The New York Sun has a brilliant editorial that muses on the irony and disingenuousness of politicians who think nothing of aborting babies but supposedly worry about the future Social Security benefits of retirees who won't even be conceived for years.
"There would be at least a 28% benefit cut for a worker who is born five years from now, who retires at age 65, and who has average career earnings," the [Senator Chuck] Schumer [D-NY] press release warns. "There would be at least a 42% benefit cut for a worker who is born five years from now, who retires at age 65, and who has career earnings that are 'the equivalent' of $59,000 in 2005."Notice those key words "born five years from now." Senator Schumer, to judge by his votes in the Senate, doesn't buy into the idea that unborn children or fetuses or embryos, call them what you will, need to be protected against being harvested and destroyed for stem-cell research or being destroyed by their parents as a method of birth control. This same senator who opposes banning late-term abortions - in other words, who votes as if he doesn't believe an unborn child has a right to life - thinks that children who are four years away from even being conceived, let alone born, have some claim on Social Security benefits indexed to wages rather than prices.
Well said, and ingeniously connected. (HT: James Taranto.)
Oh, please. It's one thing to debate whether or not it's OK to kill someone who has never been born (and, if killed, will never be), and quite another to debate an issue that will affect those who will be born.
Take this tortured logic far enough, and you'll end up with one of two absurd conclusions:
Social Security solvency heavily depends on birth rates. If total fertility rates weren't 2.1 but 4.1, we wouldn't have a social security solvency problem. We could probably even lower the SS tax rate. This is the ponzi scheme nature of the current program. It is abortion and other fertility altering decisions that have upset the balance of the program.
You can't build up a social program that utterly depends on high fertility and then call fertility discussions out of bounds regarding its continuance. It's just not intellectually honest.
The idea of protection of the unconceived is not held by anybody that I know of and is, in fact, morally and biologically silly. There's an awful lot of sperm that goes to waste in even perfectly normal sexual activity that is meant to result in a child.
As for Sen. Schumer, his politics results in a selective 100% reduction in social security benefits of certain members of that age cohort that he is complaining about in his own letter. This selective reduction in benefits tends to disparately impact minorities and the poor. The rank hypocrisy of piously protesting a supposed 42% benefit for some of that age cohort while backing a 100% benefit cut for others deserves not only comment, but derision.