It's like the threads about fast food worker shortages. People bitching about younger generations and laziness, unemployment extensions, economic/Covid stimulus check money. Video games, and couch-surfing while vaping pot at their childhood home into their 30's...

All of that doesn't "help", but it's not enough to really drive what's happening.

It's simple demographics. From a labor/workforce perspective, the Boomers are all dead, retired, or are getting too old to work even if they want to. Gen Z that backfills them is smaller than the Boomers, and the Millennials that backfill Gen Z are even smaller in number. It's an inverted pyramid, and has a compounding domino effect.

And this is why the drive-thru line at McDonald's is long, your order is always wrong, and they're short-staffed. And the people working at Walmart are lazier, sketchier, and "methier" looking than ever. There's no cheap and reliable robotics that can replace all this labor yet. Everybody with two brain cells that connect in their skull has a better job that's either easier, more interesting, or higher paying, or all three. And entry-level service-sector jobs are left scrambling for people who can piss clean, and will actually maybe show up for their shift.

The illegals can't fill all these jobs. The large employers, or any that have actual HR systems can't fake the I9 forms & ID info. There's not enough passable forged info or identity theft credentials to go around, and only certain economic sectors that are better suited to absorb illegal immigrant labor can take them. Businesses netter suited to cash pay under the table, like independent restaurants, or construction trades with layers of contractors and sub-contractors where there's some plausible denial and insulation from illegal worker fines/raids, agricultural work where they're spread all over the countryside, or jobs so undesirable, the business is complicit with the illegal immigrant like certain meat packing plants, and there's a sort of uneasy unspoken truce, where INS/CPB doesn't raid every last one of them they could, for fear an entire business sector would collapse. And the occasional raid that makes the news is unlucky for that particular company, and just political theater to a degree.

Cultural attitudes and trends, economics and politics can add some amount to the overall birthrate decline, but they're all secondary factors at best. Even with all the issues people like to point to, birth control, (Hello, condoms have been a thing for a long time now...) social, and economic/policy/tax demands creating two parent, or married couple working families with less time for kids, laziness, online activities/social media, all of that, it contributes, but it's also just nibbling around the edges.

From the perspective of the United States, and to varying degrees, the rest of the world... two big things happened. The internal combustion engine, and WWII.

in 1900, about 35% of the American population were farmers, or farm-families, or otherwise lived on a farm. The non-farming distributed rural population was perhaps 50%. Today, roughly 2% of the American population is "agricultural". And some chunk of that isn't actually farmers/ranchers even. There's some packing plant workers, grain elevator operators, people dealing with fertilizer or whatever, some farm/livestock veterinarians, and other agricultural support functions/people in that 2%.

There have been huge upsides to this. The average price paid for 2000 calories of food per day paid by average American workers/incomes as inflation adjusted dollars, or just hours worked, has fallen by about 85% since 1900. It would be even more, except that the enormous savings has partially been poured back into higher margin value-added convenience food services, aka "eating out". If you compare to just food prepared at home in kitchens, the relative price decrease is even bigger. If you compare a fixed basket of goods, base raw ingredients and staples (things most people hardly use anymore) like flour, oils/fats, sugar, raw meat, dairy, eggs, vegetables and fruit... the decrease for food vs. real/adjusted wages or work hours is possibly as much as 95%.

The lifestyle where more kids = more labor for the farm, and there was no electricity, no radio, no TV, much less Internet, and the million other things we have today, and nothing to do after sundown but play hide the salami with your wife by candlelight... the last big chunk of Americans living that lifestyle, it just died.

And then, WWII happened. War, danger, insecurity, huge amounts of people leaving, then returning... whatever, it seems to make people horny. And that insecurity drives the third-world birthrate to a degree, and it'll drop too, assuming their cultural issues unfuck themselves enough to allow for increased infrastructure and modernity to continue to penetrate their countries.

And the internal American economic demand post-war from the Baby Boomer demographic glut, people kind of just took that to be "the new normal."

And the economic, rade, and industrial factors from the US being the only world power that didn't see any significant damage, and wasn't also closed off and hamstrung by the Iron Curtain/Communism, people kind of took that to be "the new normal" as well, and just sort of assumed it would be that way forever too.

