Dennis M. Howard
Can America survive the abortion boom?
By Dennis M. Howard
Can America survive the abortion boom?
That's no longer an open question. It first occurred to me in 1992 when I retired after a long career as a journalist and later as a marketing consultant for companies like Waring, Toshiba, Baker Industries, Cessna, AT&T and others.
That's when I first took a look at the astonishing number of abortions in the United States – some 30 million by then. I quickly noted that was equal to the population of the 32 largest cities in the U.S. – from New York all the way down to cities the size of Austin, Texas.
It was as if we had a major nuclear war with 100% casualties in all those cities.
I concluded: This had to have a major economic and social impact.
That's when I started Movement for a Better America and began forecasting a major economic crisis ahead. I predicted that crisis would start by the year 2000 and continue until at least 2020 – unless we could somehow bring this devastating abortion epidemic to an end.
I launched a modest ad campaign and heard from people in all 50 states and from as far away as Moscow, Rome, Australia and even Madagascar. I also made a number of radio and television appearances, and even debated Gene Epstein, the economics editor of Barron's, who thought the 1990's boom on Wall Street would go on for years.
In that exchange, I predicted a slump on Wall Street, and wrote, "If not for the Baby Bust, a whole long list of stocks might still be riding high." The crash came on schedule in 2000.
I was also interviewed twice by libertarian economist Dan Mitchell, economist for the Heritage Foundation and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. .
Unfortunately, the Iron Curtain of silence in the mainstream press that insulates most Americans from the truth about abortion kept what I still consider the biggest economic story of the century under wraps.
C-Span wouldn't touch it . Even Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly – together with a lot of Republican politicians – wouldn't touch it in the mid-'90's.
However, not only did my predictions of a major economic crisis come true on schedule, but our latest research shows that the impact is far greater than even I realized in 1995.
My current forecast is that, unless America comes to its senses about abortion and birth control within the next few years, it will literally be all over for the United States as the beacon of freedom and economic prosperity for the world. That could easily happen by 2020 to 2025.
Why is the outlook getting worse? For one thing, the economic impact of the abortion boom is not only not abating, it is soaring.
Today, we have had a cumulative 57.6 million abortions, nearly double the 30 million we had in 1992. And the number of cities with an equivalent population has soared to include our 86 largest cities. Within 4 years, that number will reach 100.
Moreover, we now have to include the "echo effect" from earlier abortions – the babies who would have been born to those aborted 25 years earlier. That adds 25 million more to the total number of missing people. Together, they add up to a stunning 83.5 million missing people – attributable just to abortion.
But it doesn't end there. Economics doesn't give a hoot whether a person is missing because of abortion or because of more efficient birth control. Both create an empty hole in our economic future.
To estimate this impact, I used a very conservative approach based on surveys indicating that 64% of married people regularly use some form of birth control, and assuming that it was at least 50% effective. In other words, instead of having four children, couples using birth control might have just two children.
Add the number of those missing since 1967 because of more efficient birth control – together with the echo effect of those missing births – and that adds another 124 million to the missing, bringing the overall total to an astonishing 207 million people – or about 78% of the 264 million people actually born since 1967. That's 67% of our current total population of 312 million.
In short, measured by total output our economy would be 67% bigger today than it currently is. Instead of the $17 trillion dollar economy we have, it would be more like $28 trillion – with substantially greater tax and social security revenues to meet our obligations.
So how do you figure the total loss involved for our economy over the past 47 years?
Initially, we used tax revenues as one measure of the loss, but rejected that because a) it is only a very partial measure of the loss, and b) taxes are a variable that changes with population. In fact, fewer people should, but do not always mean, lower taxes, as we can see today with rising costs for the elderly and lower tax revenues from the young.
A more accurate measure of total cost is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita – which averages everything no matter how old or young you are. In addition, that changes with growth in the economy. What was $3973 per capita in 1967 is $55,000 per capita today.
Showing those accumulating costs over the years is a good indication of the incredible drag on the economy that we are experiencing today.
Just as you can't bring back those aborted babies, you'll never get back what they would have produced on average over a working lifetime.
In any given year, it's like an airplane trying to take off with full flaps and an engine in reverse, or someone trying to win a drag race with one foot on the brakes.
If you put a dollar value on our cumulative GDP loss from abortion alone, today it would amount to $58.2 trillion – including both abortion and its echo effect.
If you did the same thing for lives missing because of more efficient birth control, that total would be even higher – $85.2 Trillion in lost GDP.
Add them both together, and our lost GDP – economic value never realized because of our "war against the unborn" – comes to a staggering $147.5 Trillion – or 8.6 times our current annual GDP.
But the most tragic thing about it is that it has been almost entirely visited on our current younger generation under age 47.
During World War II, we sent 16 million men and women off to fight the bloodiest war in our history. They came home with battle deaths of just 1.8%. And when they got home, we called them "the greatest generation."
By contrast, 30% of our younger generation has never made it out of the womb alive. 57.6 million abortions add up to 197 times more "battle" deaths than we had in all of World War II. That's why we call it "the war against the young."
They called my generation "the silent generation" because we kept our mouths shut while ideologists on the left began driving all of us off a social, political, cultural, and moral cliff.
Now we give the youngest among us anonymous labels like "Gen X," "Gen Y," and "Gen Z" – or "the millenials" – as if they came from another planet.
Might as well call them "Brand X" or "Brand Y" or "Brand Z."
They need to change their name immediately to "Generation Why!" They need to demand to know just why they have been written off as the most expendable generation in history.
Political correctness tells us we're not supposed to even talk about it.
Generation Why! needs to demand: why not!
