Bottom Story of the Day

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Bottom Story of the Day
“Starbucks Chief Urges CEOs to Push for End to Government Shutdown”–headline, Washington Business Journal, Oct. 8

Is He Just Venti-ng, or Does He Have Delusions of Grande-ure? 
“Starbucks Corp. Chief Executive Howard Schultz is calling on business leaders and his own employees and customers to petition Congress to reopen the government, pay its debts on time and pass a long-term budget deal by year-end,” The Wall Street Journal reports:

He had harsh words for a House Republican plan, expected to be unveiled Thursday, for a six-week extension of the nation’s borrowing limit. “I think that is fool’s gold because that is a Band-Aid solution that will put us right back into this abyss . . .,” he said.

Sounds as if somebody needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Janet Yellen

Yellen and Santorum 
During the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, Rick Santorum came in for considerable mockery for suggesting that modern-day contraception has been something other than an unmitigated boon for women. This column defended him, noting that his views found support in a 1996 article by three mainstream economists in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Two of the trio brought the argument to a less intellectual audience in a 1996 article for Slate:

Many observers expected liberalized abortion and contraception to lead to fewer out-of-wedlock births. But the opposite happened, because of the decline in the custom of “shotgun weddings.”

Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that most women would only engage in sexual activity if it came with a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that even if they left one woman, they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. In the 1970s, women who were willing to get an abortion, or who used contraception reliably, no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who found abortion unacceptable, or who were unreliable in their contraceptive use, found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations as well. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners.

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a socialchoice of the father.

Their solution was a non sequitur–more of the same: “Easier access to birth-control information and devices and to abortion could reduce the number of unwanted children and improve the timing of those whose mothers would have preferred to wait.” But it’s not as if we have a better solution; the problem seems to us unsolvable, at least at this time. And Santorum’s mockers failed to note that he was not calling for restrictions on contraception either.

Anyway, we bring this up because one of the economists who wrote that 1996 piece has been in the news lately. Her name is Janet Yellen.