One of the most painfully annoying things a politician can do is to explain to the public, in matter-of-fact terms, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, some idea that he thinks is unimpeachably great, but which in fact is so larded with noxious assumptions and implications that you feel the need to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming. GOP Representative Paul Ryan is a master of this particular rhetorical art, and managed to outdo himself last week while discussing the number of American workers in relation to impending retirees. He asserted that this disparity is creating a problem for the economy — I assume for funding programs like social security and keeping up economic growth — and said that the obvious solution is for Americans to start having more babies.
It’s hardly in dispute that one major way our economy continues to grow is through population increase, lending Ryan’s statement a grain of truth that makes it hard to dismiss outright, and that adds to its overall fatuous quality. But by zeroing in on the U.S. birth rate, Ryan tellingly ignores the fact that U.S. population growth has been supplemented by immigration for many years. Yet he acts as if we have a population growth crisis, which would only be true if we were to become a nation that no longer allows in moderate numbers of documented immigrants. The only reason this might be the case, of course, is because our government is currently headed by a nativist, anti-immigrant commander-in-chief who aims to make such restrictive policies the law of the land.
As this piece rightly points out, there’s a clear line between Ryan’s ideas and the thinking of right-wing GOP Representative Steve King, who said in a CNN interview earlier in 2017 that, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.” Paul Ryan’s statement about the necessity of Americans getting busy making the l’il workers of tomorrow implicitly assumes this racist and nativist perspective, in which “real” native-born Americans are more valuable than those who happen to be born elsewhere.
Ryan’s statement also runs up against his own dismal record on policies that actually help people raise children, and for those children to get an education that might allow them to fulfill their glorious destinies as Productive Workers. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the soon-to-be-passed GOP tax bill would exclude millions of children from its Child Tax Credit increase, and Common Dreams notes that in 2009, Ryan voted against a bill that would allow federal employees to use up to four weeks of vacation time for parental leave — far less generous that the leave offered to families in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and many other countries.”
As has also been noted elsewhere, simply birthing out more future workers is hardly the only solution to budget issues created by relatively fewer people in the work force vis-a-vis the retired population. As a glaringly obvious Exhibit A, it’s possible to amend the tax code to raise more money from the wealthy — an option that Ryan is philosophically and perhaps even cognitively unable to consider. In the context of the “soak the rich — with firehose streams of free money!” GOP tax bill, the suggestion that we’re just plumb out of funds for government becomes laughable on its face, and the idea that the best solution to raise money is for average people to have more babies comes to seem bizarrely roundabout.
If nothing else, Ryan’s suggestion that it’s the patriotic duty of American women to pump out kids vividly illustrates the connections between an economics tilted to benefit the rich, a racist social vision, and a politics of misogyny. If America is to remain as white as possible, but still retain a growing economy, then the importance of women’s reproductive function becomes increasingly prominent versus the million other things women are capable of. And almost needless to say, the notion that our private choices to marry and reproduce should be informed by a sense of patriotic duty upends the relationship between citizen and state in a way more befitting an authoritarian regime than a democracy dedicated to personal freedom. Ryan's is a bankrupt vision, morally and economically, and his ability to make it superficially sound like it's no big thing is yet one more reason to hope his Speakership gets drowned in a big blue wave in 2018.
