Paul Ryan Wants You to Have More Kids

Paul Ryan has discovered the bipartisan solution to fixing Medicare and Social Security: babies.

"This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring—I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country," Ryan told reporters on Thursday.

Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican and current Speaker of the House, "did [his] part" by having three children.

"We have something like a 90 percent increase in the retirement population of America, but only a 19 percent increase in the working population in American," he said. "So what do we have to do? Be smarter, more efficient, more technology—still gonna need more people."

Ryan is not wrong about declining fertility rates in America. The United States birth rate has been on the downfall for years and hit an all-time low in June, according to The New York Times. It fell 1 percent from last year, to 62 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 to 44.

The declining numbers are said to be associated with the decrease of births for teenagers and 20-year-olds. The birth rate for women having children in their 30s and 40s has increased, but not enough to compensate for the age group of 15 to 29—Ryan wants to change this.

The congressman's solution implicates that by increasing the younger population, the U.S. could increase the amount of tax money going into Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Ryan has long been an advocate for Medicare reform, allegedly persuading President Donald Trump to feel the same. In December, the Republican Congressman—after proposing a tax reform bill that would raise the national debt by more than $2 trillion—vowed to cut spending on health care entitlement, which includes Medicare.

Italy is experiencing similar fertility rate issues but has not yet proposed to cut health care for people ages 65 and over.

The 2016 birth rate in Italy dropped to its lowest point since 1861, but a lowering teen birth rate is not the cause. Finances and the rising costs of food and nurseries are being blamed, and Italians worry that the national average will drop to one child per woman.

America's low fertility rates have also been attributed to millennials, whom experts believe are "postponing adulthood" and waiting to have children, and pesticides, which have been linked to miscarriages in women.

Among Ryan's other proposed solutions is fixing the unemployment rate.

"And when we have tens of millions of people right here in this country falling short of their potential, not working, not looking for a job or not in school getting a skill to get a job, that's a problem," the congressman said.