Hormones and latex for everyone!

I don't Drudge that often, simply because Matt Drudge is like Perez Hilton for people with jobs, brains, lives, whatever. When I do happen upon the Drudge report and its eye-piercing siren, though, it doesn't take long to find something incredibly stupid and sensationalist.

Consider this video linked on Drudge a few days ago: Nancy Pelosi insisting that birth control could help our economy in the long-term. Here's the exchange in question, which took place on one of those Sunday morning news shows that you don't watch because you're at church, somewhat ironically:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

Guys are supposed to heed clear of this issue. It's a touchy subject, no doubt. SHAME ON YOU FOR BRINGING IT UP STEPHANOPOULOS. But now that it's out there, I may as well continue blogging about it, for the lulz and the comments.

Let me be about as clear as I possibly can, using both boldface and italics: Children are a burden on society. Every child that attends school is a costly and risky investment in America's future. Every mouth-to-feed that puts an American family on Medicaid or Welfare is drawing from your pockets. Every kid who flunks out or fails to contribute to the workforce is a enormous loss for the American economy. Take your high school class' dropouts, multiply by about 20,000, and you'll start to understand the enormity of what I'm scratching at.

Back in high school, I begrudgingly read Bill O'Reilly's book-of-the-moment, Who's Looking Out For You?. It was an incredibly insensitive assessment of the American people, with lots of glaring racism and old-farty complaints about how these aren't the "good ol' days" anymore. But Bill actually got one point to stick in my head pretty hard: Unplanned, unwanted children are depleting government programs. Of course, his point was that unwanted black children born out of wedlock were depleting government programs for the entitled, working white man. Racism by any other name? Yes. Remember that there are many white Americans milking the system, too, and they know how to navigate the system better than anyone else.

Now to my point: If we didn't live in a culture that demonized birth control and family planning and underfunded programs to get it into the right hands, maybe our country wouldn't be in such a rut right now. Maybe if we funded programs to actively cut down on the number of deserving welfare recipients, we could put the net gain toward something proactive and useful. And maybe if we encouraged people to plan their families according to their income and their future, half of America wouldn't be degrading into a poor, awful slum.

Maybe if these huge families didn't need huge places to live, America wouldn't be seeing a record number of defaulting mortgages. After all, that's the most simple explanation as to what broke the credit market last year. Yes, yes, the current crisis is a much more complex situation, but who's to say that the entire thing would have been a hiccup rather than a depression if families had been small, succinct, and not drawing from the great American coffers.

You can blame popular religion and the far-right for that one. After all, trailer parks are chocked full of redneck couples feeding their 12 children with the money withheld from your paycheck, simply because they didn't use condoms, birth control, or get a non-surgical abortion early into the pregnancy. Selfish, right? It's actually the Christian thing to do: Bring children into this world that you can't support, because the government will help you. And ironically, the far-right are the same ones calling for a reduction in welfare and social security. Genius.

I really wish someone would explain why Republican senators and their constituents refused to fund the family planning programs in the stimulus package passed this week. Obviously, Americans are pretty bad at family planning without help-- the average American family stands at 3.14 members yet we have over 6 million families and 33 million individuals living below the poverty line. Obviously, people are going to keep screwing and accidentally getting pregnant, whether or not you chose to believe that simple fact. And obviously, this isn't going to stop without government intervention. Our country cannot wait five-hundred years for private interests and churches to fix the problem.

It's a downward spiral that elicits memories of Idiocracy. As families start too young and grow too large to support, the majority of our country becomes stupider and stupider. And to end on a wacky, popular literary allusion: Atlas will be crushed by the weight of the world long before he even has a chance to shrug.

[DRUDGE FLASH 2009: PELOSI SAYS BIRTH CONTROL WILL HELP ECONOMY]