More Babies, Please
How does a country with over 38 million retirees and another 79 million on the brink of retirement find it in its best interest to implement antinatalist policies like this one? Now, I'm not philosophically opposed to contraception, but for the love of all that's good and right, we need more babies now if every last Baby Boomer is to cash out of the government-run Ponzi scheme in style. Obama forcing insurers to provide free contraception to every female is plain dumb. If liberals expect to have their cake and eat it too, it's time to bring Russia's "Day of Conception" right here to the United States, and offer cash, cars and refrigerators to couples who contribute a future worker to help prop up the scam. Since procreation is too offensive of a concept to liberals, they should think of it as a long-term plan to increase revenues in a balanced and sustainable way.
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May '10
Re: More Babies, Please
A more open and business-friendly immigration policy would help as well.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 4:04pmMar '11
Re: More Babies, Please
The true perversity of this decision is that the normal functioning of the human reproduction system is now officially classified in the same category as a disease.
Mar '11
Re: More Babies, Please
I'm convinced, marry me Diane.
On a somewhat more serious note, foolishness such as this latest out of Washington while morally offensive is not the cause of looming demographic catastrophe. The cult of youth which seems to be constantly preached in all mediums strikes me as closer to the mark if we are looking for a guilty party. Steyn touched on this somewhat in America Alone I believe.
Re: More Babies, Please
Yes, I noticed that too. That's indeed a much more depressing angle of the story.
Oct '10
Re: More Babies, Please
The machine demands cheap labor sooner than the maturation rate of the young. Hence lax immigration enforcement. The real fly in the ointment is sold as needed diversity and multiculturalism at all cost...
May '11
Re: More Babies, Please
"If liberals expect to have their cake and eat it too, it's time to bring Russia's "Day of Conception" right here to the United States, and offer cash, cars and refrigerators to couples who contribute a future worker to help prop up the scam."
I had missed that "day of conception" initiative and look forward to seeing how others here can expound on that. Pat in Obamaland is right that immigration is key. I have read where Amity Schlaes has said that bringing in just 100,000 immigrants that earned at the top of the tax rates, along with minor inflation adjustments, would solve the solvency of social security.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 3:44pmJun '10
Re: More Babies, Please
From a Catholic perspective, on your honeymoon, it's okay to put a "Do Not Disturb" sign out for the hotel staff, but using contraception puts a "Do Not Disturb" sign out for God. In the Church's view, God drew you together for His purposes--not just for yours. In this case, making it a threesome improves the quality of the marriage. And being open to procreation is how you keep the relationship with God alive.
Fr. Barron comments on Marriage and Relationships
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2fcNFHDzAE
Dec '10
Re: More Babies, Please
Sorry to quibble over the small stuff, but I love how the same folks that once said Obamacare would decrease health insurance costs for Americans, now believe that a new requirement for services provided to half the population without charge will not affect the cost of insurance. Would somebody please buy these guys a calculator, or at the very least explain to them the difference between free and offset costs?
Wealth redistribution: 1, Arithmetic 0.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 4:05pmJun '10
Re: More Babies, Please
I am in total agreement. Our government now acts as though new human beings are a plague, at the same time they won't touch entitlements. Perhaps the ultimate in cognitive dissonance.
I did my part: five children, all but one dutifully paying social security and medicare taxes (the last one will finish college in a year--he'll pay too if he can find a job). And I'm still paying as well. It's good to remember that if you want the ultimate reward--grandchildren--there is an intermediate step. No kids, no grandkids.
I don't have the exact quote on me but Mark Steyn wrote something along these lines: the design flaw of the secular welfare states in Europe is that they must have a religious-society birth rate to be sustainable.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 4:17pmRe: More Babies, Please
etoiledunord: From a Catholic perspective, on your honeymoon, it's okay to put a "Do Not Disturb" sign out for the hotel staff, but using contraception puts a "Do Not Disturb" sign out for God. In the Church's view, God drew you together for His purposes--not just for yours. In this case, making it a threesome improves the quality of the marriage. And being open to procreation is how you keep the relationship with God alive.
Fr. Barron comments on Marriage and Relationships
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2fcNFHDzAE · Aug 1 at 3:58pm
We Protestants differ in our opinions on this issue.
Dec '10
Re: More Babies, Please
Ted Kennedy was convinced that we needed to transport the third world into the US. Now we will pay for females in this country to be infertile and require that we import an unassimilated population to finish us off.
In the 1980s, a KGB jerk joined me in a basket being tranferred between Soviet ships, as we laid to off Alaska. He waved his arm to the crane operators and we stopped between ships, as we faced America. His words to me, then, suddenly in perfect English, "Everything you see before you was once Russia; it will be again."
