What a distorted editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal called “What’s Really Behind the Entitlement Crisis.”
Oh, thank goodness (NOT) that we have these pundit-types to tell us what’s “really” happening and feed us their self-serving “proofs.”
Anyway, the author, Ben Wattenberg, contends that we all are suffering a decline in standard of living because we don’t have enough children.
He actually advocates that we have more children to bear the burden of our waste, fraud, and abuse and inability to live within our means.
The author writes: “Never-born babies are the root cause of the ‘social deficit’ that plagues nations across the world and threaten to break the bank in many.”
Never mind that current world population of over 7 billion people is anticipated to rise above 9 billion by 2050, and we continue to spoil and deplete our world’s limited resources already.
The author selfishly contends that “Declining birth rates mean there are not enough workers to support retirees.”
Unfortunately, the author ignores that if current and prior workers and politicians did not spend down the balances in social security to finance other pork-barrel political initiatives, then each workers savings would still be there to support their retirement, and we would not have to rely on future generations to make up the difference by spending their savings to support our prior excesses and waste.
Wattenberg ends by saying that “The real danger for the future is too few births.”
Like a glutton, he advocates that we eat more in order to keep trying to satiate our insatiable spending needs.
When I was a kid, my father used to joke about eating too much and say we should do some push-ups–push the the table (with all the food) away from us!
No, like teenagers on day time TV shows, who contend that they want to have children because they feel it is their “way out” of their problems and only then they will be loved and be able to love, and the TV show host puts them in a program with a fake baby that cries and makes at all the inconvenient hours of the day and night, does the teenager realize that having (more) children is not the answer to their problems, but actually may only increase their problems.
Having more children as a nation–we already average about 2 per family–in order to finance our retirements and entitlements through the development of another generation of a slave labor pool is completely misguided.
Have children for the right reasons–out of genuine love and a commitment to give–not to receive.
Mr. Wattenberg does not seem to care if children are brought into the world of broken families, poverty, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, molestation and incest, homelessness, and separation and divorce, because Wattenberg’s standard of living is at stake.
Bring children into a world that is giving, loving, and sustainable.
Safeguard life, but don’t recklessly encourage birth.
Birth is a privilege of the young, not an entitlement for the elderly.
(Source Photo: Michelle Blumenthal)
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