Visualizing the baby boom

I found a good illustration of what the baby boom looks like:

From these three charts you can clearly see how just prior to 1950 there had been a decline in births due to WWII followed by a boom towards the end of the war and through the fifties and sixties as people were encouraged to have babies. Then you have a decline in birth rate over the last thirty years and a clearly defined bubble riding up the stack as shown by the 2000 census data. That bubble will be hitting retirment age in 5 to 10 years and will be riding up the stack for another twenty to thirty years.

As of 2000 there were 35 million in the 65 and up age group, 174.1 million in the 18 to 64 age group, and 72.3 million in the under 18 age group. That makes the ratio of productive dependents to non-productive independents currently at 0.61. I'll be very interested to see what that number looks like in 2010, if only to see if there really has been a post 2000 baby boom or whether I've just been imagining it all. So far, figures as of the end of 2002 indicate there isn't one overall, although the birth rate for women in the 34 to 44 age range has been on the increase which probably explains my observation which is largely based on births among my thirty-something friends.

Another to visualize the baby boom it is just look at a graph of absolute numbers of births and also the birth rate (per capita):

Of course another baby boom right now only helps to fuel the problem of government and social security bankruptcy as in case you haven't noticed, any new babies fall right into that non-productive dependent age group. So if Bush suddenly proposes to raise the retirement age and decrease the age at which kids can leave school and go out to work you'll know he's trying more economically inspired policies to "solve" the baby boom problem. It seems unlikely but when the government is bankrupt (yes folks, its bankrupt - it owes almost $7 trillion at the moment and is still borrowing hundreds of billions more each year) they might try anything.