A Conservative Farewell Speech

No, I'm not giving a farewell speech.  The fight goes on, even if it's conducted from the marshy wasteland on the fringe of the kingdom.

Here is the farewell speech of the greatest conservative politician of my lifetime.  The speech was given in 1991, at the end of her 12 years as PM of the United Kingdom and one year before the formation of the European Union.

She used her two terms as PM to turn the UK from a socialist basket case (in 1979, the UK's standard of living was on par with East Germany's), to an economic powerhouse, by standing up to the unions and capably advocating the Free Market system.  Though the UK has diverged somewhat leftward since her time, it is still in far better shape than she found it and the British overall are still maintaining their independence from the EU. 

In this speech she shows clearly and simply what liberals want, and in so doing shows the ridiculousness of their desire.  She also delivers a parting warning about the danger of the EU that is remarkably prescient.

We need a Thatcher badly now, as Americans have shown that they prefer the results liberalism provides rather than conservatism.


2012 Election Analysis

Well, I'm too cheap to buy Photoshop and Microsoft Paint sucks, so I'm just not going to post the goofy photo I was trying to make.  But, it woulda been so awesome!

Anyway, Obama wins with 51% (~62 million) of the popular vote to Romney's 48% (~59 million), and that managed to translate into 332 to 206 Electoral Votes.  So many different things to consider and discuss that I don't know how to arrange things, so the post may be a little jumbled.

First some interesting data: the overall popular vote was down from 2008, even though there are more registered voters now.  Obama got 10 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, Romney got 3 million fewer votes than the pathetic 2008 Republican nominee McCain did.  McCain's vote total would have beaten Obama this year.  More data:

Ethnicity/Gender Ratio:
White Men -  Romney 64%  Obama 35%
White Women - Romney 57%  Obama 42%
Hispanic Men - Obama 65%  Romney 34%
Hispanic Women - Obama 76%  Romney 23%
Black Men - Obama 87%  Romney 12%
Black Women - Obama 96%  Romney 3%
Asian Total - Obama 73%  Romney 26%

Generational Ratios:

Marital Ratio:
Married Men - no data
Married Women - Romney 53%  Obama 46%
Unmarried Men - Obama 56%  Romney  43%
Unmarried Women - Obama 67%  Romney 32%

Dem-Rep-Ind Split:

Democrat Ratio: 92% Obama   7% Romney

Republican Ratio:

Independent Ratio: 50% Romney    45% Obama

If anyone knows of a good website that can fill in the missing information above, let me know and I'll update the article.  I thought I would be able to find the age breakdowns, but haven't. 

I figured Romney would win a relatively close election.  I figured the partisan split would be something like halfway between the electorate of 2008 and that of 2010.  Obamamania could not still exist.  The partisan split of 2008 was DEM +7, that of 2010 was I think REP +1, but it might have been DEM +1.  Regardless, I expected DEM +3.  With Independents breaking for Romney, I figured this would give Romney the popular vote closely, though the Electoral Vote was going to be tough.  I figured enough swing states would fall Romney's way to give him the victory. 

In the campaign, Obama campaigned towards his base and Romney, after the Primaries, campaigned towards the middle.  This indicated to me that Romney had the advantage, that Obama was desperate to have to campaign hard for the base.  However, the polls show that that campaign paid off for him.

As The Huffington Post says:

As the exit polls showed, Obama won the popular vote despite losing to Romney handily among independents. Independents preferred Romney to Obama 50 to 45 percent. This was only the second time in the last 10 elections that the winner lost the independent vote, and in the only other time it occurred the margin was much closer, as Bush lost independents to Kerry by just 2 points, 51 to 49 percent.

The reason Obama was able to overcome this deficit was that many more Democrats than Republicans turned out to vote. The Democrats held a 6-point advantage over Republicans among voters in 2012, down only a single point from 2008. Since Democrats supported their nominee by a whopping 92-7 margin, Obama was able to overcome losing independents, even by a significant margin.

