Australia's ethnic Australian population is in significant decline, like that of some other civilized nations. (Our decline is slower than that of others, but the bottom line still is: not enough babies born alive.) Consequently, the former Howard government started paying mothers a $5000 "baby bonus" (or more properly a First Child Tax Refund).
Parents are eligible for the payment on compassionate grounds if a baby is stillborn beyond 20 weeks' gestation. Late term abortion qualifies for "baby bonus" purposes. You can guess the rest.
The loophole can't be closed till 2009, because printing new forms is expensive. (link)
People commonly kill helpless, un-offending human beings, innocents who have not wronged them in any way, because they can and they gain by it. The gain can be material, as in an uninterrupted university career, or psychic, as in a sense of control of one's life.
In the Australian "baby bonus" case, the gain is clear cut, and so is the lesson. When there are helpless human beings in the power of other human beings, when there is a way to gain from the deaths of those who can't protest or fight back, and when killing is made legal, safe and as far as possible stigma-free, then killing will ensue. Incentives work.
That, Mr. Blue, is the most depressing thing I've read in a month or more.
It affected me that way too. :(
David, it's hard to tell a lot of things from the link you provided.
You say incentives work, but it seems that you are predicting that there will be an increase in abortions due to this loophole, not that there have been. Can you clarify?
Also, you write that "people commonly kill helpless..human[s]. Can you expand a bit on what "commonly" means to you.
Finally, it is unclear to me whether this loophole was designed initially to promote abortion, or was an accidental by-product of the bill's intent that needs to be fixed up next year.
Finally-finally, can you bring me up to speed: what does ethnic Australian refer to? Is this group the only one who receives the tax credit in question?
Sorry for all the questions, but the link was short on information and google didn't lead me to any further info.
Are you saying that incentives work to promote abortion or that incentives would work to prevent abortion?
A side note which is probably unrelated to the point of the post: I'm not sure that a shrinking population is necessarily a bad thing. Overpopulation, the cost of food, fuel, education and health care have pushed many modern nations to the breaking point. Having a stable population (or slightly decreasing population) gives more avenues for success (and decreases competition) on the remaining children. Quality over Quantity.
Alchemist, the exact same rationale can be applied to the "Festung" approach of disallowing all immigration. Is that necessarily a bad thing? If so, why?
The "baby bonus" (or First Child Tax Refund) applies to all, without respect to race, religion, ethnicity or whatever. So "ethic Australian" was confusing and is irrelevant. Sorry about that, it was just a distracting goof on my part.
(It is true however that Australia has major population decline, and that the government was aware of it, and to some extent aware of the problems or replacing the fast-declining domestic population with immigration. And no, I do not want to get into a discussion on the definition of a "domestic" population either. That is not what this is about.)
This loophole was definitely an unintentional consequence of the bill, and not an attempt to promote abortion. Thus, besides the simple lesson that incentives work, this story teaches a second lesson, on the unintended consequences of your incentive structure.
By "commonly" I meant "as apposed to in extraordinary and rare cases that can't be dealt with in a systemic way". For example, someone may have a bad drug trip and kill his grandmother under the impression she was an evil elf. That would be killing someone who had not wronged him in any way, but a structure of gain and loss would have nothing to do with it: it was a random act by someone who was unaware of what they were doing. Incentives don't get you far in managing the behavior of people who are that far gone. But society functions because "commonly" legal, economic and social incentives do have some effect.
I wasn't predicting that there would be an increase in abortions due to the change in the tax laws, which has been on the books for years. Nor would I predict that you could go back and sort out an effect from the bill on the abortion rate. In the first place, the data that would be necessary for that is unobtainable in Australia, which is political and intentional. Second, the same "baby bonus" is in effect an incentive to carry your baby to term.
What the story shows is that people respond to incentives. When there are rewards to be had, people work the system to obtain those rewards.
#4 from Alchemist:
I'm saying that incentives work.
If misguidedly compassionate governments introduced a "chainsaw killer compassion bonus" that gave a free university education and worthwhile student living bonuses to people whose helpless grandmothers had been offed by a masked chainsaw killer, there'd be chainsaws revving up all across our great lands.
[Off topic. Deleted - David Blue]
Think of it this way. The people responsible for the "baby bonus" were the last people I would accuse of deliberately engineering more abortions. The problem was: they could easily imagine a heartbreak case where a mother lost her child due to a late miscarriage, and lost their expected "baby bonus" too. So they legislated with that in mind. And they couldn't imagine that people would use that compassionate clause to rake in money. So they legislated without that possibility in mind.
But the awful truth is, incentives work, whether you intended them to or not. That is how people are. Provide a possibility for gain, and reduce costs and risks, and what we would like to think is the powerful barrier of moral awareness that holds back humanity's propensity to kill starts leaking like a cracked dam. And as time goes on, it leaks more and more.
