Former U.S. Senator and likely 2012 presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been receiving lots of criticism in the liberal blogosphere during the past couple days. While on a radio show in New Hampshire, Rick Santorum blamed Social Security’s financing problems on high abortion rates. Specifically, he argues that the high incidence of abortion has resulted in fewer workers to support current retirees.
A number of pro-life activists have been making this argument for years. However, this is among the first times a Republican elected official has made this case. Unfortunately, the argument is not entirely correct. The legalization of abortion has had some fairly complicated demographic effects. While it certainly increased the incidence of abortion, it also accelerated a burgeoning culture of sexual permissiveness. As such, after abortion was legalized there were more conceptions and more abortions and the birthrate remained fairly stable.
Still, Santorum is certainly correct that contraception is partly responsible for Social Security’s financing woes. During the 20th century, people gradually moved away from farms and into cities and suburbs. Many people desired a smaller family and the advent of the birth-control pill in the early 1960s certainly made smaller families more feasible. However, the birth-control pill has had a number of unintended effects. It disrupted the financing mechanism for Social Security and resulted in a far more promiscuous culture that afflicts us to this day.
Much of the ongoing debate over Social Security reform has focused around the fact the people are living longer; the declining fertility rate in the United States has received far less attention from both policy analysts and the mainstream media. Increasing the fertility rate will doubtless be a difficult task. Public policy is certainly a clumsy tool for influencing people’s reproductive choices. That having been said, Senator Santorum deserves credit for raising the salience of this important issue.
— Michael New is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.
"Still, Santorum is certainly correct that contraception is partly responsible for Social Security’s financing woes."
Wait, is abortion contraception? Did Santorum say contraception is hurting Social Security or did he say abortion is? Those are two very different statements. One is a boring statement about declining birth rates and one is nuts.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell - regardless of the impact of abortion on Social Security stability (in my opinion, a specious point at best) - and regardless of where one stands on abortion - is this really a credible argument against abortion? We should be against abortion and pro-life so that we can ensure that someone will be around to support us in our old age?
There are a ton of strong arguments for the pro-life position - surely the reason that this one hasn't been raised by "elected officials" in the past simply because it is ludicrous, morally faulty and detrimental to the debate....
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe problem with this argument is if we make it, the Left can counter with the claim made in Freakanomics, that the reduction in crime in the late 90's was also a result of abortion.
This is a no-winner for the pro-life movement.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGossman has it right. The ramifications of this idea are.... non-trivial...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think the guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
So the only way for SS to be "solvent" is for an ever expanding population? That's a ponzi scheme by definition.
Fortunately, it's not so. Cashflows from SS inputs don't have to equal the outflows....there was a surplus built up from the 1980s on by raising tax rates. And this money was invested in treasury bonds, the safest, most secure assets in the world.
How does he propose to pay for the increased legions of poor on welfare and in jails due to lower abortion rates? Cut taxes? (cause tax cuts pay for themselves, maybe they could pay for other stuff too).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm not at all sure that abortion and contraception are the causes of a declining birthrate or merely symptoms of it.
I think it's worth pointing out that through the modern era, children have moved from being economic assets (cheap domestic and agricultural labor, an additional paycheck, even a family retirement program) to economic liabilities.
People now have kids for the same reason they buy sports cars or luxury houses: the emotional fulfillment. And the cost of raising kids has increased enormously as the economic benefits have dwindled to almost nothing. On the contrary, these days kids can be a financial liability well into their own middle age and beyond.
What Santorum needs to wrap his head around is the fact that we no longer live in a fairly primitive agricultural society. Yet he's still making moral prescriptions as if we were.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr Santorum has proven again he is an uneducated moron. How many people are getting food stamps and how many are unemployed? Millions and millions. If there are not enough jobs now and citizens can't afford to feed their families where are all the additional jobs coming from?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse@brianbbb--
Let us know when you find that lockbox, eh?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn lieu of an ever expanding population, you can have stability if the ratio of number of years worked : number of years retired stays steady. Of course that means bringing back child labor or raising the retirement age to something like 80.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNot likely to happen, so the Ponzi scheme collapses after all.
How about both sides in the abortion debate come to a rare, if largely meaningless, truce? Can we agree that, whatever we think about the morality of abortion, whether it is legal or not should not depend on the economic benefits or downsidess?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe fact that abortion causes economic costs that hurt society is weak as an argument for why it's wrong, however, it can be valid if you're trying to advocate that regardless of the moral question, it causes society harm and shouldn't be supported for non-moral reasons.
SS was a ponzi scheme from the get-go, but unfortunately, it's a rail that cannot be touched in politics. When SS was created, there were 44 workers or so per retiree, and the average life expectancy was about 57. It was designed as a concealed way that the government would take taxes from the American people without calling it such.
Economically speaking, Mr. Molinari is exhibiting one-dimentional thinking. Because we have millions unemployed now, if we added millions more, they'd obviously be unemployed as well. This obviously wouldn't be happening in a vacuum. These people would have existed throughout the time that Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land; throughout the boom of the 80s and 90s, throughout the 2000s, etc. The fact is, if you look at population growth and its effects on nations, problems usually develop much more frequently when you have a waning population, or aging population, as more productive members of society get taken out of circulation.
Overcrowding can cause problems, as well, but I don't know that anybody could plausibly argue that, were it not for abortion and contraception, we'd be facing an overpopulation crisis.
In any event, this is why I don't like these secondary arguments against abortion. Regardless of costs, abortion is either wrong and shouldn't happen, or it's ok. I fall in the former camp, and I wouldn't care if the costs of keeping it illegal outweighed the costs of legalizing. I suspect that most that believe that abortion is a right probably feel the same way; i.e. economics be damned.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe lack of comment from the most virulent anti-abortion and anti-contraception readers of this blog speaks volumes for the double idocy of this post (and I credit them for not commenting). First, the professor acknowledges that Santorum's "courageous" argument is nonsense. Indeed, taking the position that abortion is wrong as it deprives the homeland of able, working bodies is a small step removed from the argument that everyone of childbearing capability should be producing as many children as possible for industrial and military use. Second, as the other commenters to this post have noted, the moral, ethical, economic and sociological problems with this position are numerous to say the least.
Why post this at all? Does National Review owe something to Professor New or Mr. Santorum? If the idea was to boost whatever political aspirations Mr. Santorum may have, count this as an abject failure.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI guess he must have read "Freakonomics".
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAgain, Santorum assembles the pro-life circular firing squad. So the problem with abortion is that we don't have enough unwilling dupes for the SS Ponzi scheme? The comment confirms the worst stereotype of pro-life activists -- that they only care about kids before they're born.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSantorum's a likely presidential candidate in 2012? He lost his Senate seat from Pa. by a landslide.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHe, Gingrich, Palin, Bachmann and others are just muddying the political waters. They need to rein in their egos and stand down, making room for serious GOP contenders.
Where's the hook?
So Santorum is saying that a large number of these missing kids would have turned out as high-earners paying the maximum SS taxes? Doesn't seem likely.
The population of the US is increasing rapidly ("thanks" in large part to immigration) yet we're still short of workers?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOnly liberal sickos win when conservatives criticize each other in public. If Professor New has a problem with Senator Santorum, he should contact the Senator privately. America is at war with liberals who are evil and must be destroyed. Conservatives need to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other.
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