Is your lack of empathy an urban thing, or would you attribute it to something else?
It's not like we're the ones voting against benefits for people outside urban areas, eh?
The feedback loop takes many decades, and due to voting a lot of damage is continuously done. Also poorer less educated folks tend to have a lot more children. Unless you are fine with waiting 5000 years till it resolves itself via this way, if it ever actually does.
If we just project current demographic trends into the future under the assumption they won't change (obviously a false assumption), then in a lot less than 5000 years (arguably even less than 500 years) the clear majority of people in the US will be either Amish or ultra-Orthodox Jewish or some other high-fertility ultra-conservative religious minority. Amish tend not to vote, but when they do they tend to skew Republican; ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to vote Republican at the national level. (Many vote Democratic at state/local levels, which seems to be mainly driven by the pragmatic awareness that in Democratic supermajority states such as NY and NJ, you get much more political mileage by playing the Democratic politics game than by voting GOP–however, by the time they become the state's demographic majority, they likely will have turned the state red, so that reason for them to vote Democratic wouldn't apply any more.)