EXCEPTION:

U.S. births, immigration boost Social Security system (Bloomberg News, January 19, 2005)

Tara Trent of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, has three girls, with another child on the way in June. The 31- year-old homemaker and her husband, Ken, talk of having a fifth baby. Big families aren't unusual in the neighborhood, she says.

``Ken says we're not going to have any workforce later,'' Tara says with a laugh. ``So we've got to pump these kids out to take care of us.''

The Trents are part of a demographic phenomenon in the U.S. unmatched in any of its major trading partners: Americans are having more babies. The trend, combined with an annual inflow of immigrants that is more than the rest of the developed world combined, may undercut a key argument behind President George W. Bush's plan to allow private Social Security accounts: that the current system faces an emergency because of a sharp decline in the size of the future U.S. workforce.

Even Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives and a supporter of private accounts, says, ``The combination of higher birth rates and more immigration makes the United States the healthiest of developed nations. This is not a crisis.''

One of the reasons we need to stop treating the Europeans like allies is because our futures are so different--we have one.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2005 10:02 AM