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Saturday Steyn

Just a taste

Testifying before Congress, Timmy Geithner referred only to “demographic challenges” — an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the official Obama budget “Analytical Perspectives” makes plain, your feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it. Instead, the Democrats shriek, Ooh, Republican prudes who can’t get any action want to shut down your sex life! According to CBO projections, by mid-century mere interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues. For purposes of comparison, by 1788 Louis XVI’s government in France was spending a mere 60 percent of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for His Majesty shortly thereafter. Not to worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.

This is a very curious priority for a dying republic. “Birth control” is accessible, indeed ubiquitous, and, by comparison with anything from a gallon of gas to basic cable, one of the cheapest expenses in the average budget. Not even Rick Santorum, that notorious scourge of the sexually liberated, wishes to restrain the individual right to contraception.

New on The Corner. . .


COMMENTS   4

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 EBL
   02/18/12 10:09

This is very disturbing. Sort of like the US Economy is the Titanic and the debt (most of it unfunded medical entitlements) is the ice berg.

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 EBL
   02/18/12 10:10

So we are basically screwed, but not in a way that we will need free contraception.

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Patrick Sweeney
   02/18/12 11:57

Changing hearts and minds on contraception is a century-long project. Few (basically Steven Mosher, David P Goldman, and Mark Steyn) are making the connection between the coming Demographic Winter and the millions of individuals who today choose to contracept and may actually believe that a world with fewer children is a better world. This transcends the doctrines of a single (or several) religions.

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Andyet
   02/18/12 15:12

So Steyn would prefer the world end up like Soylent Green?

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