Christianity could be a higher order way of organizing lives

[MadMojoMonkey]

government-funded eugenics through Planned Parenthood.

Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.
My lady does marketing for Planned Parenthood in St Louis. There are multiple business entities under the umbrella of Planned Parenthood, and the wing that does ER services (including abortions) is financially distinct from all other aspects of Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood does so much more than merely abortions. They cover all kinds of sexual health needs, including checkups and classes for men.
Who'd have thunk it.

I have a brother because my mom was considering abortion, and went to Planned Parenthood and learned about all of the support services that were available to her.

[BananaStand]

Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.

Source? I'm extremely skeptical of this. If this were actually the case, it's hard to believe that national political discourse would include a controversy over the funding of planned parenthood.

Though if this is true, PP would be extremely well-served by taking my advice and changing the name to "Uncle Sam's Vagina Wash"

[spoonitnow]

Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.
My lady does marketing for Planned Parenthood in St Louis. There are multiple business entities under the umbrella of Planned Parenthood, and the wing that does ER services (including abortions) is financially distinct from all other aspects of Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood does so much more than merely abortions. They cover all kinds of sexual health needs, including checkups and classes for men.
Who'd have thunk it.

I have a brother because my mom was considering abortion, and went to Planned Parenthood and learned about all of the support services that were available to her.

Thank you for paraphrasing all of the left's talking points on Planned Parenthood. None of them refute that Planned Parenthood is government-funded eugenics.

For clarity: I am not against Planned Parenthood or anything they do. I am against them receiving tax dollars.

Also, and I mean this genuinely and not a knock on you, but you may want to consider using a different phrasing than "my lady" since that sounds autistic as fuck, no offense. I just see you do it often, and I cringe every time. That's the type of small thing that can help you to make better impressions in work, social life, etc. and make your life go smoother.

To tie this back into Christianity, killing babies is wrong.

[wufwugy]

Exactly $0 of the government's funding for Planned Parenthood is allowed to be used for abortion services, by law.

Any government funding for PP means that some of it is probably going to abortion even if the line of sight isn't direct. This is because all spending decisions are marginal and come from the same pool of possible spending decisions. The pool of resources to cover the possible spending decisions are allocated first to the spending with the greatest marginal benefit, second to those with the second greatest marginal benefit, etc..

If PP has a budget of $10, where funding consists of $2 from government and $8 elsewhere, without restrictions, the two funding sources are essentially merged and put to pay for the $10 of services. If the budget is deconstructed to pap smears ($5) and abortions ($5) and the law says no government funding can go to abortion, PP then pays for the pap smears with the $2 from government and $3 from elsewhere, and pays for the abortions with the remaining $5 from elsewhere. As we see, a change in the law regarding allocation didn't change the funding for abortions. If, however, the government stopped funding PP altogether, PP would have only $8 and would have to cut its spending. It would do so based on the marginal assessment characterized above. Unless abortions are valued more highly than pap smears such that PP would rather lose $2 of pap smears to keep all $5 of abortions, abortions would decline.

The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.

[BananaStand]

The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.

This also creates a hole in the market. There will be a demand for subsidization of the stuff that PP does.

Charities are really good at fixing problems like this. Governments, not so much.

[spoonitnow]

This also creates a hole in the market. There will be a demand for subsidization of the stuff that PP does.

Charities are really good at fixing problems like this. Governments, not so much.

Yup.

Right, because I'm the only person who realise it's actually pretty important.

What the fuck do you mean when you say "abortion is murder"? If you're saying neither "it's immoral killing" nor "it's unlawful killing", then what are you saying? Are you all using a different meaning of the word "murder"? Perhaps it's like a bunch of fucking crows, yeah abortion is murder because it's plural.

Forigve me for not knowing what it is you're saying when you're using alternate defintions that only I seem to be unaware of.

Go play with your logs while the grown-ups are talking.

[OngBonga]

Go play with your logs while the grown-ups are talking.

Hangman time...

Phrase

---- ---

[spoonitnow]

Hangman time...

Phrase

---- ---

Q

Also, hangman is inherently racist because it's done in black ink.

[boost]

Any government funding for PP means that some of it is probably going to abortion even if the line of sight isn't direct. This is because all spending decisions are marginal and come from the same pool of possible spending decisions. The pool of resources to cover the possible spending decisions are allocated first to the spending with the greatest marginal benefit, second to those with the second greatest marginal benefit, etc..

