Take heart, Marxism!

The exploited workers in Africa and that capitalist haven, China, will realize their economic significance and start flexing their economic muscles and will have (shock!) workers' movements! Their wages will be forced up and will stem the loss of jobs from the decadent West where wages have been falling.

Workers of all countries, unite!

Andro:

Sam didn't raise the challenge about points 2 and 3 (PP and NPR). Maybe he knows that a dent can be small, but still noticeable. In regard to abortions, the big social cost is not the procedure but the lost production by the aborted fetus/baby/thing. Perhaps there should be a tax on an abortion equal to the discounted value of the amount of taxes that government will not collect because of the abortion.

I have no problem defunding PP or NPR, they both would have more freedom to operate and wouldn't be such stupid political talking points if the federal dollars weren't involved.

That said, PP offers valuable services for prenatal care and providing low cost assistance for family planning. We can argue abortion all we want but one of the simple problems in America is that too many of the wrong people are having too many children. The birth rate of the impoverished far exceeds that of the middle or upper class.

Now as for a true rebuttal to your assertion that abortions lead to lost potential productivity, I agree that the potential exists for increased productivity with more people. The problem is, in the real world there was a correlation with Roe v Wade and the drop in violent crimes in the USA, with a lag time of about 15-18 years from the decision to when crime began falling. Families that can afford to have kids shouldn't have kids, families that can afford to have kids should. But mandated government family planning falls outside of the enumerated powers I think ;-)

As for NPR the majority of their funding is through donations, as it should be. They will survive without federal dollars. Also I would encourage everyone to give to NPR or the CPB when they can afford to.

My main issue with this is the same as many of these issues, they are more talking points for politicians then honest attempts to fix the budget or other problems facing our nation.

Sam,

I have that book, too. There can be terms with contrary signs in the multiple regression, just as cigarette smoking can reduce deaths from causes other than lung cancer and bed fires.

You set yourself up as the judge as to the right and "wrong" people to have children. It is not wrong for poor people to have more children. It is a rational decision based on their assessment of how much government help they are going to get in their old age. They will need relatively more "private security" since the amount of "social security" they are going to get will be small.

I said a correlation existed, I did not attempt to argue causation.

Poor people aren't making a rational decision to have more kids to support them later on in life, this is tribal thinking which has very little standing in most American families.

In this post we might see BO disagree with Marxism.

Sam,

My trusted source, Wikipedia, failed me in my search for an entry on "tribal thinking". Here is an opportunity for you to do some writing to benefit the world.

I found an essay with that name by William Luther Pierce. Is he your source?

i still feel like i should say something extremely wordy and intelligent, but all i can come up with is

you guys are fucking stupid

You never took a sociology course skrum?

But yeah chase, most of this is just a few of us baiting each other.