29th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
The following amendment to the Constitution is proposed to preserve and protect the standard of living and quality of life in America from the effects of overpopulation. It explicitly precludes a dependence on the rest of the world for natural resources and requires an environmentally sustainable population. It does not preclude the consideration of other factors, such as labor force size, productivity, etc.
29th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
The Congress shall establish a target population for the United States for the purpose of assuring a high standard of living and quality of life for its citizens. The target population shall not be higher than can be continuously sustained by proven reserves of domestic natural resources utilizing existing technology, or by trading such excess resources for others not available domestically. Also, the target population of the United States shall be below the level that, if applied globally, is determined by science to pose no threat to the global environment. The Congress shall establish immigration quotas consistent with achieving the target population. The Congress shall also enact policies that, while leaving people free to choose the size of their families, encourage the population to move toward and stabilize at the established target level. The target population shall be reviewed by Congress annually and shall be retained or adjusted as necessary.
What This Amendment Does and Does Not Do:
It forces Congress to address overpopulation and prevents it from ruining the standard of living and quality of life in America.
It forces the United States to live within its means in terms of natural resources.
It prevents the United States from contributing to an overall decline in the global environment.
It forces Congress to face the mathematical realities of immigration policy as an integral component of population management policy, instead of only viewing it as “our heritage” or as some kind of fulfillment of an unspoken promise to the rest of the world.
It does not say what the population target should be, nor does it define the standard of living or quality of life that we want to maintain, except to say that we must be resource independent and must not contribute to environmental degradation. But it does force our nation’s leadership to discuss and define these parameters.
It does not say what policies should be used to manage the native population, except that they should leave people free to make their own family planning decisions. The intent is to preclude the adoption of forced measures – things such as a “one child policy” or forced sterilization – which have been employed by other countries faced with overpopulation. Tax policy would be an example of an economic policy that could be used.
It does not say that we have to be independent in all natural resources, but that for those resources in short supply, we have other resources in excess for which they can be traded. For example, if we are short on oil, we should be able to pay for oil imports with exports of grain or lumber or some combination of these and other resources. If that’s not possible, then this clearly means that the target population would have to be reduced.
Explanation:
