In my city, having one kid in day care 40 hours a week costs about what you make working 40 hours at minimum wage. The ability to control when you reproduce is absolutely basic to the ability to support yourself if you are a low income woman and that is what PP does. The idea of cutting 33% of its funding (and therefore 33% of its services) as some kind of lesson about self-reliance is just perverse in light of what PP really does for women.

And about the cost of pap smears: the numbers cited in this thread are assuming that the test comes back normal and no further action is required. Too bad a lot of people get an abnormal result and have to go for further testing and maybe future treatment for a condition, up to and including cancer. Don’t think that just cause somebody can scrape together 200 bucks for a pap that they are in the clear until next year. If that were the case, paps wouldn’t even be necessary because we would be living in a magic land where nobody ever had a medical problem.

I’ve got to admit, I roll my eyes whenever someone identifies her- or himself as a libertarian, because they’re inevitably going to trot out the same ideologically driven drivel. Ditto for fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, or any combination thereof.

I brought up taxpayer $$$ funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because libertarians and ‘fiscal conservatives’ seem to spend a great deal of time whining about social services and generally express very little concern about the billions of dollars of taxpayer money being spent on wars, paying Blackwater mercenaries, and on and on. Ditto Christian fundamentalists who rabidly support any and all wars, but insist they’re oh so pro-life because of their great concern with fetuses.

As for your Evangelical uncle — well, unless he gets off on women dying from undetected, untreated cervical cancer and STIs, he can suck it up and accept that an incredibly miniscule proportion of his tax dollars are going to fund an organisation that performs a procedure he doesn’t happen to like. He can also accept that his taxes aren’t funding that particular procedure, but potentially life saving functions like cervical cancer exams and STI treatment (and so on) and contraception, which will reduce abortions. If he’s truly pro-life rather than just a hypocritical, misogynistic ideologue, he’ll learn to appreciate the activities of PP, because they’re doing more to save lives and reduce unwanted pregnancies (thus abortions) than he’s doing by whining.

Sorry to get angry, but damnit, libertarians and conservatives piss me off.

Essentially, I think the issue is this–just because the liberal stance is to socialize does not mean the liberal stance is leave the bureaucratic structure the way it is. Period. To say ‘well, fine, we just have to fund all of this privately, screw the government’ is, frankly, throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to eventually having a productive system. You can’t rework things by not funding them. It’s an empty threat, it gets things absolutely nowhere.

Believe me, I have little interest in throwing money at the gov’t wall and seeing if it sticks. The liberal ideal is to change the system, not just insist on current status quo practices. To say that it is would be working from false premises.

The main point is that we can avoid creating more problems and a whole lot of grief by not having to fight each other over the Federal Budget. If you put the money back in the hands of individuals, or even local governments like school boards and city councils, you will avoid a harm.

There will always be fighting about budget priorities, and neglecting important issues like healthcare in order to avoid conflict is pretty stupid. (And yes, school boards and local councils fight over things too.)

If you reduce the importance of the federal government another Republican take over will hurt a lot less.

I’m not sure whether I find this argument disingenuous or pointless.
–Under Bush, the federal government expanded. This after Clinton tried to contract it. Precedent isn’t always important.
–A strong Democratic federal government can neutralize Republicans at the state level.
–It would seem that the ideal would be to oppose the hypothetical Republican’s positions when he comes to power, rather than refrain from doing good out of fear that the system will be abused in future.

My position isn’t that ‘private money will solve everything.’ I don’t think we have the capacity as a species to “solve everyones problems.” The main point is that we can avoid creating more problems and a whole lot of grief by not having to fight each other over the Federal Budget. If you put the money back in the hands of individuals, or even local governments like school boards and city councils, you will avoid a harm. Hell, you’ll avoid the irritating arguments with libertarian kids from NYU over PP. Bush has done more to help me convince liberals that this position is the correct one by spending all their tax dollars on shit that they hate. Now Obama is going to help convince Social Conservatives of the same thing. You wonder why a Presidential election costs a billion? Because whoever gets power gets Treasury; and half the country gets livid. Just don’t forget what it felt like when Bush won his second term in the wake happy times being here again for the left. If you reduce the importance of the federal government another Republican take over will hurt a lot less.

If you had read the rest of the thread you would have seen that I, in fact, don’t want you to have to pay for abstinence only education, war or anti gay charities. My whole point is that the way you feel about your tax dollars going to that shit is the same as some feel about their tax money going to PP. I’m taking the middle position and saying you are both right. Bush and the evangelicals are wrong for making you do that just as the liberals and PP are wrong for making others pay for their stuff. Get it? … you’re both doing the same thing to each other.