Even though we saw no Obamania like we saw in 2008, the Democrats turned out in force while Republicans tended to sit on their hands, even though anyone paying attention knew how important this election was. 

Pollsters and other analysts focused on a gender gap, that Obama had a large advantage with women that Romney wasn't going to be able to overcome, however, the results don't quite bear that out.

As The Atlantic says regarding the gender gap:

In other words, if you want to place a bet on how someone will vote and you have to choose between knowing that person's gender or their race/ethnicity, you're better off learning their race or ethnicity. That marker is more telling.
 

The one critical statistic above is the race of the voter.  If I had the age statistics, that may be another critical factor, but, as with gender, it probably is not as telling as race.  The marital status probably ties more into the fact that Whites have a far higher marriage ratio than other ethnic groups (Asians probably are high too but still too small a percentage of the population to affect the marriage ratio).

I'm not going to take the time to produce the poll results, but on questions of who would best take care of the problems important to voters, Romney was leading on almost every catagory, including the (by far) most important question of the Economy.  But, rather than vote for the person they thought would take care of the problems, minorities voted strongly for the candidate who was Not White.  Though Whites voted strongly for Romney, they weren't as unified a voting bloc as the minority groups were.  Even Asians, who get screwed worse even than Whites on Affirmative Action policies  and would also suffer even worse on Obama's redistributionist policies voted overwhelmingly for the Affirmative Action president. 

A President who took a recession and made it worse and longer with his Socialist policies, who advanced policies that weakened America and its allies around the world (his Administration's feckless handling of Benghazi is a chief example), and who did everything he could to exacerbate racial tensions in America was re-elected. 

It could be argued, probably rightly, that Blacks and Latinos would consider the redistributionist policies of the president to be in their best interest, but this wouldn't hold for Asians who have a higher standard of living than Whites.

But, it is not just the extreme racial vote that did Romney in; as stated above, the vote total for Romney is down from that of McCain.  How can that be, when the energy for Romney seemed to be way higher than it was during the perfect Democrat storm of 2008?  That is the thing that I really do not understand: the Republican or White or whatever voters that sat on their hands this election.  I don't know how someone could have been motivated to vote for McCain in 2008 and not be motivated to vote for Romney in 2012. 

An evenly-matched electorate, in which Independents favored Romney, should have given the election to Romney.  Instead Conservatives stayed home.  Why?

Why did we re-elect this complete failure of a President?

Because what the majority of Americans want now is free stuff from the Government, and we have a government eager to hand it to them.  This to me seems to signal the end of a functioning Democracy.

Time to build a bunker

It's not that the government wasn't already eager to give free stuff to Americans, it's that, faced with the fiscal cliff that we are, and having a choice with Romney/Ryan that at least offered some hope of facing it realistically, Americans chose to keep getting more free stuff and screw everything else.

Uncharted Terrority

QE-3 to infinity, creating money out of thin air, was announced on the thirteenth of this month:

The Federal Reserve announced plans to unleash more stimulus Thursday, in its third attempt at a controversial program to rev up the U.S. economy.

The policy, known as quantitative easing and often abbreviated as QE3, entails buying $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month. The end date remains up in the air, as the Fed will re-evaluate the strength of the economy in coming months.[...]

Meanwhile, the Fed will continue its existing policy known as Operation Twist. Together the two programs will add $85 billion in long-term bonds to the Fed's balance sheet each month.

  QE-3 is "open-ended". It will continue until the unemployment rate drops to an unspecified number. (It is interesting that one of the driving forces of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic was the desire to prevent massive unemployment.) The Federal Reserve is now buying around 74 percent of all new debt issued by the Treasury Department.

Ron Paul's stance of QE-3:

To me, it is so astounding that it does not collapse the markets. [Bernanke] said, ‘We are in very big trouble. We are going to do something unprecedented and we believe it will not hurt the dollar.’ [...] It means that we are weakening the dollar. We are trying to liquidate our debt through inflation.[...] I think the country should have panicked over what the Fed is saying that we have lost control and the only thing we have left is massively creating new money out of thin air, which has not worked before, and is not going to work this time.

