Political & Elections

I saw something about the US birth rate today and numerical population control here is probably only of interest to the flat earthers, lp.

Not arguing whether abortion is a necessary evil, don't even feel like whipping on PP anymore. After trolling through abortion statistics the other day, I just feel dirty.

 I do not believe the "sexual revolution" (which I lived through) of the '60's came out of nowhere.  Not at all.

But to say more would be getting into the political, which I have promised myself not to think about!

 

My solution is not to increase social programs that make it easier to have more children out of wedlock, or if you're poor. I don't think that is the answer to preventing pregnancy.

My solution is to encourage birth control. It would be worth the money if we could convince young women to have some sort of long lasting implant.
My other solution is for leaders be very vocal in discouraging single parenthood, making it unacceptable and undesireable. While still understanding that sometimes this happens in people's lives, but it's not a situation to plan on and aspire to. I am disgusted that Obama hasn't used his position to do this.

What other realistic solutions are there? Encouraging religion, bringing people to God and somehow they will be more moral and not have sex unless they want babies? Have religious police enforcing moral laws? I don't think we can change people's hearts and minds in any respect, but you can encourage behavior in some ways.

Some of you (principally the guys) are referring to federal funding for Planned Parenthood as if it were some pure donation.

No concious effort to blow smoke, hayden. It's just easier to say "the bills are marked so the accountants can do what they do", rather than string together: "reimbursement for services", "Medicaid funds", "Hyde amendment", "contractor", ......

I'm going to throw my hands up here, and say it's impossible to know whether the taxpayer's subsidizing off-the-shelf abortions. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places but all I keep coming up with is... who knows? The accountants duly submit whatever reports satisfy the states and the feds as to the funding but the issue of fungibility doesn't appear to be a metric. No one I've found bothers trying to refute the claim, not coherently anyway, instead they just claim the religous don't blink an eye when it comes to fungibility & faith based grants so they're wellcome to go wee up a rope if it makes them feel better. (Not that it's the same thing at all but: I wonder if they'd be so blase if it was a university taking government dollars, while incidentally offering a short course on the proper way to burn a Koran?)

I can't say the time searching was entirely wasted, though. I did manage to find Henry Waxman decrying a plan for a congressional audit of PP as to be on par with harassment and witch-hunting, so the fact no one seems able to even identify exactly the average price of an abortion from PP no longer seems strange at all, nor the effort PP's spent spinning abortion as a small, insignificant portion of their business.

-- Edited by catahoula on Thursday 29th of November 2012 02:21:11 PM

My other solution is for leaders be very vocal in discouraging single parenthood, making it unacceptable and undesireable. While still understanding that sometimes this happens in people's lives, but it's not a situation to plan on and aspire to. I am disgusted that Obama hasn't used his position to do this.

Charles Murray’s idea is similar. He says that leadership has fallen down on the job by NOT speaking out in the way you suggest:

The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn't even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren't working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.

To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up. Don't call them "demoralized." Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren't feckless with respect. Recognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor's college-educated son who won't take a "demeaning" job. Be willing to say so.

This shouldn't be such a hard thing to do. Most of us already believe that one of life's central moral obligations is to be a productive adult. The cultural shift that I advocate doesn't demand that we change our minds about anything; we just need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.

It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn't make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on.

That’s certainly part of the solution, but it’s not enough. Telling people to behave better never works, making it easier for them to make the right choices has a much better track record.

Telling people that smoking or eating too much processed food is bad for them doesn’t work. Making it more difficult to get cigarettes and much easier to get and prepare healthy food – in other words, changing the cultural path of least resistance – does.

The current welfare state creates a cultural path which encourages the exact behaviors which worsen the problem it is intended to mitigate.

What is needed is policy changes which change the path in a way that encourages better behaviors like those you suggest.

The video below offers a simple and lighthearted example of the power of changing the path. Of course, not all problems are as simple as in the example, but the concept holds. What is needed is policy reforms which change the path in ways which discourage bad behaviors and encourage good ones. This is simple in concept but difficult in practice, but nonetheless it must be done because as things stand right now, current policies do the exact opposite.




-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 29th of November 2012 10:42:44 AM

Having children when you are unable to care for them is the number 1 reason people are trapped in poverty.

And what’s the number one reason people have kids when they are unable to care for them?

The Times reporters Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise spoke to dozens of people in Lorain, Ohio, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, with 63 percent of births to women under 30 occurring outside of marriage. The young parents of Lorain said their reliance on the government safety net encouraged them to stay single

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/for-younger-mothers-out-of-wedlock-births-are-the-new-normal/


And why do those people think that way? The answer is well documented in probably dozens of books and articles, but for the purpose of this discussion I’ll draw from just one book, “Coming Apart,” by Charles Murray.