Dave, I am not sure I understand how you conclude from the link that "incentives work." I don't see any data that show an increase in abortions, stillborns, or live births. All I see are politicians second-guessing the potential implications of the law.
As an advocate of these types of programs (but not this one), I think it's worth considering that there are a lot of child-bearing expenses that are incurred prior to child-birth or at least at the time immediately surrounding birth. I don't think it's unreasonable to legislative incentives that help people address their immediate concerns. And I think you're right that the pain of stillbirth is one which compasionate lawmakers would feel fit to address.
But if I'm doing the numbers right. A $5,000 AUD bonus is the equivalent of $3,350 USD. A second-term abortion in the U.S. costs $1,000 or more and is more restricted and less commonly available. There are also the health risks. I don't know enough about Australia, but I don't think there are a lot of sane people that would be incentivized to make money this way.
Re: #10 from PD Shaw: if you are right and nothing has happened, then my point that "incentives work" is baseless.
There is nothing other than the kind of information presented to go on. Information about abortion is made practically impossible to obtain and preferably not collected or stored in the first place, because it suits politicians for that to be so. (It's hard to work up a heated argument without data. And, particularly for the currently ruling Labor Party, which is both the lefty and functionally pro-abortion party and the traditional Catholic party, a clear-cut, factually based national debate on abortion is not what the doctor ordered.)
This is quite a lot like the discussions Americans are having now on election fraud. Great efforts have been made over the years, with success, to prevent the systematic collection of information to prove election fraud, and to stigmatize pursuing this issue as "vote suppression". It's hard to argue that you need election reforms as long as you can't prove that the process has been corrupted.
David,
I understand that the purpose of the legislation was to offer incentives and for a legislator to pass such a law, it would be difficult to deny the consequences of a single example of abortion for profit.
But, as a supporter of this type of law, I'm not sure I know enough about what types of incentives work. I am pro-choice and a male, but I can't imagine any dollar amount that would induce me to have a child to abort it (assuming I were a woman). I can't vouch for being normal.
I find this subject interesting because it would be nice to have some data about incentives in child birth. There is sex . . ..
PD Shaw, you probably can't imagine knocking off your grandmother for profit either, but that's just the problem: the legislators didn't imagine people would act like that, but that's exactly how they do act.
Consider the history of castration in Christian Europe. This will do for a start: (link). The Catholic Church was dead against the practice. But as long as a castrati - a singer with a permanently childish pure voice - was a potential gold mine for their parents, depending on how good they turned out to be with training, large numbers of boys were castrated in unlikely farm accidents every year across Europe.
The only solution was to ban castrati from making their living singing - which of course involved much hardship to individuals, just as cutting out the compassionate late miscarriage "loophole" will cause hardship for individuals, etcetera.
Or consider the historic practice of mutilating children to make them more pitiable, more efficient and thus more profitable beggars. You may not be able to imagine doing that, but people will. They have. It made sound economic sense.
As long as the incentive structure is in place to let people gain by doing terrible things to their offspring, who have no voice, who cannot fight back, over whom they have total control - then you can't beat the practice. People will endlessly focus on the few hardship cases if you threaten to do what it takes to prevent the practice, and maintain with a straight face that this farm accident was real (do you have witnesses to the contrary?), or that these abortions were medically necessary or the mother's perfect right, or whatever.
That is just sad and sickening. People should be ashamed of theirselves for doing this just to get a bonus. The liberal illuminati should have done away with this because they had the authority to do so. Are they going to try to get the money back from the sickos?
Expressions, I'm going to make two requests:
One, which I made already: please pick a nickname and stick with it. So far I see you having used three. If the number rises much higher you might be invited to have a nice day somewhere else.
Two: please consider skipping the cant and contributing more substance. We all benefit more when contributors do that.
Thanks,
Marshal Nortius "Big Tuna" Maximus, in his official capacity
AJL: Well, AUS$5k probably tax free. (?)
#15 from Expressions:
Yes it is. :(
#15 from Expressions:
Ah, but that's one of the reasons I thought this story was suitable to post on Winds of Change: because it's not suitable as a stick for beating liberals with.
This is a strictly non-partisan and cross-ideological moral disaster. The people who brought in the "baby bonus" were and are conservatives, and they did it for purely conservative reasons. (That's what I was trying to get at with the "ethnic Australian population decline" thing. There was no hidden liberal motive in this.)
The incentive structure isn't a person and it doesn't care. It worked as it always does, to the expansion of what was rewarded, regardless of the innocent (and tragically naive) intentions of the legislators.
Winds of Change does not aim to be a conservative or a liberal blog. I think it's desirable here to post things that are helpful or interesting or valuable to think about, but are not convenient partisan talking points or easy, safe shots at one side or the other.
#15 from Expressions:
Of course not. That's another point of the story. Bonuses are still being paid now and will continue to be paid till 2009, because it's more trouble than the fetus' lives are worth to print a different form, and bureaucracy is all about hewing to standard procedure and filling in and acting on forms.
