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One third of young women admits regret for the way they lost their virginity

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Dina sent me this article from UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

A recent survey of teenage girls conducted by Glasgow University revealed that in Britain — which has the third highest number of sexually active 13 to 15-year-olds in the world (only Denmark and Iceland have more) — more than a third of young women regret their decision to have sex so early.

A worrying 38 per cent of teenage girls regretted losing their virginity, and a fifth said they felt pressured to do so.

[…]…becoming sexually active at an early age can have devastating lifelong consequences, according to clinical psychologist Dr Michael Mantell. ‘It’s a psychological disaster waiting to happen,’ he says. ‘It leads to empty relationships and low self-worth.

‘The experience creates worry, regret, self-recrimination, guilt, loss of self-respect, shaken trust, depression, stunted personal development, damaged relationships and relationship skills. It can also have a negative impact on marriage, should one ever take place.’

[…]‘It has become the norm in our culture to be embarrassed if you have not had sex, as if there is something wrong with you, but, in my view, young people should be discouraged from rushing into it.’

The prospects of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases loom large in underage sex. But psychological damage is just as real a threat, according to Dr Mantell.

‘Having sex carries a sense of “being adult” for teenagers,’ he says. ‘This leads to the notion they can do other things that adults do, which is why data suggests teenagers who begin having sex at a significantly earlier time in their lives than their peers are more likely to engage in delinquent behaviour.’

There are other worries too, says Dr Mantell. ‘Girls who become sexually active in their teens are more than three times as likely to be depressed as those who don’t.

‘A girl’s self-worth is often damaged and she can come to rely on external evaluations of herself — “If I looked better, he would have stayed longer,” or “If I gave better sex, he would have wanted more.”

‘She knows she’s been “used”, which affects her ability to express affection and appreciation, and will always leave her wondering if it’s only about sex, and not her own particular qualities.’

[…]Psychologist Dr Mantell says when a girl experiences sex early in life and free of commitment, she learns an erroneous message that sex means nothing. ‘Her experience is that nothing happened as a result of her having sex, which creates the belief that sex and commitment have nothing to do with each other.

‘Later this can be carried into marriage, where the girl may believe that sex is not an important part of marriage when, clearly, it is.’

Dr Mantell says there is a physiological issue here, too. ‘Oxytocin is a chemical released into the system with sexual behaviour and is often linked to pregnancy and breast-feeding. It bonds people, one to another. When a young woman has multiple partners, some studies suggest her level of oxytocin is diminished, which can have longer-lasting effects — such as leading to bonding difficulties in marriage.’

The article has multiple frightening examples of how specific women lost their virginity and then experienced negative outcomes. I really recommend that everyone click through to the story (I linked to the printable version of the story, so no ads) and then read the cases of Kristen and Kimberley.

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Obama ends welfare reform and calls for $12.7 trillion of new welfare spending

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From the Heritage Foundation explains the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and its detractors.

Excerpt:

Last Thursday, the Obama Administration quietly issued new bureaucratic rules that overturned the popular welfare reform law of 1996. This was an illegal move, and it completely undoes years of progress that helped millions of Americans.

The 1996 reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). At the core of the TANF program were new federal work standards that required able-bodied welfare recipients to work, prepare for work, or at least look for work as a condition for receiving aid. Welfare reform turned “welfare” into “workfare.”

Under the old, pre-reform AFDC program, welfare was a one-way handout: Government mailed checks to recipients who did nothing in return. Reform changed that. The new TANF program was based on fairness and reciprocal responsibility: Taxpayers continued to provide aid, but beneficiaries were required, in exchange, to engage in constructive behavior to increase self-sufficiency and reduce dependence.

The TANF work requirements were not onerous. Under the law, some 40 percent of adult TANF recipients in a state were required to engage in “work activities,” which is defined as unsubsidized employment, subsidized employment, on-the-job training, attending high school or a GED program, vocational education, community service work, job search, or job readiness training. Participation was part-time, 20 hours per week for mothers with children under six and 30 hours for mothers with older children.

