In Case You Missed It
If you, like me, missed the initial fury over Big-Money Bill Bennett's remarks and are wondering what everyone's talking about, Media Matters has the transcript of his radio show. It's a much more spectacular offense than I could have guessed... First a caller suggested that if we made abortion illegal it would solve the social security problem, with more people to pay into the system. But Bennett responded that there are too many variables to "extrapolate" arguments like that, like the possibility that most of the increase in births would be folks who are born into shiftless and lazy families, and would not contribute as much to the revenue base. He went on to separate those things we can't extrapolate safely from those we can know:

BENNETT: I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.