshit, most fortune 100 companies pay little or no taxes and energy companies got huge government subsidies even when they made record profits. Check out the Taxes and Government Revenues over at Wikipedia. Most enlightening, and rather infuriating as well. We've been sold a pile of cow flops.
Supply side should be renamed screw John Q.