According the Dallas Fed President:

The Federal Reserve's decision to jolt the economy a third time with monetary stimulus measures won't help the country much but could stoke inflationary pressures down the road, said Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, a noted inflation hawk.[...]

Such a policy tool — known as quantitative easing but dubbed by many as merely printing money out of thin air — follows two similar rounds in the past that have flooded the economy with trillions of dollars with the hope of encouraging investing and hiring.[...]

It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I did not argue in favor of additional monetary accommodation during our meetings last week. I have repeatedly made it clear, in internal FOMC deliberations and in public speeches, that I believe that with each program we undertake to venture further in that direction, we are sailing deeper into uncharted waters,' Fisher told the Harvard Club recently, according to prepared remarks of his speech.

Despite all the models and resources at the Fed's disposal, uncertainty is a very difficult factor to plug into assumptions when forecasting the economy.

'The truth, however, is that nobody on the committee, nor on our staffs at the Board of Governors and the 12 Banks, really knows what is holding back the economy. Nobody really knows what will work to get the economy back on course,' Fisher said.

'And nobody—in fact, no central bank anywhere on the planet—has the experience of successfully navigating a return home from the place in which we now find ourselves. No central bank—not, at least, the Federal Reserve—has ever been on this cruise before.'

The Federal Reserve adheres to a dual mandate to keep prices stable and unemployment rates optimal.

The Fed sets monetary policy by targeting inflation rates to 2 percent, but many market experts say the latest stimulus policy reflects the Fed's desire to prioritize the unemployment portion of its mandate way above keeping inflation rates in check.

In other words, the Fed is so willing to keep its foot on the gas pedal and risk seeing inflation rates rise above target levels in order to see unemployment rates fall that the country is steaming ahead deeper into unfamiliar waters.

'Not only will they tolerate higher inflation, not only will they wish for higher inflation, but they actually may target higher inflation,' Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of Pimco, manager of the world’s largest bond fund, told CNBC.

Central banks elsewhere have rolled out similar measures, flooding the world with inflation-fueling liquidity.

'This is true for all central banks — the (European Central Bank), the Fed, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England. We are so deep into unfamiliar territory, so deep into experimental mode, that we don’t know what the consequences will be,' El-Erian said.

'Whoever comes afterward will have to clean up the mess.'

On the point that  "central banks elsewhere have rolled out similar measures, flooding the world with inflation-fueling liquidity.",  Germany's Constitutional Court opened up the flood gates in Europe that will unleash unlimited money printing:

Germany's Constitutional Court gave a green light on Wednesday [September 12th] for the country to ratify Europe's new bailout fund, boosting hopes that the single currency bloc is finally putting in place the tools to resolve its three-year old debt crisis.

But the strings it attached to its endorsement of the ESM and a separate European pact on budget rules were less onerous than many had feared.

European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi announced plans last week to buy 'unlimited' amounts of government bonds issued by stricken euro states like Spain and Italy in order to reduce their borrowing costs.

That plan fuelled optimism in the markets, but it was contingent on the ESM coming into force. Following Wednesday's ruling, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he expected the rescue fund to be operational within weeks.

 Also Japan has decided to act by printing more money, something they have been doing for a very long time, in response to QE-3:

The Bank of Japan announced Wednesday that it would expand its asset purchase program by 10 trillion yen in an effort to stimulate its economy as global demand slows.
The announcement comes less than a week after the U.S. Federal Reserve announced its latest stimulus plan, and two weeks after the European Central Bank revealed its new bond-buying program.

Apparently this is not enough, "The Bank of Japan is ready to expand monetary stimulus again even after this month's action and may ponder new steps if necessary, board member Takehiro Sato said, warning of global uncertainties that could push the economy into recession".

Printing money devalues the currency of the nation that engages in such actions, and that in turn gives it an unfair economic advantage against other nations. This forces other nations to intervene and devalue their currency. It is a global race to the bottom.

