Given the worries expressed in the background paper the World Bank prepared for the March meeting of the G20 finance ministers, there is a plausible case to be made that the huge expansion of the U.S. government is about to suck the globe dry of available credit, leaving the third world stalled for years in the murderous effects of the current financial situation. "Preliminary analysis shows that...infant deaths in developing countries may be 200,000 to 400,000 per year higher on average between 2010 and ...2015 than they would have been in the absence of the crisis," the World Bank reported. "Unless reversed, this corresponds to a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million excess deaths during the period."
Because of the need to borrow to pay the massive debt into which President Obama and Congress have plunged us, there will be very little money available for third world borrowers who need money to buy necessities like food and medicine for their people, and, as usual, the children of those countries will bear the brunt of the financial famine.
There's an irony in this tragedy. People like Wallis made the argument during the campaign that Obama's economic policies would benefit the poor and thus reduce the felt need among poor women for abortions. Obama would thus do more, substantively speaking, to reduce the incidence of abortion than would John McCain who could be expected to only appoint Supreme Court Justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade. This seemed like a peculiar argument at the time, but I wonder what Wallis thinks of it now that those very policies that he was so enthusiastic about may result in the deaths of almost three million born children in a span of only five years.
RLC
