Those familiar with small boat operations know what happens when a diesel engine malfunctions and begins to suck in fuel and oxygen uncontrollably. It accelerates beyond all control. This runaway diesel has to be stopped. Unless it is stopped, it explodes. Boating safety courses teach us to take a life jacket, a towel, even a T-shirt, and jam it into the diesel’s air intake to avoid catastrophe.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are at that point now with our federal budget. Spending is accelerating out of control. And some things we spend our money on — including things like Planned Parenthood — together suck in billions more in spending.
In the two weeks of the big budget battle, Republicans demanded cuts of $61 billion but finally had to settle with President Obama for cuts of $38 billion. While they were haggling and while we were facing a government shutdown, the national debt increased by $58 billion.
Pro-life leaders in Congress, including Speaker John Boehner, pressed the president on cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. On that, Mr. Obama and his liberal cohorts would not bend. According to The New York Times, the dialog went like this:
“Nope. Zero,” the president said to the speaker. Mr. Boehner tried again. “Nope. Zero,” Mr. Obama repeated. “John, this is it.”
We need to understand that the Democrats are the abortion party. NARAL founder Lawrence Lader said it clearly: “Abortion is central to everything in life and how we want to live it.” NARAL showed that in 2008 when they shocked feminists by endorsing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. It would be hard to imagine someone more pro-abortion than Hillary Clinton. Her 1994 health care plan would have forced the 89 percent of American counties that had no abortion facility to open one. It would have forced taxpayers to pay for all that.
But Barack Obama went further. He killed a bill in the Illinois legislature that would have protected unborn children who survived abortions. Barack Obama went to the Planned Parenthood convention a year before he won the Democratic Convention’s nomination for president. He pledged to them that he would never yield on abortion. Nor has he, as he demonstrated to John Boehner just a few days ago.
That’s why he promised Planned Parenthood that his health care takeover would include funding for “the right to choose.” That’s progressive-speak for abortion.
Federal funding for Planned Parenthood is not a side issue or even a small part of the budget crisis. True, the organization’s annual take of $363 million from taxpayers seems small in a budget of $3,800 billion. But Planned Parenthood’s impact is huge.
In 2009, the organization killed 332,278 unborn children. That is more than one out of ever four of the annual toll of 1,200,000 American lives lost to abortion. To keep killing and to keep politicians in office who will let them keep killing, Planned Parenthood spent $700,000 in 2010 lobbying legislatures for more money.
Planned Parenthood-related political action committees elect lawmakers who fuel the runaway diesel that is federal and state spending — not just for abortion, but for a whole range of liberal pet programs. Here’s the latest example: We just learned that President Obama and his allies want to provide $20 million to provide Sesame Street for children in … Pakistan.
There’s a further cruel irony to federal funding for Planned Barrenhood. When Social Security began in 1935, there were 17 taxpayers for every recipient of benefits. Today, there are only three. If Planned Barrenhood succeeds in its objective of controlling the U.S. population, the near future will see that ratio reduced to 1:1.
It will never come to that, of course. Before that happens, the diesel engine of spending will explode. We will not be able to find foreign lenders to help us service the debt.
Demographer Nick Eberstadt warned of an “old age tsunami” about to strike third-world countries, including China and India.
China has brutally suppressed its own population with a barbarous one-child policy that has led to forced abortions and female infanticide. China will get old before China gets rich, population forecasters tell us. President Obama is helping Beijing advance this heartless and self-defeating agenda. He ordered U.S. funds to go to International Planned Parenthood and the UN Fund for Population Activities — two infamous traffickers in abortion — on his third day in office.
If China is facing an old age tsunami, that means they won’t be able to lend to us — and Chinese financing is helping keep our leaking ship of state afloat.
What do you call it when 78 million U.S. baby boomers retire — as they are now beginning to do — and America’s smaller cohorts of young people have to pay for their Social Security, Medicare, and liberals’ exporting of Sesame Street to Pakistan?
Pro-lifers must have a seat at the table, and a potent voice, as we go forward in budget negotiations. We understand that just as the government cannot go on spending money it does not have, it cannot go on helping Planned Barrenhood to kill future taxpayers. Those unborn children are the future thinkers, doers, entrepreneurs, and innovators who alone can rescue the future.
President Obama and his friends are the party of now. Given our understanding of the Author of human life, we are the party of forever. Which is why we will never quit.
Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council and a member of the National Advisory Committee of Pass the Balanced Budget Amendment.