“The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” he said. “The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/books/charles-murrays-coming-apart-the-state-of-white-america.html?pagewanted=all


Murray’s second part details the declining hold of the “founders’ values” among lower-class white Americans. Murray identifies these values as industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. He marshals an array of statistics to show that white Americans are having more babies out of wedlock; indeed, fewer are marrying at all. More are working part-time or have ceased working, independent of the economic climate. They have lost the industriousness that visitors to America since de Tocqueville identified as a national trait; they are perhaps even less honest.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/book-review-coming-apart-by-charles-murray-01192012.html#p2


"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It's a cost that many in the new upper class don't experience or understand.

http://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2012/02/02/mitt_romney_meet_charles_murray_8.html


Here's a metaphorical description of the problem:

Fish are swimming in filthy water and they’re getting sick. Your approach to helping the fish is to ignore the water and treat their illnesses, mindless of the fact that your treatment methods are what are fouling the water in the first place.

And your solution? More of the same.






-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 29th of November 2012 09:11:05 AM

And I see it all the time here in Lansing, especially at the shelter where often the ONLY male role models have been abusive. It's worse than having a single mom. Many of these women's children are the result of forced sex and even incest. And they're SO YOUNG. I am always just amazed at how many women come in my age with MULTIPLE children. I could not imagine in my wildest dreams even having ONE right now.

When there is little to no child care subsidies, inflexible work hours, etc, these women are trapped. There is literally nothing they can do. And some of these women are so uneducated that they have zero idea how to get birth control even if they wanted it. I would have never thought that was possible in this day and age, but it is. Many of these women are high school drop outs and illiterate- never making it to sex ed and a topic their moms didn't talk about.

I don't know the solution either. That's what I'm spending at least the next two years studying if all goes as planned.

$300,000 is not much at all for a CEO.  The CEO of our local hospital, a not-for-profit, makes $5 million a year.  It's not some huge national system, either - it's a 3-campus facility.

Some of you (principally the guys) are referring to federal funding for Planned Parenthood as if it were some pure donation.  It's not.  Most of the "funding" is reimbursement for services provided, which are paid under Medicaid.  Just as with not for profit hospitals, where most of the hospitals receive an average of 40% "funding" from the federal government.  Again, it's not a charitable donaltion, it's reimbursement under Medicare for services rendered by the hospital.

With regard to abortion, PP keeps two separate sets of books.  The services which provide abortion are required to pay separate rents, separate physicians bills - everything is separate, not intermingled.  The amount received from other services does NOT support the abortion services, as the books are not intermingled in any way.

"You're proving my point.

EVERYONE happens to thinks that same way about their own pet project, and that's the problem. Once the government starts providing some "benefit' people effectivley addicted to it and they can't imagine life without it, AND they accuse anyone who even suggest that it be cut of being cold, heartless, uncaring, of "those who cannot provide for themselves." It's a catch-all argument that is used to defend practcially EVERYTHING the government takes."

I don't think I've ever accused anyone of being cold, heartless, and uncaring. For me, it's a financial issue. Pay small bucks to encourage birth control for people who can't afford it, or pay big bucks for eternity for their fatherless, neglected children.

I don't care whether the government pays for it, or private charities do. Someone will, because many people think a lot like me, and don't want to encourage continual reproduction (the movie Idiocracy keeps coming to mind). Unless of course, our nation is lacking in enough babies.

I don't think the Righteous Mind quote applies to something like encouraging use of and making birth control cheap. The consequences of lack of clothing, shelter or food are....eventually, death. The consequences of the high cost and unavailability of birth control are... more people. Perhaps this sounds too much like eugenics, but I would like to encourage highly educated people who are able to care for a child, to reproduce. I would like to encourage uneducated people who are unable to care for their children....to not.

""The goverment should be responisble. It should stop spending so much. Members of congress are horrible. What's wrong with them?

Except when it's something I like."

You get the government, and the fiscal cliff, that you deserve"

Of course. We all have our own interests, and things that we think are important.

But I happen to think that the massive amount of benefits that are provided to those who cannot provide for themselves and their children are pushing us off the fiscal cliff far quicker than the puny amount given to planned parenthood. I don't really even care much if the federal govt stopped funding them, because I'm sure that donors would take up the slack.

As a society, what costs us more? A little bit for cheap birth control, or for hordes of children with no fathers in their lives?

romani, the reason for grounding women was that they claimed they didn't know how a woman's body would react when they first started birth control pills, and couldn't take the chance. Some military flying can be rather demanding and precarious, so I guess I see the point. Six weeks seems like a ridiculously long time, though. I don't know if they still do that.