If PP has a budget of $10, where funding consists of $2 from government and $8 elsewhere, without restrictions, the two funding sources are essentially merged and put to pay for the $10 of services. If the budget is deconstructed to pap smears ($5) and abortions ($5) and the law says no government funding can go to abortion, PP then pays for the pap smears with the $2 from government and $3 from elsewhere, and pays for the abortions with the remaining $5 from elsewhere. As we see, a change in the law regarding allocation didn't change the funding for abortions. If, however, the government stopped funding PP altogether, PP would have only $8 and would have to cut its spending. It would do so based on the marginal assessment characterized above. Unless abortions are valued more highly than pap smears such that PP would rather lose $2 of pap smears to keep all $5 of abortions, abortions would decline.

The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.

This is a simplistic way of understanding organizational structure and accounting. It can be true, but it is not necessarily so. There is legal precedent on this. Different parts of an organization can be financially segregated to a degree to which this is a non issue.

Absolute financial segregation is a myth. I don't just mean within a legally recognized corporate organization, I mean in the absolute sense. If abortion is legal, any funding given to any entity will eventually fund abortion. As illustration, take a strip mall that holds an abortion clinic as a tenant. The other tenants rents are being suppressed due to a decrease in vacancy.

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is. A woman that gets an abortion should not be eligible for public scholarships, her children should not be admitted to public school, she should not be allowed to ride public transit, etc. Do we get to apply this logic to similar cases? The government should not be funding religious institutions, therefore it follows that a priest should be shunned in the same way as the woman whose had an abortion.

Also, when does the ban from government funding happen? Does it last for a set period of time? Her whole life? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to owe the government for all of the assistance she's received so far in life which allowed her the financial flexibility to chose abortion?

[BananaStand]

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is

I don't think that's what he was doing. I interpreted his last sentence to mean that programs like medicaid should also not cover abortion.

Now I know what you're thinking.....if it doesn't cover abortions, then medicaid shouldn't cover birth control pills either. Stop thinking that.

It is simply erroneous to start drawing parallels between abortion, and anything else. For whatever reason, abortion is "the big one". It's completely appropriate to treat it as something radioactive that needs to be quarantined from every other issue.

The rest of your post seems to basically claim that maintaining a road where a clinic resides effectively equals government funding of abortion. Nonsense. You're discussing abortion as if there is a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of other shit. There isn't. There is no slope, slippery or otherwise, that connects abortion to other issues.

it stands alone. This isn't my opinion either. It's the consensus of decades of public discourse on the topic. Abortion is an issue that gets special treatment. You'll find it's a lot easier to find common ground with the other side (no matter which side you're on) if you just accept this reality.

[wufwugy]

I don't think that's what he was doing. I interpreted his last sentence to mean that programs like medicaid should also not cover abortion.

I was getting at the fact that if a person is on welfare and pays for an abortion, then iterating this scenario over time, across the population, and on average, means that a portion of taxes have probably gone to abortion because some abortions were likely had only on the margin that the person can fund her budget with welfare.

This point is true before going a step above like boost did, the infinite regression of causality, which is worth thinking about.

[boost]

I was getting at the fact that if a person is on welfare and pays for an abortion, then iterating this scenario over time, across the population, and on average, means that a portion of taxes have probably gone to abortion because some abortions were likely had only on the margin that the person can fund her budget with welfare.

This point is true before going a step above like boost did, the infinite regression of causality, which is worth thinking about.

Yeah man, I think this is where your ideology gets in the way of you discussing practical matters. It's fine that you think the government ultimately does not have a right to tax (if this is even your position.. it's hard to keep track of), but that's not what you were arguing. It wouldn't even make sense to argue the subsidising of abortions point if government is not subsidizing anything.

Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.

It's an absurd argument. You cannot find the thresholds of reason outside of a pragmatic argument, which results in "the government should not directly subsidize X"

Ideology has a way of blinding us to pragmatism.

[wufwugy]

Yeah man, I think this is where your ideology gets in the way of you discussing practical matters. It's fine that you think the government ultimately does not have a right to tax (if this is even your position.. it's hard to keep track of), but that's not what you were arguing. It wouldn't even make sense to argue the subsidising of abortions point if government is not subsidizing anything.

My ideology is what it is due to what is practical. I'm into what works.

I don't believe the government doesn't have the right to tax. I don't even know what a right is. Though I do know how the Constitution defines rights, as things that exist because of prohibition of government intervention.

Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.

It's an absurd argument.

What makes that absurd? That's what the people who wrote the 2nd Amendment intended in the first place. The concept of government assistance is new and was not something the United States Constitution included. That whole thing was about prohibition of government power. Welfarism came later and its origins are mostly outside of the US.

And yeah, gun owners shouldn't be allowed to receive welfare for the reason you described. And the same logic should be applied to everybody, which illustrates a reason why welfarism is a contradiction to constitutional principles. Though it isn't a contradiction to the socialist idea of rights. Which raises the question, which one of those actually successfully provides rights?

