From a thread on Plastic I see indication of a very distressing trend -- that more Americans are having three kids instead of two.
"Things have really changed," says S. Philip Morgan, a fertility expert at Duke University. "It's more acceptable to send kids to day care. ... There's an increasing number of upper-middle-class families out there who can just afford to have a third kid."
In other words, because these upper-middles have successfully exploited the earth's resources to their advantage, they're that much more capable of producing even more copies of resource-consumers just like them: resource-consumers who will expect televisions, DVD players, expensively and unsustainably manufactured plastic toys, cars, cheap gas... And you can't even argue that Americans are entitled to two children for "replacement" of themselves, because...
In terms of energy consumption, when we stop at two it's about the same as an average East Indian couple stopping at 60, or an Ethiopian couple stopping at one thousand.
Which, again, shows that the societal pressure on breeding is going in exactly the wrong direction. We should be discouraging breeding, not subsidizing it with tax breaks. As you learn at the bottom of this page, the sooner we turn up the pressure against breeding, the lighter the pressure will have to be. If we wait until the world's population is at really crisis levels, much more extreme measures will be needed (like mandatory abortion, or enforced sterility).
You know my attitude about population control. The comparisons you cite are interesting in how they portray the relative consumption of resources. Yours is a deliberately incomplete picture, though. First of all, two American children would most likely replace American parents (no net change in resource consumption). Second, your "two is too many" argument could be used against immigration since that too would create more Americans. Furthermore, you recklessly disparage the emerging generation by accusing them of a level of materialism which was not reached by our own generation. I don't know the details of your upbringing, really, but you might be surprised to learn that many (I suspect most) Americans grew up not "expecting" televisions, DVD players, cars, and cheap gas. As for plastic toys, all kids like toys, but that does not mean they expect them. Indeed, if a parent buries a child in material goods for some overcompensation reason or another, is that the child's responsibility or the parent's?
One thing I know for certain is that the grim scenario you paint for future generations is much more likely with each person who adopts your cynical attitude and shares your contempt for your fellow man.
Have a nice weekend!
Drew