Yellen 'demonstrably wrong' on claim abortion helps economy

Janet Yellen
Janet Yellen

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently proclaimed publicly that abortion helps the economy, and a decision by the Supreme Court striking Roe v. Wade and allowing states to regulate the industry would be harmful to the nation’s money issues.

But she’s “demonstrably wrong,” according to commentary writer Tiana Lowe, an economics graduate from USC and founder of the USC Economics Review, at the Washington Examiner.

The commentary explained, “Like the Confederates who settled on an economic argument to defend slavery rather than justify such a travesty on the principle of personhood, Yellen is not only avoiding a moral defense of the morally indefensible, but she is also demonstrably wrong.”

She noted that many experts agree one of the problems in America today is a contracting labor force, brought on by the exodus of workers from the jobs because of COVID, but also because of a wave of retirees.

“Population growth generally promulgates aggregate economic growth, but especially in an entitlement state such as ours, an at-replacement birth rate is crucial to avoid a deficit crisis,” she explained. “Social Security and Medicare, together the greatest drivers in the growth of our national debt and deficit, are structured as de facto Ponzi schemes, and as such, both require birth rates to sustain enough workers to fund entitlement recipients.

“The morality of the abortion question aside, the available data would belie the claim that limiting abortion access would prove damaging to the economy. In fact, the reverse is likely true if only because abortion continues to constrict the growth of the workforce artificially with very little net benefit,” she said.

She noted in the long run, “those unabated children” would turn into “workers continuing the solvency of our entitlements.”

“As of last year, the amount of money required to pay interest off of our national debt comprised just 1.4% of our annual economic output, but within the decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that share will nearly double and, by the second half of the century, should eat up 9% of our gross domestic product,” she confirmed.

Complicating factors are Joe Biden’s inflation – somewhere near 11% on the wholesale level – possibly double-digit interest rates because of that, decades of “quantitative easing” and the like.

“The slavery argument I first mentioned introduces facets to this debate we cannot even yet quantify. Contrary to the contemporaries who justified slavery as an economic benefit to the country, economists today note that the institution prevented the South from modernizing and industrializing its economy in the way the North did. Slavery may have actually rendered ‘King Cotton’ less majestic than a free labor force would have given slavery’s structural discouragement of immigration,” she said.

“Who knows all the societal ways abortion limits our own economic growth? Perhaps those would-be criminals who escaped abortion would not have become criminals at all had the Supreme Court not normalized abortion and thus [given] men the cultural allowance to abandon the women they impregnate. Would a culture of more motherhood force employers to adapt and grow more accepting of mothers balancing their home lives with their careers?”

WND previously reported on the reaction from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C, so Yellen’s agenda.

See the exchange between Scott and Yellen:


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