#17 from Nortius Maximus:
That's the idea.
Now imagine if the government provided a $5000 no questions asked tax free compassionate "grieving bonus" to each of the children of a mother who met her end violently. What do you think would happen?
Twenty weeks old: (link).
Pierce heart with poison needle (massive potassium chloride injection right in the heart): win $5,000.00, tax free!
Does anybody have any real doubts in their own heart what will happen if we ever bring in a Fatal Accident To Child Consolation Payment for a few thousand dollars, tax free, to be paid to the parents or legal guardians of the deceased child, no questions asked?
David Blue: I agree that even as a pro-choice individual, I would find this disgusting IF IT WERE ACTUALLY HAPPENING. But at this point, there is no evidence to suggest this is true. The only circumstantial evidence is given by this quote:
"There is horrific evidence given on radio by one lady who rang in and said she knows someone who has done this three times to claim the baby bonus."
That's BS data. You know it. I know it. So until you come back with facts (or at least some strong statistics) It seems to me that you are slandering the morals of the Australian public to make a political point.
Come back with facts, and I'll hedge in your direction.
AJL: Me neither, but I can just barely imagine a woman postponing an abortion that she wanted anyway long enough to get the credit if it were large enough.
Yes. And I can't imagine an American deciding to have a baby for $3,350 USD. It wouldn't cover the costs of having a baby. But it might encourage somebody to start a few months earlier if they were trying to build a little nest egg beforehand.
I don't know enough about Austrialian laws, customs, health care coverage to opine about Australia.
David: It's interesting that you make the analogy to criminals that do the unimaginable. The class of people you suggest might abuse the program sound the same: the down-trodden with little hope of advance, the mentally retarded or ill, the drug-ridden or people with simply attorcious judgment. It's hard to draw conclusions on what incentives will do to these people. They are not rational actors.
And there are alternatives. According to this government study prostiutes in Australia made an average of $800 per week in the mid-80s (before taxes).
But obviously a baby promoting policy that pays for abortions is oxymoronic.
I don't know what "ethnic Australians" means.
1. Does it mean the Aboriginals?
2. Does it mean the descendants of the British transportees?
3. Does it mean decendents of the British Free settlers?
4. Does it mean the descendants of the great migration from southern Europe after world War II?
5. Does it mean the descendants of the more recent immigrants from India, China and the Middle East, who were banned from entering the country until the repeal of the Bombay Plan and the White Australia Policy in the 1970s?
When I lived in Australia from 1980 to 1983, fully one half of the workforce was foreign born.
I am aware that Blue has already acknowledged his goof, but I wrote the above because it underlies how twisted a policy for paying people to reproduce is at its base.
After World War II, the Australian Government paid people to come to the country. Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians, Yugoslavians, et al came in droves. As late as 1980, traffic signs in Melbourne were in Greek and Italian as well at English. A Mediterranean culture began to grow, the vaunted Australian wine industry, was build on the back of these southern Europeans, just as was our California industry. Cheeses of all types including 10 or 15 varieties of Feta could be had at the Melbourne market which would have been the most ethically diverse in the world. Mind you I was coming from New York.
Generally, the country flourished, culturally, intellectually and economically. This was accomplished on the backs of immigrants. One would think that Australia might do better than open their doors to immigration again rather than encouraging baby factories.
One might infer that the deep seeded fear of "ethnic" Australians being lost in a sea of Asians and now Muslims has a lot to do with not only the policy but Blue's slip of the tongue.
#24 from TOC:
It means "not the topic of this thread".
And unless more information is published to confirm beyond the resources of skepticism that the reported incidents happened - which in this country, as I said, will not and practically cannot happen - I have nothing else to add to this thread.
Yes, incentives matter. That's why life insurance is illegal.
Sounds like a good test, right? By pure lack of foresight, a situation has developed such that people can conceive a baby, abort it, and get a significant tax refund. If there are a significant number of additional abortions in this year, that's good evidence that, as David says, incentives are indeed working. If there aren't, it's at least an argument that there are lengths to which people will not go...
As an ethnic Australian (at least, that's what I put when US forms ask for my race/ethnicity), I don't see why we should drop it. You implied that the Howard government introduced the policy for racist reasons. Much as I disliked that government, I see no reason to believe this.
Then as others have pointed out you made a bunch of claims on the basis of a newspaper report of a political speech citing an anonymous caller to a talkback radio program referring to an unnamed person of whom her own knowledge was not described in any way. Given the short period for which the program has been in place, and the fact that as far as I can tell, no-one knew about this loophole, I'd put the probability that this chain of anecdotes connects to a true event at zero.
You really ought to withdraw and apologise for this post.
I just feel issues like this are sickening, and should not be supported. There, that being said. This world is so set on spreading the wealth, but the socialist illuminati are spreading the wealth to people like this, and that is sickening. Welfare was enough!