Bill Bennett, former secretary of education, had an odd comment on his radio broadcast. I pulled this transcript from Media Matters. There's more to the story but this is what he said:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.


Response

What else is there to say. I think Bennett's grasping here. Maybe... just maybe society should do a little more to bring others up from the poverty driven socio-economic dung heap they live in. It might make life a little easier. One thing Freakonomics did say was that conditions weren't based upon race, it was based on the socio-economic factors. In other words a white single parent family living in poverty will do just as badly in the end as a black single parent family living in poverty. Bennett failed to point that out. He's a racist and more specifically an elitist. "Freakonomics" is a great book by the way. I will heartily recommend it to anyone who's not read it yet.

posted by Stithmeister @ 10:20 PM
 
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