What the Nation Is Up Against

If you’re curious about what we’re up against as a nation with the previous Ticker "Here It Comes", particularly when it comes to California and its fiscal problems that threaten to turn into an all-on state-wide collapse, this ought to make it rather clear:

LOS ANGELES – The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.

Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.

That’s right.

14 children, all conceived by artificial means, unmarried, and worse…

"She told me that all of her kids were through in vitro, and I said ‘Gosh, how can you afford that and go to school at the same time?"’ she added. "And she said it’s because she got paid for it."

Uh, by whom was she being paid?  That wouldn’t be our wonderful "welfare" system, would it be?  WIC, EIC, you know, "pay me to live and poop out kids"?

Unknown.  What is known is this from the LA Times:

"Friends and family also reported that Nadya Suleman worked as a psychiatric technician until she was injured on the job. Then she began having children and enrolled in school.

She graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 2006 with a bachelor of science degree in child and adolescent development, school officials said. She returned to pursue a master’s in counseling, but last attended in the spring of 2008."

So how did she get paid to have these kids?  The timing suggests that she quit school when she became pregnant with the octuplets.

Nor does it end there:

"The eight babies — six boys and two girls — were delivered by Cesarean section weighing between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces. Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries."

Not one of those children could go to a normal nursery ward as all are critically under normal weight.  Never mind the 46 physicians and staff (and the dozens more who will take care of these kids in neonatal until they reach a safe weight to remove from around-the-clock medical supervision) – who paid for them?

14 children.  No ability to cover the expenses of having or raising them by herself.  Implanted by a medical system that was paid by you and I to perform these procedures, given "free" medical care which you and I paid for, born into a demand for extreme immediate medical care and expense and now, to raise those 14 children (each of which, by the way, has a cost of at least $100,000 – each – from birth to 18, assuming no complications post-discharge) you and I will pay for that too.

And before someone says "what if she’s not on welfare" let me point out that (1) even "private insurance" has lifetime limits on coverage which almost certainly will be exceeded by these kid’s neonatal care, and (2) even if they’re not this still constitutes a massive "money grab" from every other policyholder to her for an elective procedure (the choice to be IVF’d in the first place.)

Oh, and it gets better.  The Times in the UK is saying this:

"Her family has told agents she needs cash from deals such as nappy sponsorship — she will get through 250 a week in the next few months — and the agents will gauge public reaction to her story….

Nadya Suleman, who describes herself as a “professional student” living off education grants and parental money, broke up with her boyfriend before the birth of her first child seven years ago."

Then there’s this, from the same article:

US public reaction has been mixed: many have asked how an unemployed single mother can raise 14 children, as her first six have already strained the family budget. Angela and Ed Suleman, Nadya’s parents,bought her a two-bedroom bungalow in the suburb of Whittier in March 2007, but soon after got into debt and had to leave their own home.

They filed for bankruptcy and moved in with their daughter and grandchildren. Last week her father said he would return to his native Iraq to work as a translator and driver.

Sounds like the family money has already run out.

The epitomy of "I want, therefore I will have, and damn the consequences and costs."

There is no chance of this woman being able to forward up the nearly $100,000 per year that such a family would cost to raise assuming, once again, not one of those kids requires special care. 

That’s after we (not she) pay the $1,000,000+ in up-front costs for the neonatal and birth expenses for these eight – whether through Medicaid or private insurance, she did not pay that bill personally.  A neonatal stay is an easy $150,000 (each), and that’s if things don’t go badly south.

It didn’t matter.  She wanted an entire kindergarten class of her own and so by God she was entitled to access extraordinary medical procedures and to have one, irrespective of her personal ability to cover the cost both here and forward.

However you slice it this is ridiculous.  FOURTEEN children as a single parent? Assuming she has medical "insurance" from somewhere, exactly how does a desire to have as many kids as humanly possible entitle her to this sort of abuse of that insurance?  If she doesn’t have insurance, who’s footing the bill?  And how do you possibly go out and earn a living while raising fourteen kids?

This is what the nation is up against. 

This is why California is broke.

This is what we have created and allowed to fester in our country.

This is what happens when demands are not tempered by ability to pay and the consequences of one’s actions, but instead are allowed to be shoved off on other people. It is what happens when ethics fail and regulation is eschewed to enforce that which ethics refuses to.

In the financial markets it was put this way by Jesse’s Cafe:

"You want leverage? Imagine a 20 billion dollar portfolio of mortgage backed securities with a capital base of $10k, literally 2 million-fold leverage. Imagine the shock of the inventor as he watches as his successors expand similar portfolios up to $900 billion…..

The guys initially putting these packages together had some sense that they were crazy, that they made no sense, but nobody said stop, and they didn’t care. It was a good time to make money and then move along.

Got it?

It was a good time to do what we wanted, get what we want, take as much as we can (irrespective of the ethics or even the law involved), ignore the consequences and then move along, saddling someone else with the bill.

This is not just a financial markets issue.  It is an everything and everywhere issue.

The problem is that there is no "someone else" and the bill is on the table.  We will pay that check, and it will be paid through radical contraction in our standard of living and, if we do not stop rewarding these sorts of actions and instead try to bail them out we will suffer an all-on economic and social collapse.

THAT is what has to change if we are to solve the problems we face, and WE as Americans must demand that it change.

Buckle up.