The Palin family is a trainwreck. Her 17 year-old daughter is pregnant, her sister is in the midst of a nasty divorce and Palin may have used her influence against her ex-brother-in-law and before the election is over who knows what else we will find out about the Palin family and their problems.
Yet, social conservatives like Palin are telling the rest of us how to live our lives. Now they are trying to make it legal for health care providers to refuse tp provide birth control to anyone they feel like. This way we can have more teeage mothers. I don’t know if social conservatives know they are misreable and wan to drag the rest of us down with them or if they are just stupid, but it is important to point out the failing of the conservative lifestyle whenever possible, as they are trying to force it on the rest of us any chance they get.
I saw a headline saying that her mother in law wasn’t sure of who she was going to vote for…
Where’s the birth control refusal info? That is a surprise to me.
Mr Bettor:
The latest guidelines from Bush and Co allow health care workers to refuse to dispense anything that they find morally objectionable. Including morning after pills and birth control pills can be used as morning after pills so they can refuse them as well. Plus, over the past few years their have been cases of Physicians and pharmacists refusing to give birth control pills to unmarried women.
The idea that a women after being raped should then be forced to bear the child of the rapist is pretty disgusting.
I agree that rape is disgusting. I would say it’s not anyone’s decision besides the victim and her family.
But if someone believes that certain forms of trade are reprehensible, whether I agree or not, what should the policy be? Don’t tell me you would be against states or nations who outlawed slavery, or individuals who refused to participate in the slave trade.
I am not sure I follow you.
Are you saying that just because some people think rape victims should have to have the baby, we should respect their decision becsuse some people think slavery is ok?
No, I think you need to respect the anti-slavery folks more.
As a country we respect everyone who wants to be a baby machine, people get tax credits for kids in many companies moms get almost infinite sick days to care for their “ailing” children. Personally I think we are encouraging many people to make the wrong choice for them, like in the case of Bristol Palin I think she would have been better off to wait a few years and maybe let her husban to be graduate high school.
The right wing seems to celebrate any birth when in some cases it might be better to wait, or in some cases like mine, not have kids at all.
I guess you do not favor Social Security or Medicare, which has always been younger workers paying in for older beneficiaries taking out.
I have no problem paying for social security. I think you are assuming that if people don’t have big families social security will go bancrupt. Right now I don’t think the US is any danger of running out of people.
Plus, large families are a drain on the safety net, people with one child or maybe two are able to pay for education, childcare and healthcare. When you see familes with 7 snd 8 kids they are generally in need of government assistance and they are a drain on the health care system.
Large families don’t help the safety net they destroy it.
No, your derivations of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich are incorrect.
Population replacement is a key of economic growth.
High birth rates lead to poverty. Take Bristol Palin for example, she will be luck to graduate high school and the father of her child is a high school drop out, without her moms connections their employment options would be very bleak. Most high school students in their place will never escape the cycle of poverty.
An impoverished uneducated workforce may be good for certain parts of the economy, slaughterhouses and sweatshops ect ect. But it is very bad for a society and probably leads to more crime.
Well, why has per capita income and wealth increased with the American population?
All those social programs that certain people love to complain about help drive the economy. Large uneducated populations need lots of prisons and police not to mention GED programs. Having lots of poor people may create jobs for some of us but it ruins the quality of life for most of us as well.
Large populations also need people administer their welfare and their food stamps still get them food that has to be grown somewhere.
A small self suffecient population would be much better than the situation we have in places in the US and in some other countries as well.
No, social programs show a deadweight loss–for every $1 spent, approximately $1.40 is lost vs. market driven programs.
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=1745
You spend $4 at McDonald’s and get a meal. You spend $40 at the DMV and get what?
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with how the money is spent or not the spending becomes part of the economy. That is why population growth leads to economic growth someone has to take care of all those kids and pay to jail them later in life.
So you are right that population grows makes the economy bigger just not in a way that most of us want.
JR, perhaps you are only looking at one side of the ledger, instead of both sides.
If the costs of raising children and jailing criminals is less that the wealth created by productive adults who avoid jail, then it makes sense to have more kids and more jails.
I think I am seeing both sides of the ledger, take the new definition of the all American family, the Palin clan. Bristol Palin has been a net expense, through high school she was a drain on the system because we had to hire teachers and build schools to educate her and her soon to be husband. Now at 17 she is about to have a child who will need lots of health care and in 5.years will need schooling. By then Bristol will have a few more children that will also need health care and education. If Bristol follows her mothers example she will keep having kids for the next 25 years and when they hit their teens they will start having kids as well.
At no time during this cycle do I see anyone becoming a net benefit to society. – just see health care costs, education costs and prison costs for the people who don’t pay their child support in this trainwreck of a human breeding farm.
JR: Who pays taxes in your world? Isn’t it folks between 20-70 who need to be born first?