© Dennis M. Howard
August 19, 2014
Can America survive the abortion boom?
That's no longer an open question. It first occurred to me in 1992 when I retired after a long career as a journalist and later as a marketing consultant for companies like Waring, Toshiba, Baker Industries, Cessna, AT&T and others.
That's when I first took a look at the astonishing number of abortions in the United States – some 30 million by then. I quickly noted that was equal to the population of the 32 largest cities in the U.S. – from New York all the way down to cities the size of Austin, Texas.
It was as if we had a major nuclear war with 100% casualties in all those cities.
I concluded: This had to have a major economic and social impact.
That's when I started Movement for a Better America and began forecasting a major economic crisis ahead. I predicted that crisis would start by the year 2000 and continue until at least 2020 – unless we could somehow bring this devastating abortion epidemic to an end.
I launched a modest ad campaign and heard from people in all 50 states and from as far away as Moscow, Rome, Australia and even Madagascar. I also made a number of radio and television appearances, and even debated Gene Epstein, the economics editor of Barron's, who thought the 1990's boom on Wall Street would go on for years.
In that exchange, I predicted a slump on Wall Street, and wrote, "If not for the Baby Bust, a whole long list of stocks might still be riding high." The crash came on schedule in 2000.
I was also interviewed twice by libertarian economist Dan Mitchell, economist for the Heritage Foundation and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. .
Unfortunately, the Iron Curtain of silence in the mainstream press that insulates most Americans from the truth about abortion kept what I still consider the biggest economic story of the century under wraps.
C-Span wouldn't touch it . Even Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly – together with a lot of Republican politicians – wouldn't touch it in the mid-'90's.
However, not only did my predictions of a major economic crisis come true on schedule, but our latest research shows that the impact is far greater than even I realized in 1995.
My current forecast is that, unless America comes to its senses about abortion and birth control within the next few years, it will literally be all over for the United States as the beacon of freedom and economic prosperity for the world. That could easily happen by 2020 to 2025.
Why is the outlook getting worse? For one thing, the economic impact of the abortion boom is not only not abating, it is soaring.
Today, we have had a cumulative 57.6 million abortions, nearly double the 30 million we had in 1992. And the number of cities with an equivalent population has soared to include our 86 largest cities. Within 4 years, that number will reach 100.
Moreover, we now have to include the "echo effect" from earlier abortions – the babies who would have been born to those aborted 25 years earlier. That adds 25 million more to the total number of missing people. Together, they add up to a stunning 83.5 million missing people – attributable just to abortion.
But it doesn't end there. Economics doesn't give a hoot whether a person is missing because of abortion or because of more efficient birth control. Both create an empty hole in our economic future.
To estimate this impact, I used a very conservative approach based on surveys indicating that 64% of married people regularly use some form of birth control, and assuming that it was at least 50% effective. In other words, instead of having four children, couples using birth control might have just two children.
Add the number of those missing since 1967 because of more efficient birth control – together with the echo effect of those missing births – and that adds another 124 million to the missing, bringing the overall total to an astonishing 207 million people – or about 78% of the 264 million people actually born since 1967. That's 67% of our current total population of 312 million.
In short, measured by total output our economy would be 67% bigger today than it currently is. Instead of the $17 trillion dollar economy we have, it would be more like $28 trillion – with substantially greater tax and social security revenues to meet our obligations.
So how do you figure the total loss involved for our economy over the past 47 years?
Initially, we used tax revenues as one measure of the loss, but rejected that because a) it is only a very partial measure of the loss, and b) taxes are a variable that changes with population. In fact, fewer people should, but do not always mean, lower taxes, as we can see today with rising costs for the elderly and lower tax revenues from the young.
A more accurate measure of total cost is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita – which averages everything no matter how old or young you are. In addition, that changes with growth in the economy. What was $3973 per capita in 1967 is $55,000 per capita today.
Showing those accumulating costs over the years is a good indication of the incredible drag on the economy that we are experiencing today.
Just as you can't bring back those aborted babies, you'll never get back what they would have produced on average over a working lifetime.
In any given year, it's like an airplane trying to take off with full flaps and an engine in reverse, or someone trying to win a drag race with one foot on the brakes.
If you put a dollar value on our cumulative GDP loss from abortion alone, today it would amount to $58.2 trillion – including both abortion and its echo effect.
If you did the same thing for lives missing because of more efficient birth control, that total would be even higher – $85.2 Trillion in lost GDP.
Add them both together, and our lost GDP – economic value never realized because of our "war against the unborn" – comes to a staggering $147.5 Trillion – or 8.6 times our current annual GDP.
But the most tragic thing about it is that it has been almost entirely visited on our current younger generation under age 47.
During World War II, we sent 16 million men and women off to fight the bloodiest war in our history. They came home with battle deaths of just 1.8%. And when they got home, we called them "the greatest generation."
By contrast, 30% of our younger generation has never made it out of the womb alive. 57.6 million abortions add up to 197 times more "battle" deaths than we had in all of World War II. That's why we call it "the war against the young."
They called my generation "the silent generation" because we kept our mouths shut while ideologists on the left began driving all of us off a social, political, cultural, and moral cliff.
Now we give the youngest among us anonymous labels like "Gen X," "Gen Y," and "Gen Z" – or "the millenials" – as if they came from another planet.
Might as well call them "Brand X" or "Brand Y" or "Brand Z."
They need to change their name immediately to "Generation Why!" They need to demand to know just why they have been written off as the most expendable generation in history.
Political correctness tells us we're not supposed to even talk about it.
Generation Why! needs to demand: why not!
© Dennis M. Howard
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
