Rick Santorum sails off the edge

opinions

April 1, 2011 - 12:00 AM

Rick Santorum was a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and now wants to be president.
He shouldn’t be, because he doesn’t think very well. To illustrate, he told a radio station host Tuesday that Social Security was in fiscal trouble because of “America’s abortion culture.”
What’s that, you say? Santorum gladly explained:
“The Social Security system, in my opinion, is a flawed design, period. But having said that, the design would work a lot better if we had stable demographic trends. We don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. … A third of the young people in America are not in America today be-cause of abortion.”
What a preposterous statement!
Santorum then further demonstrated his tenuous grasp on reality by agreeing that abortion also was to blame for our underfunded Medicare program. Fortunately he was not asked to elaborate on that idiocy. Perhaps he would have said that had the abortion rate been higher 65 years ago and earlier there would not be so many Medi-care recipients draining the program dry today.
He did get one thing correct in his interview. He and Mrs. Santorum have seven children. They are, he said, doing their part to “fund the Social Security system.” Or will be when the seven are earning wages and remitting payroll taxes.

AMERICA’S BIRTH RATE happens to be higher than that in most of the world’s rich nations today. U.S. couples are having enough children to replace themselves and produce a growing population.
And America doesn’t have “an abortion culture.” Yes, women have abortions; yes, some women, some times, use abortion as means of birth control. Most do not. In the United States and in the rest of the world, birth rates go down as the standard of living rises and the means of low risk, affordable, birth control be-come available. Abortion is neither low-risk nor cheap.
There are many reasons why the ratio between the work force and the number of retirees has shrunk over the past half century. Two major factors are the population bulge that occurred in the years after World War II called the baby boom and, second, the ongoing revolutionary ad-vances in medicine that have increased life expectancy so dramatically.
What Santorum finds so sinful — yes, that’s the word — is that medical science has made it possible and practical for young couples today to decide how many children they want, if any. So, until these changes work their way through a couple of generations, the number of retirees will grow a bit faster than the number of new workers and the Social Security and Medicare programs will cost more. 
Pennsylvania voters decided that Sen. Santorum didn’t represent them and have elected others to help them decide how to restructure Social Security and Medicare without turning the clock back to 1900.
Let thanks be given.

 

— Emerson Lynn, jr.

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