The drop in abortions, the new baby boom and W.'s big bill coming due.
The NYT reports:
"In a statement before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, the official, Emilio T. Gonzalez, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that from now until 2010 the agency would take an average of 18 months to process petitions from legal immigrants for citizenship, up from 7 months or less last year. Visas for permanent residents sponsored by relatives in the United States will take one year, up from the current average of six months or less, he said. . . Under questioning from subcommittee members, Mr. Gonzalez said he could not guarantee that immigrants who applied to become citizens last summer would be naturalized in time to vote in the November elections." [My italics]
Gosh, that's a real shocker. I mean, which party might the majority of these immigrants be most likely to vote for? The GOP, right? The Party that hates immigrants. No?
Well, I say let them wait, it looks like Mike Huckabee is going to get his way and we won't have to worry about filling all our low-wage jobs with foreigners.
Remember, Huckabee, the candidate running for the GOP nomination for president (fyi all you immigrants out there) said just recently that if it weren't for all those abortions in the 70's due to Roe v. Wade we'd have enough red blooded underclass Americans to pick our fruit, vegetables and to clean our hotel rooms.
He said: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." [Thanks John Seery]
Looks like that holocaust has run its course, though.
AP reports:
"The number of abortions in the United States fell to 1.2 million in 2005, down 25 percent from the all-time high of 1.6 million in 1990, dropping the abortion rate to its lowest level since 1974, a report says. The Guttmacher Institute, which surveyed abortion providers nationwide, said there were probably several reasons for the decline, including more effective use of contraceptives, lower levels of unintended pregnancy and greater difficulty obtaining abortions in some places."
I'm thinking greater diffculty in obtaining abortions was probably the leading cause. In conjunction with this decline in abortions is a new baby boom.
The Daily Telegraph reports:
"The figure for 2006 - nearly 4.3 million births - was the largest number born in the US since 1961. The rise was due mostly to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Hispanics [ahg!], but non-Hispanic white women and other racial groups were also having more babies [whew!]. . . The American rate - the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime - has reached 2.1, the 'magic number' cited by economists as necessary for a population to replace itself. Experts cite various reasons for the US increase, including a decline in contraceptive use, falling access to abortion, poor education and poverty."
Hey, that's just great! The only reason we've been somewhat able to keep a lid on crime and manage to keep the already overwhelmed public school system from not completely melting down is because there were all those extra poor kids who weren't born. Now we've got a whole bunch of extra kids coming down the pike who are going to need medical care, education and, in about 20 years, they're not only going to be using our already crumbling infrastructure but they're going to need jobs. too.
Something is telling me with the strain on our already rickety economy and with the bill for the older baby boomers' coming due, there's going to be hell to pay. Keep in mind the bill for the Iraq war is also in the mail to the tune of some 1 trillion dollars. Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz estimate that by using "current and expected troop deployment to make a reasonable projection of the likely costs. . . Looking purely at direct budgetary costs to the taxpayer, we estimate that the total cost of the Iraq war is in the range of $750 billion to $1.1 trillion."
Remember, the hundreds of thousands of 20 year-old vets from the Iraq War, suffering with amputations, PTSDs and Traumatic Brain Injury (the most common injury of the war) will in twenty years only be slightly half way through their lives and still in need of government assistance.
How are we going to pay for all of this? Ask the Chinese? The Kuwaitis? Make another call to Singapore?
"In a statement before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, the official, Emilio T. Gonzalez, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that from now until 2010 the agency would take an average of 18 months to process petitions from legal immigrants for citizenship, up from 7 months or less last year. Visas for permanent residents sponsored by relatives in the United States will take one year, up from the current average of six months or less, he said. . . Under questioning from subcommittee members, Mr. Gonzalez said he could not guarantee that immigrants who applied to become citizens last summer would be naturalized in time to vote in the November elections." [My italics]
Gosh, that's a real shocker. I mean, which party might the majority of these immigrants be most likely to vote for? The GOP, right? The Party that hates immigrants. No?
Well, I say let them wait, it looks like Mike Huckabee is going to get his way and we won't have to worry about filling all our low-wage jobs with foreigners.
Remember, Huckabee, the candidate running for the GOP nomination for president (fyi all you immigrants out there) said just recently that if it weren't for all those abortions in the 70's due to Roe v. Wade we'd have enough red blooded underclass Americans to pick our fruit, vegetables and to clean our hotel rooms.
He said: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." [Thanks John Seery]
Looks like that holocaust has run its course, though.
AP reports:
"The number of abortions in the United States fell to 1.2 million in 2005, down 25 percent from the all-time high of 1.6 million in 1990, dropping the abortion rate to its lowest level since 1974, a report says. The Guttmacher Institute, which surveyed abortion providers nationwide, said there were probably several reasons for the decline, including more effective use of contraceptives, lower levels of unintended pregnancy and greater difficulty obtaining abortions in some places."
I'm thinking greater diffculty in obtaining abortions was probably the leading cause. In conjunction with this decline in abortions is a new baby boom.
The Daily Telegraph reports:
"The figure for 2006 - nearly 4.3 million births - was the largest number born in the US since 1961. The rise was due mostly to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Hispanics [ahg!], but non-Hispanic white women and other racial groups were also having more babies [whew!]. . . The American rate - the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime - has reached 2.1, the 'magic number' cited by economists as necessary for a population to replace itself. Experts cite various reasons for the US increase, including a decline in contraceptive use, falling access to abortion, poor education and poverty."
Hey, that's just great! The only reason we've been somewhat able to keep a lid on crime and manage to keep the already overwhelmed public school system from not completely melting down is because there were all those extra poor kids who weren't born. Now we've got a whole bunch of extra kids coming down the pike who are going to need medical care, education and, in about 20 years, they're not only going to be using our already crumbling infrastructure but they're going to need jobs. too.
Something is telling me with the strain on our already rickety economy and with the bill for the older baby boomers' coming due, there's going to be hell to pay. Keep in mind the bill for the Iraq war is also in the mail to the tune of some 1 trillion dollars. Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz estimate that by using "current and expected troop deployment to make a reasonable projection of the likely costs. . . Looking purely at direct budgetary costs to the taxpayer, we estimate that the total cost of the Iraq war is in the range of $750 billion to $1.1 trillion."
Remember, the hundreds of thousands of 20 year-old vets from the Iraq War, suffering with amputations, PTSDs and Traumatic Brain Injury (the most common injury of the war) will in twenty years only be slightly half way through their lives and still in need of government assistance.
How are we going to pay for all of this? Ask the Chinese? The Kuwaitis? Make another call to Singapore?
posted by William Duane at 1:48 PM
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