(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The birth rate in the United States just keeps setting one dismal record after another. In fact, according to the CDC it just dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. We are literally not even replacing ourselves, and that has all sorts of implications for our future. For instance, if we don’t produce enough offspring, there simply will not be enough workers to support Social Security and Medicare and those programs will inevitably collapse. A society with lots of old people and relatively few young people will result in poverty for everyone. So the truth is that the birth rate crisis is going to ultimately affect all of us.
In order for the population of our nation to remain perfectly stable, women need to be giving birth to an average of 2.1 children because not all children make it to adulthood.
Sadly, the birth rate in the United States is now way below replacement level.
The CDC just announced that the birth rate in the U.S. fell below 1.6 children per woman in 2024…
The United States’ total fertility rate fell to a record low in 2024, dipping below 1.6 children per woman, according to new federal data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This marks a significant demographic milestone for a country that once stood apart among developed nations for maintaining a replacement-level birth rate of around 2.1 children per woman.
Our society is not growing.
Our society is dying.
If you go back to the early 1960s, our birth rate was hovering around 3.5 children per woman, but it has been on a downward trend ever since…
In the early 1960s, the U.S. total fertility rate was around 3.5, but plummeted to 1.7 by 1976 after the Baby Boom ended. It gradually rose to 2.1 in 2007 before falling again, aside from a 2014 uptick. The rate in 2023 was 1.621 but inched down in 2024 to 1.599, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
So what has caused such a dramatic shift?
According to CBS News, on average U.S. women are waiting longer to have children, and many are choosing never to have children at all…
The U.S. was once among only a few developed countries with a rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself — about 2.1 kids per woman. But it has been sliding in America for close to two decades as more women are waiting longer to have children or never taking that step at all.
I think that it is important to also point out that many couples simply can’t have children today.
Infertility has been steadily rising among women, and among men sperm counts have been falling precipitously since the 1970s.
If we do not do something about this, eventually most males will simply be unable to produce offspring at all.
For couples that are able to produce babies, many are putting off parenthood due to the rising cost of living.
Most Americans are just barely scraping by from month to month these days, and having a kid is really expensive.
In fact, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a single child to adulthood in the United States…
Raising a child from birth to age 18 in the United States can cost between $200,000 and $310,000, according to some sources. It is even pricier in some states, including Massachusetts, where families can spend up to $650,000.
Child care is a huge part of this: parents can expect to pay anywhere from $3,000 to $21,000 annually on child care.
When I was growing up, my father worked and my mother stayed home with the kids. But that is very rare in America today.
Most women are working, and that is another reason why the birth rate has been falling. It is just very difficult to have a full-time career and to be a full-time mother…
This “shift” includes the fact that most women in high-income countries now work, while it was previously “reasonable to consider having children as a widespread priority for women.”
But they do not attribute this to “whether women work at all after they are married or have had their first child” but rather “the tension between a lifetime career and the way motherhood interrupts or alters that lifetime career progression.”
But even women that don’t work are having fewer children. So how do we explain that?
The answer is actually very simple. Throughout human history, children have been considered to be a blessing to be cherished, but our culture regards them as a burden to be avoided.
We have a very “me-centered” culture, and we now prioritize ourselves over everything else. The idea of “making sacrifices” for your family and your children is anathema in this day and age.
Young people are frequently told that they will “ruin their lives” if they get married too early or have children too early. Our society encourages them to run around and have lots of fun before they “settle down”. Of course many are choosing not to “settle down” at all.
Our movies, our television shows and our music glorify the single lifestyle. As a result, a higher percentage of Americans are single than ever before. But has that made us happier? No, we have a raging loneliness epidemic in this country that I have written about on numerous occasions.
We were designed to love and be loved, and the family unit has always been the basic building block of society all throughout human history.
There is one last cause of our birth rate crisis that I wanted to mention. If we stopped aborting a million babies a year, that would completely solve our birth rate crisis right there. Of course that isn’t going to happen, and that is extremely unfortunate.
Given enough time, if we stay on the road that we are currently on it would lead to demographic collapse…
If trends continue on their present path, demographers warn, there won’t be enough people to work to support society. The extreme labor shortages would lead to stagnation, poverty, and ultimately — in the most dire scenarios — the collapse of civilization itself.
Of course I don’t believe that our society actually has enough time left for such a scenario to play out.
We are committing societal suicide in so many other ways, and the clock is ticking.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