[wufwugy]

This is a simplistic way of understanding organizational structure and accounting. It can be true, but it is not necessarily so. There is legal precedent on this. Different parts of an organization can be financially segregated to a degree to which this is a non issue.

Absolute financial segregation is a myth. I don't just mean within a legally recognized corporate organization, I mean in the absolute sense. If abortion is legal, any funding given to any entity will eventually fund abortion. As illustration, take a strip mall that holds an abortion clinic as a tenant. The other tenants rents are being suppressed due to a decrease in vacancy.

I'm happy to see that you're thinking in conceptual terms that need to be thought in. I don't have much input on this because finding an answer is unbelievably hard. In fact I don't think there is an answer.

Where do we draw the line? I don't know, probably where people want to draw the line. The concept I laid out regarding budgeting is pretty well modeled in economics, so I think it is reasonable to say that a law that says certain fund sources can't be used for certain things doesn't change much of the funding of those certain things since moving funds around to keep things the way they have been is pretty common. Economists have tried to study this a bit with food stamps, where the models say that making it illegal for this form of welfare to be used on alcohol and cigarettes shouldn't negatively impact consumption of such since the food stamp collectors will just move their funds around, spending less cash on food than they would otherwise since they can use stamps for food, letting them consume the same amount (sometimes more) of alcohol and cigarettes. The empirical results are mixed, as they always are in economics. I don't know any models that suggest what I described wouldn't be the case.

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is.

I wouldn't say that's absurd, but more the next step in logic to be taken even though it gets into "throw your hands up in the air" territory, where solving the problem has no easy or good answers.

Cool to note about this is that this type of problem is a good reason why it is better to restrict government intervention. This is because a democratic government has a duality of responsibilities that it cannot meet. For example, you mentioned public schools. A sufficiently intervened by government education system (which we have) means that the government has the responsibility to provide that service for all citizens. Yet, it is also the case that doing that means that those who fund it (taxpayers) are coerced into paying for things they do not want. Reducing government impact into lives and increasing the freedom of choice reduces this problem because it allows people to more effectively allocate their own resources to what they believe in.

The problem never goes away in entirety though. It's sorta like one of the premises of Loki's Wager. You can't say where the neck ends and the head begins, so you can't perfectly separate them no matter what.

[wufwugy]

Where do we draw the line? I don't know, probably where people want to draw the line. The concept I laid out regarding budgeting is pretty well modeled in economics, so I think it is reasonable to say that a law that says certain fund sources can't be used for certain things doesn't change much of the funding of those certain things since moving funds around to keep things the way they have been is pretty common. Economists have tried to study this a bit with food stamps, where the models say that making it illegal for this form of welfare to be used on alcohol and cigarettes shouldn't negatively impact consumption of such since the food stamp collectors will just move their funds around, spending less cash on food than they would otherwise since they can use stamps for food, letting them consume the same amount (sometimes more) of alcohol and cigarettes. The empirical results are mixed, as they always are in economics. I don't know any models that suggest what I described wouldn't be the case.

I should correct this. The models and studies are mostly about the difference in consumption choices between using cash transfers or food stamps. The models suggest using food stamps (that can't be used on alc/cigs) instead of cash transfers (that can be used on alc/cigs) would unlikely have any impact on consumption of alc/cigs. This is because recipients of cash transfers will consume what they want evenly across their total cash, and recipients who get food stamps instead tend to move the alc/cigs consumption to their other cash and move more of their food consumption to food stamps.

[wufwugy]

I should correct this. The models and studies are mostly about the difference in consumption choices between using cash transfers or food stamps. The models suggest using food stamps (that can't be used on alc/cigs) instead of cash transfers (that can be used on alc/cigs) would unlikely have any impact on consumption of alc/cigs. This is because recipients of cash transfers will consume what they want evenly across their total cash, and recipients who get food stamps instead tend to move the alc/cigs consumption to their other cash and move more of their food consumption to food stamps.

Even as regulations get more stringent, the welfare recipients who are targeted specifically to not abuse the system tend to develop clever ways of getting around the rules. One way is trading their food stamps at a discount on the black market for alc/cigs/drugs/cash

[boost]

Even as regulations get more stringent, the welfare recipients who are targeted specifically to not abuse the system tend to develop clever ways of getting around the rules. One way is trading their food stamps at a discount on the black market for alc/cigs/drugs/cash

Not that you were accusing me of being in favor of the current welfare system, but I think intuitively it makes sense and the data is coming in in support of no strings attached welfare.