What does all of this mean? This is very spooky stuff. The global economy is based on debt. Nations have been spending money that does not exist, and paying for this with creating money out of thin air for some time now. It is very much like a con artist that gets a loan and pays for that loan with another loan and so on. The game is rapidly approaching the end. The very next step for the Federal Reserve and just about every other central bank in the world is 100%, straight-up, Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe type money printing. This means that massive world-wide inflation, or some economic disturbance, is possibly not that far off. As the Dallas Fed President said central banks "are sailing deeper in uncharted waters". Now is the time to educate yourself and to prepare to avoid finding yourself in the situation found below. 

As noted in the book When Money Dies:

In hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth, to some, more than the family silver; a side of pork more than the grand piano. A prostitute in the family was better than an infant corpse; theft was preferable to starvation; warmth was finder than honor, clothing more essential than democracy, food more needed than freedom.

Paul Ryan The Fiscal Warrior

Looks like Mitt Romney has chosen a conservative that is going to fight to massively reduce the size of government and tackle entitlement reform. The election is now about the big issue of reducing the size of government. This is big news. The coming economic crisis has been avoided thanks to a bold move by Mitt Romney to pick a radical small government politician that is going to make things happen.

Of course there is always more than the shiny facade pimped by party loyalists and for those that have bothered to investigate Ryan's record the picture becomes a bit murkier.
For starters there is the very pressing and disturbing votes of the Bush legacy. Specifically Ryan's support of: TARP, Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). All three are wonderful examples of how the Republican party only fights for fiscal sanity when they are a minority party, the second they become the majority they expand Government programs at an alarming rate. NCLB is a monstrosity that gave the Department of Education teeth, Medicare Part D tacked on hundreds of billions (half a trillion as of today per year) to the debt and was passed in the House in a manner very reminiscent to ObamaCare and TARP is an egregious disregard of the free market system and should make any citizen sick to their stomach.[...]

In order to understand that Ryan's budget is nothing more than smoke and mirrors we turn to a detailed analysis of the budget. This interactive analysis lets you compare and contrast the Ryan and Obama budgets side by side and examine the projects for spending. [...]

First we got Medicaid. Clearly the difference is notable and appreciable. In fact based on this image alone it would almost invalidate all my criticism of the Ryan budget. [...]

Next we have Medicare. What's this? Apparently Grandma is not going off a cliff, instead it would appear that she is being pushed up a hill! Ryan's plan spends MORE on Medicare than Obama.[...]

Next up is Social Security. No, it is not a graphical glitch. Ryan's plan does absolutely nothing for Social Security. Yet conservative websites and pundits swoon over Ryan like he is the next coming of Barry Goldwater, more on that later.[...]

Lastly, the national debt. This is probably not surprising, but after all the hoopla and all the bravado the end result is that the speed at which our fiscal apocalypse arrives is merely slowed down by a teeny weeny bit. [...]
The answer is quite simple. Romney and Ryan represent exactly the same problem even if one appears to be a moderate and the other appears to be an epic fiscal warrior. The Republican party fights for and pushes through the status-quo. The images you see up above and the Ryan record is the status-quo. No doubt about it.
Yet Romney is counting on the ignorance of Republican base to run with the facade of Ryan's conservatism. If that illusion holds then Ryan's image will invariably boost Romney's own image as many will view Romney's decision as courageous and bold despite Obama's willingness to distort Ryan's budget. In other words, you are witnessing a most fantastic and glamorous circus. A bad Hollywood movie, except that ending will be quite real and not something you can pause or turn off.[...]

However we all know what happens when politicians threaten the sacred cows of entitlement spending. They get destroyed. Barry Goldwater was America's last libertarian-Republican candidate and he was obliterated because he dared to speak up against Social Security. Barry's loss paved the way for the great society and the invention of Medicare and Medicaid. How ironic. Poll after poll shows that Americans refuse to accept changes to entitlement programs, despite their clamoring for someone to fix our debt.

 They had me fooled for a little bit in thinking Paul Ryan was a small government conservative that is going to reduce the debt and reign in big government. 

222,000,000,000,000

 The actual U.S debt is 222 trillion dollars:

Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.
In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap -- the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness -- rose by $11 trillion. [...]