Yes, the US government, and various social changes/attitudes influencing our national economic and international policy have been absolutely pants-on-head stupid, if not downright intentionally evil and anti-American at times. And some aspects of post-war American global dominance are a problem too. The "surface area" of the US Dollar as the #1 world reserve currency, and the Petrodollar, and perpetual inflation from debt-backed Federal Reserve notes, and the final nail in that coffin with stuff Nixon did, means there is or was, a ton of "surface area" for the Fed Reserve to print/issue dollars like crazy and Congress to continually deficit spend, and not suffer bad "inflation", at least much of the time. (There's always some with debt-backed fiat currency and a central bank, always...) And the effects of that on real wages for Americans arguably accelerated the pressure for two-income married couples/families. Plus a bunch of other social things that drove it too.

There were also other things that arguably robbed the American people of even greater prosperity, like a couple of arguably wasteful wars/occupations that cost trillions of dollars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a ton of excessive cold war spending that didn't really match the actual military or economic poverty of the Warsaw Pact. Both out of a cynical desire to line one's pockets, maintain political/military power and influence, and an honest dose of "better safe than sorry" over-caution all fed it. Argue the details all we want, but out of the billions or trillions spent on defense, whatever portion of it was unnecessary or waste, was a tax dollar Americans could have spent on themselves or saved. Or it was deficit spent, and drove inflation, shrinking the dollars Americans had in their purses, wallets, and bank accounts, and paychecks.

President Eisenhower warned us about it in his "Military Industrial Complex" speech, but it went nowhere.

Then, in a double-whammy, LBJ's "Great Society" went and did the same thing with welfare/entitlements as Cold War military spending, and added to it the creation of an intergenerational welfare-dependent underclass that played a big part in stopping whatever good came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and race relations in America dead in it's tracks.

But as much as one can bitch about all of that, and more, China's "most favored nation status", the WTO and the G8, 9, 13 or whatever the hell it is now, NAFTA, and whatever else, had that all been "done right", many things around the edges would indeed be significantly better, but in the large broad strokes, America would still be in the same boat we are now no matter what. Even had every last aspect of US economic, military, and foreign policy all been "perfect" from the standpoint of protecting the best interests of the American people as a whole.

The internal combustion engine, taking on the form of the modern farm tractor, ended the era of America being a significant agrarian economy, in terms of employment and lifestyle for good. And cemented our existence as a majority urban/suburban industrial economy. And WWII, the Baby Boomers, and the post-war decades of America being the last-man-standing economically... none of that was going to last forever.

It won't happen, not to any significant degree anyway. The first reason is their own constitution, that General MacArthur handed them. They could re-draft it, but it's a huge undertaking.

Everyone but the Norks giving China nervous side-eye isn't enough to completely overcome the institutionalized base hatred most all of Asia feels towards Japan. And because of that, they won't accept Japan re-militarizing significantly past their current level. Most of Asia isn't interested in a significantly more militarized Japan, except as a talking-point against Chinese attempts at regional hegemony. And in part, the feelings towards Japan are exacerbated by the unique situation of the US occupation WWII. We gave them the kid-glove treatment in some ways, fearing they'd all go banzi to the last woman and child wielding sharp broomsticks if we pushed them too hard on owning up to what they did. And while nobody's going to make a human wave assault with sticks over it today, all that's still in play with certain Japanese/Asian cultural aspects in terms of honor and saving-face. And younger generations that just see WWII as a generic "war" over economics and whatever, without the darker aspects of "We've got a divine right to rule all this other sub-human filth." that motivated Imperial Japan from the 1930's to 1945, to add some context.

So Japan didn't get their "noses rubbed in it" in the way the Allies did with Germany. And the Germans even did more of it all on their own. (Arguably, Germany has gone too far in the other direction in some ways.) And that's assuming an actual meaningful full-blown apology and acknowledgement of Imperial Japanese WWII atrocities would actually help with other Asian countries supporting increased Japanese militarization. Instead, over the decades, Japan has issued a series of wishy-washy "statements of regret", but not outright apologies because of all that. And in practical terms of Japanese realpolitik, the Japanese Parliamentary system and certain hard-line political parties/factions would immediately cause a big internal backlash, making such apologies impossible.

And if all that could be ignored, Japan's demographic decline and economy can only support so much. They don't have America's largest military asset, the US Dollar, and it's ability to spread across the globe as the #1 world reserve currency and the Petrodollar, which enables the Fed Reserve to print dollars incessantly, and (usually) avoid intolerable inflation, and the Congressional deficit spending on a huge defense spending program. Japan just can't do it, even if they had the manpower, and the regional political or cultural realties needed to run a significantly bigger war machine.