[…]As welfare dependence fell and employment increased, child poverty among the affected groups fell dramatically. For a quarter century before the reform, poverty among black children and single mothers had remained frozen at high levels. Immediately after the reform, poverty for both groups experienced dramatic and unprecedented drops, quickly reaching all-time lows.

None of this reduced the left’s antipathy for welfare reform. The left had strongly opposed work requirements in welfare in 1996. When TANF faced reauthorization in 2001, they again aggressively sought to repeal federal work standards; they repeated the attack in 2006. For the most part, they lost those battles. But they were not done.

[…]Having lost repeated legislative battles to abolish workfare, the left has now gone backdoor, using an arcane bureaucratic device called a section 1115 waiver to declare the actual work standards written in the TANF law null and void and grant federal bureaucrats carte blanche authority to devise new replacement standards.

Now that we are in an election year, I expect to see a lot of promises by the Democrats of more and more handouts, bailouts and rewards to all of their various constituencies. And all paid for by the job creators in the private sector, and their hard-working employees. After all, “the private sector is fine” and “if you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen”.

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New Ernst and Young report: proposed tax increases will cost 710,000 jobs

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Here’s the news from The Hill:

Allowing tax rates for the country’s highest earners to rise, an idea endorsed by top Democrats, would have a dire effect on the economic recovery, according to a new report prepared for business groups that was released Tuesday.

The study from Ernst & Young found that letting tax rates for the wealthiest Americans lapse would sap $200 billion and some 700,000 jobs out of the economy, reduce wages by 1.8 percent and lead to a decrease in investment.

“These results may suggest to policy makers that allowing the top tax rates to increase comes with economic consequences,” Ernst & Young’s Robert Caroll and Gerald Prante wrote in the report for the Independent Community Bankers of America, the National Federation of Independent Business, the S Corporation Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Long-run output can be expected to fall, and, depending on the use of the revenues, living standards, as reflected by workers‟ real after-tax wages, may also be lower.”

Top Republicans, including House GOP leaders and committee chairmen, jumped on the Tuesday report, as they continue to battle with President Obama and Democrats over how to proceed on tax issues and the broader fiscal cliff.

Obama reiterated last week his plan to only extend the Bush-era rates for annual family incomes up to $250,000 for another year, a proposal many congressional Democrats have coalesced behind. Republicans on the Hill want to extend all current rates for a year.

The key findings are here on the House Ways and Means Committee‘s web site:

Lower wages, fewer jobs and less investment

  • Output in the long-run would fall by 1.3 percent, or $200 billion in today’s economy.
  • Employment in the long-run would fall by 0.5 percent, meaning roughly 710,000 fewer jobs in today’s economy.
  • Capital stock and investment in the long-run would fall by 1.4 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively.
  • Real after-tax wages would fall by 1.8 percent, reflecting a decline in workers’ living standards relative to what would have occurred otherwise.

Every state in the U.S. feels the impact of tax hikes

  • The report, which offers a state-by-state look at the impact on economic output and employment, finds that every state is affected negatively by the tax increases contemplated by the Obama Administration.

Ernst & Young is one of the top financial firms in the world. The report is entitled “Long-run macroeconomic impact of increasing tax rates on high-income taxpayers in 2013”.

Even though Obama has increased our debt by nearly 6 trillion in less than four years, that money hasn’t created any jobs because government is not efficient at creating jobs that last. When you take money away from people who create jobs, you lose the jobs.  Wasting money on green energy firms that go bankrupt is a great plan to pay back your campaign fundraisers, but it’s not a good plan to create jobs. Bailing out labor unions with billions of taxpayer dollars so that they can create electric cars that catch fire is not the right way to create jobs, either. That’s what the stimulus was – $800 billion dollars taken out of the hands of businesses and sent directly to Obama’s allies. We need to get the government out of our business if we want job creation.