Jan 18, 2025 3 min read

One hundred years ago, Pennsylvania was a national colossus, with 38 congressional districts and the same number of votes in the Electoral College. It had that clout because, well, a lot of people called the Keystone State home.

They still do, but the sun belt and other parts of the United States have outpaced Pennsylvania. Today, the commonwealth has half as many congressional districts. It’s not news that Pennsylvania has been losing population, with its rural communities being hit particularly hard. Counties in the Pittsburgh region, including Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, have had more deaths than births in recent years.

That regional problem is soon going to be a national problem.

According to a report released this week by the Congressional Budget Office, deaths will outstrip births across the country by 2033, seven years earlier than previous projections. The country’s population will shrink and become older because of people having fewer children and lower projected rates of immigration. This will have an impact on the country’s economic growth, productivity and on programs that seniors rely on like Social Security, where fewer younger people will be paying into the program just as more seniors are drawing benefits.

When the day arrives when the United States has more deaths than births, it will be joining Germany, Sweden, China, Scotland, Japan and a host of other nations already confronting the issue. Another report released this week, this one from the McKinsey Global Initiative, concluded that younger workers in countries with swooning population numbers will have to put off retirement and work longer hours if their nations are to keep pace.

Of course, it’s not simply just a matter of urging younger adults to have more children, even with the likes of Elon Musk taking to social media and proclaiming, “Just have kids one way or another or humanity will die in a whimper in adult diapers.” People are having fewer children in part because they get married later, both parents work in many households, and many parents have chosen to concentrate resources on fewer children. Plus, anyone who has been a parent can attest that it can be a demanding and exhausting enterprise – having one or two is just fine for many people.

The reality, too, is that the United States doesn’t make it all that easy for people to have children and be parents. There is no guaranteed paid maternity or paternity leave, and child care is very expensive – in this area, it can cost as much as $1,500 a month to send a toddler to day care five days a week. That works out to $18,000 a year – almost equaling the cost of college tuition at a state institution.

Other countries make it easier to be parents through support for child care and extended leave for new parents, and those are ideas that should be considered here if we are serious about raising the birth rate. Of course, if we want to maintain a strong workforce, we need to be more welcoming to immigrants. The United States is overdue to overhaul its immigration system. We should be competing for people from other parts of the world, not turning them away.

With a country as wealthy and energetic as ours, decline does not have to be our fate.