Again I will use Bristol Palin as an example, her child will cost thousands just to bring into the world, and it would be almost impossible for her to find a job where she would make more than childcare would cost, until the child starts kindergarten she will not have the opportunity to work and chances are the Kindergarten is subsidized by the government. Assuming she does not have any more children Bristol Palin would need to finish High School or get a GED and even then she probably will not be making enough money to offset the costs of te one child she has brough into the world.
Chances are she will keep having kids and will not enter the workforce until her forties at which time tthe only to create a job for a forty year-old with no work history is through a government make-work program; which might get her to where she pays some taxes but not enough to offset the expenses of her litter.
The problem with our baby factory culture is that productive women and men are being lost to baby production.
JR: A kid costs about $200,000 to raise, and will earn about $2 million, of which about $600,000 will be collected by the government in various taxes.
You are still ignoring half the ledger!
A 17 year-old mother who does not enter the workforce until she is 45 will not earn 2 million dollars over her career and if she has five kids someone has to pay the million dollars they are going to cost and it is not going to be the mother. In order for the father to earn two million dollars over his life he would have to average fifty thousand dollars a year for forty years most high school drop outs are not going to do that.
Large families with high school drop outs as the parents are not a net gain for society
Mr Bettor:
I think your view of children reminds of a few years ago when i bought an MR2 Spyder. At the time I convinced myself that the car would be a good investment, after all Thier are not very many of them and it was the last year of production. Needless to say the car is worth maybe half what I paid for it and with winter coming it will probably lose more value.
That doesn’t mean I dont like the car or regret buying it but it was not a good investment.
I think the same can be said of children they may be fun and rewarding but they are not a good investment or going to save society.
JR: It seems to me you are trying to ignore the math, which is never a path towards better policy. Have you considered China’s one-child policy and its negative consequences? Or do you think that a zero-child policy sidesteps China’s admitted mistake?
Last time I checked we owe china billions of dollars and they are rapidly becoming an economic power.
Places like Africa with high birth rates are the ones losing economic ground.
Focusing on children ignores the present and when the present time arrives for the current group of children they are parents focusing on the future for their children. It seems to be become a never ending cycle wher in twent years all the money and energy spent on the future generation is going to pay-off. The reality is that modern societys don’t need large populations and in fact large populations drag society down.
So you don’t like sending pieces of paper to China and to oil suppliers in exchange for stuff that your neighbors really, really want?
China is trying to keep its currency cheap relative to the USD, so when we send them our $8 per iPod, they need to get rid of those dollars we sent them or else their currency will become scarcer relative to ours, and government paper is the best way for them to keep all those dollars out of circulation, thereby maintaining their currency regime.
If China does not fuel its economy in this high-growth fashion, the current leadership risks revolution from the masses. I mean, they are still celebrating their revolutions from the Forties and Sixties, aren’t they?
Places like Africa have less economic freedom even if they have more natural resources; i.e. government agencies and programs run everything. That is why they still don’t have solutions to clean water and malaria, which have taken more lives than even AIDS and genocide. And it’s not because the World Bank and IMF haven’t sent trillions into Africa to build these things–it’s because that the money goes to the dictator instead of individuals and, wait for it, industrial corporations (because individuals cannot really build a water treatment plant or a cement factory with microloans).
It’s a fact that population replacement is necessary for economic growth. We might agree on legalization of certain controlled substances, but I am not smoking them and have no trouble with facts or with math.
Mr bettor:
It seems that if population growth was such a great engine for economic growth, any place that had high rates of population growth would be doing well economicaly. (Hat is not the case most third world countries have high population growth and their economies are in the dumps.
Can’t argue with results and high birth rates lead to poverty and squalor.
No, JR, freedom is the main driver of economic growth. Once you have that, then you need people to be free. With no people, what is the point of freedom?
I am not saying we don’t need people I am saying we need less of them.
Like the numbers you gave earlier where the average person will earn 2 million over their life. My guess is people like Bill Gates skew that average and the Bristol Palins of the world bring it down.
Why not at least encourage people to have one or two children and wait until they are ready to have children, instead of trying for a giant breeding fest where 17 year-old drop outs are having a lot of kids with other drop outs as almost always that is going to produce an economic hardship on everyone involved. It is not about infringing on someones freedom to breed as much as it is about giving people the knowledge to make informed choices and yes have sex without having children.
JR: Your point on skew is fair. So let’s look at median income, which is about $40,000, and expected years worked, which is about 60.
What do we get when we multiply those 2 numbers? Whoa, its actually 2.5 milllion, not 2. Sorry.
I agree with you that having 2.5 kids, perhaps when the woman is 30-40 is much better than either having zero kids or having 8 kids between 16-26.
I knew we could agree. I’m almost as smart as you are!
whoops i was wrong, i meant 40 years, which is 1.6 million. see my last comment above.
You scared me in that last comment I don’t want to work when I am eighty
Maybe we have reached some consensus. I think we should try to keep the number of teenage moms and 5 kid families to a minimum. For me that means teaching birth control and creating a culture that does not celebrate teen pregnancy.
I get the impression you are not pro litter either. As for whether or not kids are a good investment in twent or thirty years you can let me know if your kids have appreciated in value.
I can guarantee my car won’t