Over the weekend I heard a stump speech given by Rick Santorum where he stated if a U.S. citizen, male or female graduated from high school and waited till after marriage to have children they had only a 2% chance of being poor during their lifetimes and something like a 74% chance of earning above the country’s median income. If this is true it certainly seems like a simple plan to follow in order to insure a life free from any worry of poverty.
Perhaps instead of focusing on things like pop and chips and what happens in the lunchroom and on the playground we uniformly focused on what happens in the classroom, we’d graduate a greater percentage of students thus giving them the first half of what’s needed to give a 98% chance of success. Incentives like tax credits for parents/guardians of graduating students coupled and offset with reduction in benefits for parents/guardians of students failing to graduate should be considered.
Unfortunately, the second provision, to keep oneself off poverty, waiting till marriage to have children, conflicts with Santorum’s position on abortion. We wouldn’t take away an opportunity for a student who has failed to re-take a grade, especially if it were senior year so why is taking away an option to remain childfree, with a 98% chance of success, acceptable?
Abortion is and should always be an individual decision and right. Especially when you consider one sex is far more damaged than the other. Unfortunately, although this guy has some great ideas, he is unacceptable IMO if only because of his unwavering anti-abortion stance.
I have concluded to settle on the fact we’re all screwed for the next four years, no matter who the candidate, unless of course independents and republicans unite and somehow Ron Paul emerges from the shadows. Perhaps he can even garner some support from democrats/wall street crowd who realize Goldman Sachs is one of Obama’s largest PAC donors as well as Mitt Romney’s. For those, anti-Goldman, Wall Street, Ron Paul is an option. However the likelihood of ‘hell freezing over’ is shorter odds than Paul going anywhere, at least in this election.
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