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast -- the Alternative Fiscal Scenario -- is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference -- this year’s true federal deficit -- is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.  

The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.[...] 

Part of the fiscal gap’s growth reflects changes in policy, such as the Bush and Obama tax cuts, the introduction of Medicare Part D, and the expansion of defense spending. Part reflects “natural” growth of existing programs, including growth in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. And part reflects the demographic time bomb U.S. politicians are blithely ignoring.

When fully retired, 78 million baby boomers will collect, on average, more than 85 percent of per-capita gross domestic product ($40,000 in today’s dollars) in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Each passing year brings these outlays one year closer, which raises their present value.

 According to the CBO:

 Many budget analysts believe that the alternative fiscal scenario presents a more realistic picture of the nation's underlying fiscal policies than the extended-baseline scenario does. The explosive path of federal debt under the alternative fiscal scenario underscores the need for large and rapid policy changes to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal course.

Hotair notes that, "We’ve been talking about the 'fiscal cliff' or 'Taxmageddon' coming at the end of the year, but this is the real fiscal cliff we face. And yet, no one in this general-election cycle has even acknowledged it, let alone proposed a solution to it." 

Here is a more optimistic view of the situation.

The Enemy

Most people think that communism has fallen and is no longer a threat to the free world: the Soviet Union Collapsed and communism has been discredited by its obvious failure as an economic system. What most people don't know is that communism never collapsed, but it has transformed itself. And still yet that America has been defeated by this new communism. (By communism I don't mean the Soviet-Style- Communism, but instead a system which has more in common with fascism that with communism. If I wanted to be cleaver I would not even use the terms communism or fascism as these words tend to turn people away and cause them to dismiss what is said after these words.) After the world conquest of communism failed to take place in the 1900's. Key intellectuals and leaders of communism began to wonder why communist revolutions did not take place in the West. They then realized that it was the foundation of Western Culture that must be attacked if the West was to fall to communism:

Gramsci posited that because Christianity had been dominant in the West for over 2000 years, not only was it fused with Western civilization, but it had corrupted the workers class. The West would have to be de-Christianized, said Gramsci, by means of a "long march through the culture."

The new battleground, reasoned Gramsci, must become the culture, starting with the traditional family and completely engulfing churches, schools, media, entertainment, civic organizations, literature, science, and history. All of these things must be radically transformed and the social and cultural order gradually turned upside-down with the new proletariat placed in power at the top."

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority.

This is one of the reason that pop culture glorifies sexual promiscuity and the left supports gay rights and anything else that will destroy the foundation of our society. To see that America culture has transformed in the way that communist intellectuals knew was required for America to fall to communism all one has to do is  look at T.V shows, movies, pop culture, the crap that is taught in today's universities, and the beliefs held by the common American to see this. (I have heard people spout communist slogans and state that we don't know if communism is so bad. Even one of my favorite sitcoms Seinfeld has helped to chip away, with a smile, at the foundations of our society and has contributed to revolution.)

Communist leaders knew that the West would never outright accept communism:

In 1959 President Eisenhower asked Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson to teach Nikita Khrushchev about American Agriculture.

Sec. Benson recalled the following conversation……

'Your grandchildren will live under communism.' Khrushchev said.

'On the contrary,' Secretary Benson replied, 'My grandchildren will live in freedom as I hope that all people will.' 

Khrushchev then retorted: 'You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright; but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; we’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.

 Khrushchev was probably referring to the economic rivalry during the Cold Wart, but this weakening has come about through the adoption of economic policies modeled after socialism and central planning: the welfare state. The economic crisis of 2008 has done a lot to move America towards a command and control economy.

The six- time U.S presidential candidate for the socialist party Norman Thomas stated :

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

Khrushchev also stated:

We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism,
but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism,
until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.

 It may be hard for us to accept or acknowledge, but the painful truth is that America has already been defeated by the new-communism and today "find that they have Communism".  Not the Soviet-Style Communism, but the softer-milder kind. It has happened so slowly and gradually without a major event to mark the turning point, that most people don't even know it and/or don't care enough to look. For one to see that America has been defeated, all they have to do is look at who the American people have elected to the highest office in our land. A man whose mentor was a communist with ties to Russia.

