Word: wattenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some analysts doubt that the expected 40-year buildup in the Social Security fund will come to pass. Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, predicts that within the next decade, soaring health- care costs could overwhelm the Government's Medicare fund, which is partly financed by the same payroll taxes that go for Social Security. If that happens, he says, Congress might keep Medicare going with money from the retirement fund. "And when that money has paid for Medicare, who will finance the retirements of the baby-boom generation?" he asks. Welcome to the budget debates...
...specific challenges to Wattenberg's data have been raised. Some demographers question his projections, since he extrapolates from population trends with little apparent regard for such unpredictable factors as wars, epidemics, famines and baby booms. Many scholars point out that a nation's population size does not necessarily determine its military or economic power, as the histories of Britain and ancient Athens attest. As for ideological influence, theologians note that the West's predominant religion began with just 13 impoverished people...
...Wattenberg, 53, the father of four children, denies any racism or cultural bias. "I'm defending Western culture, not white culture," he claims. "I'm not anti-anything. What I am pushing is a value system that develops economic prosperity and political freedom." A former speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson and campaign adviser to Hubert Humphrey, Wattenberg describes himself as a centrist Democrat who supports liberal immigration policies. Nevertheless, his maverick views have won him a reputation as the conservatives' favorite liberal...
...Wattenberg's thesis carries strong historical echoes. In the first decade of the century, when the nation was being flooded with European immigrants, President Theodore Roosevelt advocated a federal family policy. He declared that the one-child family "spells death, the end of all hope," and in his 1906 State of the Union report he advocated that taxes "be immensely heavier on the childless." Yet the nation not only absorbed the influx of immigrants, it thrived on their dynamism. And many present-day critics have little patience with born-again nativism. "The trouble with Wattenberg's argument," says Bruce Schearer...
Wattleton, along with syndicated Columnist Ellen Goodman and legions of other modern women, also objects to Wattenberg's tendency, as Goodman puts it, "to slip easily back into a traditional vernacular -- woman as exclusive child raiser." Schearer links this objection to the fundamental criticism of Wattenberg's espousal of Government birth incentives for the sake of international dominance. "There is something distasteful," he says, "about the concept that we should subvert personal aspirations in the democracy of America to the cause of maintaining our world-power status in the 21st century...