Planned Parenthoods just the most convenient face to the whole mess, bd.

I'd like for the opportunity to have one to be available to those who simply can't deal with the consequences, along with there being fewer due to foolish and irresponsible behavior. Culture says only one of those is likely to happen.

And a couple of things I left out.

Government funding is about 1/3 of pp funding. That is substantial.
Abortion services number about 3% of their services provided. It is a very small portion of their organization.

I don't really care if the execs make 300K, as that is probably quite low compared to many non-profits. Sure, it seems to me like non-profits shouldn't be paying people tons of money, but many do anyways.

I support the theory of PP not the reality when it comes to federal funding. PP pays 6 figure sums to their regional EVPs. In some cases 300K+. This is a NPF. I am not asking them to pay sr mgmt pennies, but if you are paying 300K+ for even one sr. mgr., don't ask the federal govt for a hand out.

PP has great programs, but I don't consider them a hand in the hat organization. Time to get off the federal budget. Just like PBS and NPR. The amount they get from the fed. govt is pennies. I believe when MR said he would get rid of Big Bird, they came back and said it is 3% of their budget.

If it is so nominal, why not walk away? I know why, because it is free money.

PP will do just fine without govt funding.

To answer your question busdriver about impoverished, uneducated, etc. Of course not! Nor do we want our 15 yr old daughters getting a back alley abortion. However, at the same time we need states and Medicaid to get involved. If the states place into their system with Medicaid, like health insurance; free/low cost prevention, i.e. Norplant, Depo, along with other options, that rate would be reduced. We would also have lower families needing WIC, food stamps. etc.

PP is not the answer. IMPO from a fiscal perspective. It IS THE BANDAGE.

The minute the R's accept that is fact, and no matter how hard they try to stop unplanned pregnancies they will occur, will be the minute they will win women. PP isn't the issue, the issue is who pays and how they pay.

MR bowed to the right. He sold his soul. He would have won even if he said I will cut fed. funding for PP. He could have run ads showing what I just stated enormous salaries paid by tax payers that never use their services.

Busdriver, have to ask....have you ever gone to PP? I never did. My friend in college did for an abortion, and I am thankful for their existence. I am thankful for their existence for my DD. I just don't have a warm, fuzzy, pity them financially feeling knowing how much they spend on payroll as an NPF.

There are some major reasons why I support Planned Parenthood, that are impossible to overlook. It has nothing to do with fairness, justice, benevolence, role of the government, none of it. It is for purely selfish and monetary reasons that I do.

If birth control is not easily accessible and cheap, you will have more babies from people who cannot afford and should not be having them. Argue it all you want, you know it's true. Look at the countries where it is difficult to get birth control. Look at Africa, the Middle East. Do you want to go there? People will not decide to just stop having sex, that is a fantasy world.

Do we really want more impoverished, uneducated people having babies around here? Is that what we want to encourage? The extreme cost of raising generations of people on welfare, food stamps, lack of contribution to society, crime.

Do you think poor women are going to buy maternity vitamins for full price? Not happening, they're not getting them at all. Think of the cost to society for some preventable malformations and disorders.

I say provide all the birth control that people want, as long as we don't need more reproduction in this country. Because otherwise we may have to support way too many kids for a lifetime. Since the government is going to provide for everyone, no matter what, I say yeah, I'd rather have our government paying for birth control. It is self preservation.

So, if you think it is a good thing then it deserves federal funding, and if I think it is a good thing it doesn't?

Or, you think that the government should be in the healthcare business?

Which is it?



Here are a few more nonprofits that I think deserve federal funding:

Cato Institute
Hoover Institution
Manhattan Institute
Lexington Institute
Project for the New American Century
Center for Security Policy
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Center for Immigration Studies
Claremont Institute
Hudson Institute

SLS, I hadn't heard that but I have a good friend who works for PP. I will check in with her.

That would be ****ty. PP is the sole care provider for a large population of women in this country. It's why my blood boils when people talk about cutting funding to it.

But I happen to think that the massive amount of benefits that are provided to those who cannot provide for themselves and their children are pushing us off the fiscal cliff far quicker than the puny amount given to planned parenthood.

You're proving my point.

EVERYONE happens to thinks that same way about their own pet project, and that's the problem. Once the government starts providing some "benefit' people effectivley addicted to it and they can't imagine life without it, AND they accuse anyone who even suggest that it be cut of being cold, heartless, uncaring, of "those who cannot provide for themselves." It's a catch-all argument that is used to defend practcially EVERYTHING the government takes. (I deliberately did not say "pays for" because the government "pays for" exactly nothing. All it does is redistribute. )

Why not apply the same logic to, say clothing, or shelter, or food.....

Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. Al labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check of an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month with you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance payments.

Under such a system, there is a little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you.

As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs.

That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account – that is, as long as someone else is always prying for your choices – things will ge worse. We can’t fix the problem by convening panels of experts to set the maximum allowable price for a can of peas. Only a working market can bring supply, demand, and ingenuity together to provide health care at the lowest possible prices. For example, there is an open market for LASIK surge ( a kind of laser eye surgery that removes the need to wear contact lenses). Doctors compete with one another to attract customers, and because the proceudr4e is rarely covered by insurance, patients take price into account. Competition and innovation have driven down the price of the surgery by nearly 80 percent since it was first introduced. (Other developed nations have had more success controlling costs, but they too face a rapidly rising costs that may become fiscally ruinous. Like America, they often lack the political will to raise taxes or cut services. -- "The Righteous Mind," page 303.


-- Edited by winchester on Wednesday 28th of November 2012 07:46:44 PM

Isn't it ironic that the practical reality, that of predominately low-income women having abortions, is something that sounds exactly like what Republicans would usually be accused of rooting for, if not actively getting down to the business of doing? Instead, it's a wedge issue our liberal friends use to beat the crap out of them with for not supporting. Maybe it's because they managed to change the issue to one of women's rights and health instead a moral issue, one of personal responsibility.

Come to think of it, there isn't anything they don't frame as outside of personal responsibilty. Hah... explains why the trial lawyers are such reliable supporters.

-- Edited by catahoula on Wednesday 28th of November 2012 06:11:13 PM

Not saying there's a parallel here but don't Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood do a lot of community service? Nuts and bolts kind of good-will building?

I think I'll have to recant on the claim PP's offering government subsidized abortions, though it's complicated. Search for breakdowns on their business and you get pie charts designed to show abortion is just a tiny fraction of their business services (3%), along with analyses that show they likely derive a huge chunk of their earned income from it:

Using an estimate from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, a former Planned Parenthood research arm that still receives funding from the abortion business for its abortion statistics and research, the average cost of an abortion is $468. Multiplying the number of abortions times the average cost and factoring that against the total income Planned Parenthood’s clinics derived, approximately $154 million of its $320 million in clinic (or 48 percent) income is derived from abortions.

They did, as of the 2011 report, show 46% of their funding as coming from the government though, along with the fact they spent some 56 MM on lobbying and good-will building.

Anyway, the arguement in my mind was that their rate structure for abortions looked to be cheaper than privately available because of the cost advantage government dollars provide. Silly of me: they're a non-profit and and can do them at cost or below.

That said,I'm as leery of cutting off access to health care for low-income women as the next guy but... I still wonder how many abortions they would perform if the government dollars they direct toward all the innocuous services dried up.

Probably not nearly as many, which explains why they keep their conglomerate a conglomerate.

-- Edited by catahoula on Wednesday 28th of November 2012 04:33:04 PM

I recently heard that PP is not allowed to give mammograms because of FDA rules. Can anyone verify?

Ah. Sorry bout that.

Cat:

When did I say you did? My response was to winchester, who did say something about the 8th month.

Sorry, didn't notice there were fresh posts.

Before I start, busdriver, I just want to say that I know you've said you think well of PP, for a host of good reasons, but I have a hard time admiring them. Partly for the dissembling about the money laundering (see below) but mostly because I just can't stand the shrillness of the more vocal abortion crowd and that bunch is tied up so tight with PP it's impossible for me to seperate the two. That Komen thing was instructive in so many ways, looking like the equivalent of what happens when someone tries to walk away from a mob family.

But do we actually have government funded abortions? Federally funded, or state funded? And if it is state funded, who are we to question how a state spends its money (unless it is our state).

A whole lot of the money states spend has first been collected by the feds and redistributed back with whatever strings D.C. feels froggy enough to tie to it, but... Personally, I'm for states spending whatever money they want, to fund whatever population control suits the sensibilities of the loudest, and I suppose they can. Just as long as they don't piss the feds off by doing anything the abortion lobby considers restricting access.

Money's fungible. That PP can claim they're not spending government dollars (fed, state) on abortions is irrelevant because they're simply backing out an equivalent amount of earned money they would have spent on all the other women's health services they earn money from. Sweet deal: "... here's a million for the kitty, just remember you can't pass any of those bills with the big red X on them over to the doctors doing you-know-what.. "

My problem with this isn't that I'm against it per se, but rather that I empathize for those who are. While I don't share their belief system, I can certainly see they have a point, a very good one, when they say it's being violated because they're most surely being taken along for the ride as to the funding. Fun to argue about it, too.