While the Congress attempts to prevent Wall Street from self-immolating by printing money like Zimbabwe on holiday, our good friends to the west – Jefferson Parish, LA for those of you not down with Louisiana geography – have come up with an altogether different solution to the financial crisis. While most rational human beings blame the current mess on poor regulation and a proliferation of complicated financial instruments, there has been a certain segment of  the Right that has traced the blame back to History’s Greatest Monster. Their ultimate target is, of course, poor people, because who else could’ve engineered this massive collapse of the value of mortgage-backed securities?

Some of that brilliant logic has apparently struck Louisiana State Representative John LaBruzzo (R-Metairie), as he recently proposed that the state begin paying poor people to get sterilized. He put his concerns this way:

"If both the welfare and Social Security system keep growing, one day we're going to have a small minority of people working to fund and finance everybody else who isn’t working or producing…"

His idea: to pay $1000 cash to any poor person willing to get their tubes tied. Furthermore, he advocated increased incentives for the wealthy and well-educated to have children, such as subsidies or tax breaks. The idea, as you might have guessed, is that eventually the welfare rolls will be reduced and the financial burden on the taxpayer relieved.

Surely, a remarkable insight. Except for the fact that welfare rolls have been shrinking steadily over the past two decades, from around 280,000 people per month in 1991 to 13,.500 per month in Louisiana last year. And that annual spending on the program is about $16.5 million a year, which, to add some perspective, is about $10 million less than what the city of Baton Rouge spends annually on road maintenance.

While it would seem relatively easy to make a series of criticisms of the district that LaBruzzo represents – after all, this is David Duke’s former seat – one can never be too sure whether proposals such as this one are the result of malice, stupidity, or some heinous combination of the two. Whatever the case, I’d like to propose a compulsory sterilization program for state legislators that propose sterilization programs – no payouts required.