Shades of Barack Obama, who said in 2012 during a budget battle with House Republicans:
I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am … able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans. [Emphasis added]
That highlighted phrase came to mind when I read that the thirteenth and final installment of Bill Nye’s Netflix series “Bill Nye Saves the World” dealt with the problem of extra kids that you don’t need. The term extra kids, which is no doubt scientific — Nye, after all, calls himself “the Science Guy” — arose during a panel discussion that featured in addition to Nye an abortionist, an expert in “population development,” and an ethicist.
“Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?” Nye asked, after the ethicist, Travis Rieder of the Berman Institute at Johns Hopkins University, claimed that children in developed countries use 160 times more resources than their peers in developing countries.
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Among the corrective measure proposed were “penalties” on parents who exceeded the yet-to-be-determined child limit. The language reminds one of the recently ended one-child policy in China, which Micaiah Bilger at LifeNews reminds us, still “mandates that families have only two children,” adding:
Until last year, most families in China were allowed one child. Families who have more than one or two children report being coerced or even forced to abort their unborn children, fired from their jobs and penalized with huge fines.
Nye’s panel didn’t get quite that far in their recommendations, and the show, titled “Earth’s People Problem,” was the last in the series, so we’ll have to wait for The Science Guy’s next pronouncement.
(h/t The Federalist)
