Journalism professor Roberto Suro was quoted by the Washington Post about a new Pew Research Center study indicating that birthrates in the United States have fallen to their lowest rate since 1920.

This new data, he said, should encourage policymakers in Washington to start planning for the country's long-term economic future.

“We’ve been assuming that when the baby-boomer population gets most expensive, that there are going to be immigrants and their children who are going to be paying into [programs for the elderly], but in the wake of what’s happened in the last five years, we have to reexamine those assumptions,” he said. “When you think of things like the solvency of Social Security, for example . . . relatively small increases in the dependency ratio can have a huge effect."

Read the article here.