And your solution? Since we don’t have a system that would let taxpayers opt out of paying for things they don’t support, why not protect everyone’s conscience equally?

Why is poverty such a problem? Isn’t this question more damning of your position?

Except our position isn’t “public money will solve everything,” whereas your position is “private money will solve everything.”

If you had read the rest of the thread you would have seen that I, in fact, don’t want you to have to pay for abstinence only education, war or anti gay charities. My whole point is that the way you feel about your tax dollars going to that shit is the same as some feel about their tax money going to PP. I’m taking the middle position and saying you are both right. Bush and the evangelicals are wrong for making you do that just as the liberals and PP are wrong for making others pay for their stuff. Get it? … you’re both doing the same thing to each other.

Why is poverty such a problem? Isn’t this question more damning of your position? Given the expenditures of the federal government on Medicaid, SS, and other humanitarian ventures … why is poverty still a problem? Why are the D.C. schools fucking worthless when they are the most well funded in the nation (the Feds spend millions on them and they still fail). I don’t know.

You don’t want to talk about privatization and Katrina. You know who took a leadership role in keeping some of those poor people from total devastation, in its laudable but still inadequate way? Your friends, the Red Cross. You know why? Because the government refused to do its job–had a prior policy of dismantling the structures that enabled it to do its job. Was it more moral to refuse to force taxpayers to support the infrastructure that helps mitigate disasters, or mobilizes relief efforts on a national scale? Lotta controversy over the right to life of destitute elderly black people in Plaquemines and Lafourche, IIRC. Katrina wasn’t a massive, massively-funded bureaucracy that refused to step up. It was a spavined, massively-defunded bureaucracy that couldn’t.

Same with HUD. You’re not looking at an efficiency shortfall; you’re looking at a categorical difference in need and needs met. Charities, by your own logic, operate independent of fiat and pipeline. They also predate social welfare. If they were a solution to the scale problems state welfare has to solve, state welfare would be neither necessary nor competitive. The charity model would win. In other words, HUD doesn’t exist because HfH isn’t allowed to pick up the slack. It exists because HfH can’t. HfH builds better homes; it builds fewer homes; it houses fewer people.

And now one of those private organizations is insisting–correctly–that its capacity is enhanced by government funding, and that private status will keep it puny and default women into want. You insist that they can do the big job with none of the cooperative obligation that defines collective providence: they have to serve everyone and please everyone at the same time. Their current problem argues against your rule: their public worth can prevail over controversy and draw down public help, or they can make massive cutbacks in their portion of the public good.

And polio? (and smallpox, and influenza, and syphilis, and pellagra, and TB, and cholera….) (And even Nazis?) Yeah, the government never does anything but waste our damn money. Toddlers didn’t stop nursing cholera out of contaminated watered beer because of a magical increase in the profit margin of clean water for slums (or real milk for broke babies).

We all got better because we stopped telling their mothers to look out for themselves and started letting our elected officials dun us to save lives. It was maybe easier to be good back when your housemaid could cough a little premature death into your sheets, too. It wasn’t like now, when poverty-related lack of healthcare poses no general risk wrt infectious disease *blood-spattered cough* tuberculosis *blood-spattered cough*. Public health has never been a shining star in the private-sector crown.

You don’t have to get rich, just enough money to pay for your own basic needs. Also, there are millions of people in this world who will help anyone who hits dire straights without having the government force them to do it. So no one will starve or miss a pap smear. Let me make clear that I don’t want to just say fuck everyone else, live and let die. I just think helping people would be more efficient if the government got out of the way. Example being PP … they get tons of private donations. Also, when you give your money to the government they might spend it on … wait for it … some fucking middle eastern war nobody wants.

There are several things wrong with this block of text.
1. Basic needs…like housing, food, transportation, and healthcare? I’m not sure what basic need you would cut out, given what other commenters have demonstrated.

2. I doubt you’re seriously suggesting tax evasion on account of the war. We don’t pay taxes because they might support PP patients rather than Blackwater CEOs, we pay them because it is the law.

3. If private charities and individuals so reliably help the poor, why the fuck is poverty still a problem?

I’m not against PP. It’s a great privately funded organization. But I’m not going to make my evangelical uncle support it through his labors.

Yet you’d still like to make us support abstinence-only education or CPCs or anti-gay charities or yes, war?

The reason people were miserable way back when (I’m not sure this is correct, modern people are more unhappy even with all the pap smears they can handle) is because of shit like polio and Nazis.

…wtf.

PS: I think from Capella describes most effed-up fundie fetus fanatics well.