The news that some are considering a child allowance to help with the so-called problem of a decline in fertility makes me wish Dr. Fauci were also a trained psychiatrist. (see NY Times the upshot https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/upshot/americans-fertility-babies.html )
Yes, I think we need a new cabinet level position, a national medically trained psychiatrist who can calm us down, hold our hand, make us absorb reality and get us back on track. His or her nickname could be Dr. Know, as in : “know science before you leap to detrimental conclusions.” The lack of understanding how deeply the US is in overshoot right now, or that many reading this do not even know what overshoot is, is right up there with other stunning examples of our failure to grasp reality.
In 2012 the National Science Foundation asked 2200 people in the United States if the earth goes around the sun or does the sun go around the earth. 26% put the earth in the center of the solar system. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says
So if 1 in 4 Americans presumably do not understand why it is that we call it a solar system and not an earth system, why should I be surprised that we keep treating the US and its resources as if they are inexhaustible? I would hope though that our leaders would be among the 3 in 4 that get the big picture. Alas, leadership is the first resource we seemed to have exhausted.
Overshoot is a term usually reserved for how many irreplaceable natural resources we are taking from the earth because too many people are using them too rapidly. The NGO, Global Footprint Network, https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/ specializes in researching the depressing data of how quickly we are exhausting our minerals and such. I believe when it comes to our country, we need to expand the term ‘overshoot’ to include human resources.
It should be quite apparent to every sober American that we are hanging by a thread when it comes to adequate health care, health care workers, vaccines, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, reliable infrastructure and the list goes on and on. Our population has become desperate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics ( https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf) as of January of this year, ten million people are out of work. Our population has doubled in my lifetime, in a land where the resources of everything from jobs to open space has diminished. When your ship is sinking you don’t take on more passengers, you fix the boat. Our boat of perpetual growth was always a Ponzi scheme and one that keeps punching holes in our beleaguered vessel during the worst of storms. There is no bigger boat to move into; we must live within our boundaries.
To keep bringing on more people is a real punch to the gut of the already disenfranchised since it allows even more competition for scarce jobs. But corporations are licking their chops. There are many of the already rich, who are very willing to take even more advantage of poor. From pay-day loans to sub-prime mortgage rates, there is a long and sordid history of preying on those with little power. We can no longer allow our country to continue to be run by these schemers who love to take advantage of the ever-growing population of desperate American citizens.
Our age-old story enshrined on the Statue of Liberty of welcoming the tired and poor needs to be changed. We have become a country of overwhelmed with the tired and poor. It is a kind of collective psychosis that says to a nation which currently can shamefully say it has 586,000 people without homes, “Don’t worry our solution is to add more people.” We must be better Americans and work to help those already here before taking on more either through increasing child allowances or immigration. It is the only sane thing to do, as our US psychiatrist would tell us if only we had one in charge.