Economy
Human population set to decline for the first time since the Black Death
From LifeSiteNews
By Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute
The world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing.
The collapse in birth rates that began in post-war Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every single corner of the globe.
Many nations are already feeling this death spiral, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
Just this past year, Japan lost nearly a million people. Poland lost 130,000.
However, the big story comes from China, home to one-sixth of the world’s population.
The decades-long devastation wrought by the one-child policy has sent that country, for centuries the pacesetter in population, into absolute decline.
China finally admitted that its population was shrinking, but demographers — including myself — believe that the numbers have been falling for almost a decade.
The Chinese government’s official population figure of 1.44 billion also greatly exaggerates its overall numbers, some analysts say by as much as 130 million people.
India, the country that has now overtaken China in population, is still growing, but not for long.
The average Indian woman was having only two children over her reproductive lifetime, the Indian government reported in 2021, well below the 2.25 or so needed to sustain the current population.
The same story is being repeated all over the world, as birthrates in Latin America, the Middle East, and even Africa are not just falling — they are collapsing.
The current total fertility of Tunisian women, for example, is estimated at 1.93.
The result of all these empty wombs is that humanity just passed a major milestone, although not one we should celebrate.
For the first time in the 60,000 or so years that human beings first arrived on the planet, we are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. No wonder Donald Trump has suggested providing free IVF to all Americans “because we want more babies,” he says.
Because of ever-lengthening life spans, the population will continue to grow until mid-century. But when this demographic momentum ends—and it will end—we will reach a second grim milestone on humanity’s downward trajectory:
For the first time since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, human numbers will decline.
The 14th century bubonic plague was the worst pandemic in human history. It killed off half the population of Europe and perhaps a third of the population of the Middle East.
But even as the plague was filling mass graves, the survivors kept filling cradles. And because the birth rate remained high the global population recovered although it took a century or so.
This time around, we may not be so fortunate. All the factors that influence fertility, from marriage rates to urbanization to education levels, are pushing births downward.
Now you may be excused for not knowing about the current birth dearth.
After all, powerful international agencies like the UN Population Fund and the World Bank have done their best to keep it out of the public eye.
Moreover, these agencies, set up during the height of the hysteria over “overpopulation” in the 1960s, like to overestimate births in one country and pad population numbers in another.
For example, the UN, in its annual World Population Prospects, claims that 705,000 babies were born in Colombia last year, when the country’s own government pegs the number at just 510,000.
This is not a rounding error.
Neither is the UN’s claim that Indian women are still averaging 2.25 children, defying the country’s own published statistics, which show that it is now below 2.0.
All this number fudging allows the UN to claim that the global total fertility rate last year was at 2.25, still above replacement
It’s even wrong about replacement rate fertility, which it says is 2.1 children per women.
It’s wrong because in many countries sex-selection abortion skews the sex ratio strongly in favor of boys.
To make up for the tens of millions of unborn baby girls missing in China, India and other Asian countries, those countries need more need 2.2 or even 2.3 children on average.
The UN exaggerates human numbers for the same reason that the Biden-Harris administration exaggerated employment numbers: for financial gain and political survival.
There are billions of dollars at stake, funding that is fueled by a dark fear of mushrooming human numbers.
The population control movement does not intend to go quietly to its grave, even as it continues to dig humanity’s own, so it feeds this fear.
But the world’s population is not only not exploding, it’s on the cusp of collapsing. Which is why it’s time to end the war on population.
This article was originally published on www.pop.org on September 3rd, 2024, before being reprinted in the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family’s Academy Review in November 2024. Edited and republished here with permission.
From the Fraser Institute
By Scott Lincicome
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the fate of the global tariffs President Donald J. Trump has imposed under the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). A court decision invalidating the tariffs is widely expected—hovering around 75 per cent on various betting markets—and would be welcome news for American importers, the United States economy and the rule of law. Even without IEEPA, however, other U.S. laws all but ensure that much higher tariffs will remain the norm. Realizing that protection will just take a little longer and, perhaps, be a little more predictable.
As my Cato Institute colleague Clark Packard and I wrote last year, the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, but the legislative branch during the 20th century delegated much of that authority to the president under the assumption that he would be the least likely to abuse it. Thus, U.S. trade law is today littered with provisions granting the president broad powers to impose tariffs for various reasons. No IEEPA needed.
This includes laws that Trump has already invoked. Today, for example, we have “Section 301” tariffs of up to 25 per cent on around half of all Chinese imports, due to alleged “unfair trade” practices by Beijing. We also have global “Section 232” tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports of steel and aluminum, automotive goods, heavy-duty trucks, copper and wood products—each imposed on the grounds that these goods threaten U.S. national security. The Trump administration also has created a process whereby “derivative” products made from goods subject to Section 232 tariffs will be covered by those same tariffs. Several other Section 232 investigations—on semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, and more—were also initiated earlier this year, setting the stage for more U.S. tariffs in the weeks ahead.
Trump administration officials admit that they’ve been studying these and other laws as fallback options if the Supreme Court invalidates the IEEPA tariffs. Their toolkit reportedly includes completing the actions above, initiating new investigations under Section 301 (targeting specific countries) and Section 232 (targeting certain products), and imposing tariffs under other laws that have not yet been invoked. Most notably, there’s strong administration interest in Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers the president to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits via global tariffs of up to 15 per cent for no more than 150 days (after which Congress must act to continue the tariffs). The administration might also consider Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930—a short and ambiguous law that authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 per cent on imports from countries that have “discriminated” against U.S. commerce—but this is riskier because the law may have been superseded by Section 301.
We should expect the administration to move quickly to use these measures to reverse engineer Trump’s global tariff regime under IEEPA. The main difference would be in how he does so. IEEPA was essentially a tariff switch in the Oval Office that could be flipped on and off instantly, creating massive uncertainty for businesses, foreign governments and the U.S. economy. The alternative authorities, by contrast, all have substantive and procedural guardrails that limit their size and scope, or, at the very least, give American and foreign companies time to prepare for forthcoming tariffs (or lobby against them).
Section 301, for example, requires an investigation of a foreign country’s trade and economic policies—cases that typically take nine months and involve public hearings and formal findings. Section 232 requires an investigation into and a report on whether imports threaten national security—actions that also typically take months. Section 122 has fewer procedures, but its limited duration and 15 per cent cap make it far less dangerous than IEEPA, under which Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs of 100 per cent or more.
Of course, “procedural guardrails” is a relative term for an administration that has already stretched Section 232’s “national security” rationale to cover bathroom vanities. The courts also have largely rubber-stamped the administration’s previous moves under Section 232 and Section 301—a big reason why we should expect the Trump administration’s tariff “Plan B” to feature them.
Thus, a court ruling against the IEEPA tariffs would be an important victory for constitutional governance and would eliminate the most destabilizing element of Trump’s tariff regime. But until the U.S. Congress reclaims some of its constitutional authority over U.S. trade policy, high and costly tariffs will remain.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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