I have had similar discussions with other communists, during which they felt free to tell me of their long term plans for America and just how they were going to upend us. One common theme has been that they would take us apart, from within. In my naivete, I have asked why they believed that we would allow that, when we had a loyal and powerfull military and a populace that was against them. They indicated that the populace would be changed and that they would, someday, be in charge of the military.
We have patient, very determined enemies.
Aug '10
Re: More Babies, Please
They may not be American but I expect each of my 5 kids to contribute to the Western economy in their individual ways.
Mar '11
Re: More Babies, Please
Beasley: Wealth redistribution: 1, Arithmetic 0. · Aug 1 at 4:00pm
Edited on Aug 01 at 04:05 pm
I have been reflecting on that point often of late, simple basic math. There are times I wonder if the disputes between conservatives such as ourselves and liberals in the end sometimes come down to the point of an inability to do simple basic math. Wealth is infinite and free for the taking, the nation can spend and spend and spend and somehow.... it will just all work out. I look at such reasoning, if we can deign to call it such, and see that there's an element of barbarism in this view. A present tense morality, or as many have said "eating the seed corn" a pox upon those who may follow us is the unspoken consensus.
In my hopeful moments I wonder if basic financial accounting could be introduced into our hopeless schools and then 1/2 our calamitous problems would soon be remedied.
Mar '11
Re: More Babies, Please
As all truths so bitter it is difficult to swallow. Why should our rivals hold their tongues? What do they have to lose? Plotting the downfall of our nation is hardly an activity of risk, in this day and age you are like to be rewarded for it. How much wealth has the PLA claimed from the coffers of American taxpayers while they preach terrorism?
Apr '11
Re: More Babies, Please
You are correct that we are following the Europeans down the road to insolvency. As Mark Steyn has made clear, more people retiring earlier and living longer puts a strain on the welfare state. The fact that some countries are not even reproducing at a replacement rate means that the system is headed for total collapse.
The final step on this path, which Europe is experiencing now, is mass immigration as a substitute for procreation. And they are learning that the societal changes that accompany these new workers is more than they bargained for.
But do we need more babies? The latest figures say that 40% of all births in the U.S. are out of wedlock. What percentage of this cohort will be able to overcome this adversity and become producers? And what percentage will instead land in jail, or be on welfare, essentially being just as much a consumer of the metastasized state as our retirees - but for their entire lives, not just their twilight years?
What we need is more parents willing and able to raise children to be productive members of society.
May '11
Re: More Babies, Please
Sorry, but I have to disagree with the premise. The answer to a Ponzi scheme is NOT to find more suckers to come in at the bottom of the pyramid. The answer is to put the people running the Ponzi scheme in prison.
Besides, sooner or later the young people are going to figure out that working their whole life to support grandma's social security is a losing game. Or the Democrats will just extend social security to everyone, from the womb to the tomb. I don't see any way that this plays out well by making more babies and asking them to take care of us.
Re: More Babies, Please
Yes, of course you're right Larry. But I have no hope that there will be any meaningful entitlement reform in time to stave off major economic calamity. And I believe that my peers who've just graduated college in the past five years will suffer from unemployment and underemployment for years to come, and then when they finally have jobs, will be taxed under an oppressive tax schedule.
When shaving $900 billion off the baseline over an entire decade proves to be such a production with wailing and gnashing of teeth, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee: we young people are doomed. And so I resort to a little absurdism because I really don't believe we'll ever be able to change the way Washington does things -- at least not enough for it to matter.
I'm usually not this pessimistic. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
May '10
Re: More Babies, Please
We are rapidly gelling from soft to solid tyranny. How is it possible that the US government can require 1) that everyone buy health insurance and 2) that every health insurance plan provide free birth control, including abortifacients?
I cannot express how this shocks and horrifies me. Unlike Diane, I am philosophically opposed to contraception. I see it as profoundly immoral and destructive. It is abusive of persons and corrosive of the common good. The severing between sex and procreation is the moral atom splitting that unleashed the sexual revolution and all its toxic effects on our society. It is at the root of the culture of death now overwhelming our world.
I'd be happy to explain my views in another thread.
Meanwhile, is it right that I and all who share my convictions be forced by law to pay for "services" we deem evil?
Oct '10
Re: More Babies, Please
RE, Diane I'm usually not this pessimistic. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
What can generally be trusted is that the sun will come up in the morning.....
Any day I can wake up and find that the gravedigger is not shovelling dirt on my face is a good start...
And I am of the optomistic sort, kinda, Hmmm.
May '11
Re: More Babies, Please
Thanks for your response, Diane. I agree entirely. I try to take some solace in the fact that the last economic catastrophe we faced, which went by the nom de plume "Jimmy Carter," proved to be something from which we could recover. This one is worse, and it will take a lot more than commissions and phantom cuts 10 years from now to get us out of this mess. But there is a law of economics that applies here -- Anything that can't go on, won't go on.