Obama, make fixing the economy your only goal right now

The following editorials appear in the Yakima Herald-Republic on March 25, 2009.

While President Obama may shrug off the advice of editorial writers urging him to postpone his initiatives to reform health care and this nation's energy policies, we surely hope he heeds the warnings noted in the latest deficit projections.

They are beyond gloomy. They portend disaster.

New Congressional Budget Office figures predict that Obama's budget would produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade. It's $2.3 trillion worse than the deficit the Obama administration declared just a month ago and it's four times the deficits posted by President George W. Bush.

The red ink would average about $1 trillion a year from 2010-2019.

You don't have to be a math whiz to figure out the bottom line -- the deficits are unsustainable. They would produce such tremendous pressure in the marketplace that interest rates would leap skyward at a time when the federal government is doing everything it can to keep these rates in check so consumers can start spending again.

Obama argues he is committed to his ambitious agenda of pushing for comprehensive health care reform and an energy policy that reduces our dependence on foreign oil. To reach these goals, he has offered a $3.6 trillion budget for the 2010 fiscal year.

While we agree these are laudable goals, in the face of these record deficit forecasts we must once again say -- fix the financial situation first. That's where our focus must be today, and in the months ahead.

Only then, after lifting this country out of its recession and getting Americans back to work, should our federal government wrestle with the complex issues of health care and energy.

One domestic crisis at a time, Mr. President. We think that's advice worth following.

An alarming trend: 40 percent of babies born to unwed moms

Setting an all-time record for births in this nation is nothing to gloat over.

A record 4.3 million new babies were born in 2007. That figure even eclipses the number of deliveries during the peak of the baby boom that followed World War II.

On average, a U.S. woman will have 2.1 babies in her lifetime, and that represents what experts call "the magic number" for a country to replace itself. That helps ease labor shortages in the future and allows enough of a population to take care of their aging elders. The magic number also helps -- at least in theory -- with tax revenues, a blessing in light of the looming federal deficits.

However, there's another record in the birth numbers for 2007 that reveals a disturbing trend. That's for unwed mothers -- with births among that group rising to nearly 40 percent of the total.

And these are not just teen moms. Actually the teen birth rate has been dropping in recent years. In fact, some three-quarters of these unwed moms were over age 20.

It appears that being a single parent is now socially acceptable, a demographer from the University of Georgia noted.

But this comes at a price. And that has to do with the socio-economic level of these unwed mothers. A study several years ago by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that nearly half of unwed mothers lived below the poverty level compared to only 12 percent for married mothers.

A Cornell University study in 2005 also revealed that when unwed mothers do get married, their husbands are more likely to have poor job prospects.

Those kinds of numbers are distressing, especially when transposed over the demographics of the Yakima Valley, where one-half of the residents are on some form of public assistance.

Raising a family with two parents is difficult enough. Having to do so as a single parent in this economic recession makes matters only worse.

* Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Barbara Serrano, Spencer Hatton and Karen Troianello.