Imagine an American man so devout in his Communist beliefs, that during the Cold War the FBI placed him on its security index – meaning that if an armed conflict were to have erupted between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Federal authorities would have looked to him as a prime suspect for treason.

Now imagine that man mentored the leader of the free world.

(Obama has admitted that this was the man that he mentioned in his autobiography. It is also interesting that a lot of what this man advocated we see our president doing today. You need to learn about this Frank Marshall Davis.)
A man whose parents were devoted socialist/communist. A man who has surrounded himself with communist while in office and/or people who profess their love for communist leaders. A man who has chosen for his 2012 campaign slogan Forward. (A classic communist slogan.) A man who has actively worked to "fundamentally transform" our nation. The American people have elected the enemy as our president, and after three years in office about half of them still support the man. Enemy is a strong word so it needs to be defined. I am using the word enemy to mean someone that stands against everything that made our nation great; someone that stands instead for communism; someone who wants to and actively works to "fundamentally transform" this nation. America fought against this ideology and way of life on the battlefield during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. Many men have died to keep America and the world safe from this system. And now America has bowed down before this system and elected a leader who seeks to bring America under this system. The bottom line is that America has been defeated from within by socialism/communism/collectivism/fascism.

Some might say "that if this is defeat then it isn't so bad". "My life hasn't changed that much." The German of the 1930's would have said the same thing immediately after Hitler took over. (I am not trying to intimate that Obama is Hitler.) Only after their nation was destroyed and two million of their women rapped would they realize what had happened. The change/revolution is not completed. All that is left to complete the revolution is a major transformative event that will be upon us in the not-so-distant future when the economy collapses or some other major event. Of course when this happens it at first will appear much as Nazism appeared to the German people-- as a savior. Only then will people realize that this has happened.

Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis

Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is a technique that is used for finding abnormalities or disorders in fertilized or unfertilized eggs (ovum). It is usually done in vitro fertilization for parents who suspect that they have a hereditary disease that is linked to genes. Many eggs are fertilized and the chromosomes are analyzed. Once an ideal egg is singled out, it is implanted in the mother's uterus. The rest of the fertilized eggs are discarded or used for testing. They will not live.There are also ways to analyze an ovum before it is fertilized in cases where maternal mutations are the only concern. (Sharpe)

Benefits:

• Less disabled people could ease the burden on our health system. A study showed that annual health care costs for a someone with down syndrome is over $34000 (Boulet). This study was done in 2004. 
• If someone finds out that they are carrying a child with a sever disability, they are more likely to terminate the pregnancy. PGD can prevent these sort of abortions.

Drawbacks:

• It has been suggested that Bill Gates, Lewis Carroll, and Thomas Jefferson had/have Asperger Syndrome; a high functioning version of autism (Hensley). What if PGD prevents great thinkers from ever being born?
• Are we playing the hand of God? 

PGD can also be a way of picking traits for our offspring: height, IQ, hair color, etc. Although research is still being done on this. I saw a scientist on NOVA talking about the complexity of these issues because there are hundreds of genes that contribute to these traits and environmental issues that we have no control of.

Citations used:

Boulet, Sheree, and Noelle-Angelique Molinari, Scott Grosse, Margaret Honein, Adlolfo Correa-Villasenor. “Health Care Expenditures for Infants and Young Children with Down Syndrome in a Privately Insured Population.” The Journal of Pediatrics. Aug. 2008. Vol. 153, Issue 2, Pages 241-246. Web. 16 July 2012.

Hensley, Samuel. “Fetal Genetic Testing is Unethical.” Biomedical Ethics. Ed. Viqi Wagner. Detroit: Greenhaven, 2008. 208-213. Print

Sharpe, Neil, and Ron Carter. Genetic Testing: Care, Consent, and Liability. New Jersey: Wiley-Liss, 2006. Print.