I want to believe this, and probably do believe this, but it has to be noted that this is a chart put out by Planned Parenthood. Would you believe a flattering chart about Tom Carr put out by Tom Carr? What about a chart provided by the city council showing how great the Tunnel is going to be?

It would be nice to be in a world where organizations always tell the truth about themselves. They don't. And you don't look good when you only believe the organizations you agree with.

Oh, puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze, not the wingnut denial of the facts, again, yet again?

Shooting the messenger is all they got. Messenger has bad news (for them), they say "Kill the messenger!"

Never any facts, proof or evidence of their own, always, and only, "Shoot that messenger bearing facts I'd rather not hear!"

@3 What exactly is your point?

The facts don't make any difference to them.

This is the only chart they ever see:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4109/4976…

Dan, you're just hell-bent on digging in your heels on the whole "tard" suffix issue at this point. You're mad that you can't say "retarded" anymore, and you're going to keep showing it. I love you and all, but grow up and get the fuck over it.

It’s primarily about contraception and reproductive health....

But, for many opponents, that makes it just as evil as abortion, especially when you throw in STD treatment.

Why? Because people who have sex without marriage deserve to be punished. Always. Abortion is just the illusory though convenient target of the attacks.

This might be a dumb question, but what do the numbers and percentages on this chart refer to? Total services = 11.4 million what? Services, or dollars? It is, unfortunately, undefined, and the percent of care/number of services performed is not the same issue as percent of dollars spent. You can't fight an argument about money with numbers that aren't money-based. I support Planned Parenthood (they were the one thing standing between me and both teen pregnancy and uterine cancer), but I don't want to back my argument by using a graphic that's based on the wrong type of data. Can anyone clarify?

Never mind. I looked it up on Planned Parenthood's site. This chart details the breakdown of different services provided out of the total. It certainly shows how great PP is at PREVENTING abortions. But it does not answer the "dollars" argument. Which sucks, because it means that this isn't useful ammunition in that debate.

Love it. Their side puts out charts and stats, our side puts out charts and stats. All are swallowed whole by their fans. No one asks, "Hey, were are the stats coming from?" (The trick here is to follow the chain of answers back to an Ur-source.) Generally you find that the actual stats, as they appear (if you're lucky) in an unrelated report as ancillary data, are somewhere between the colorful charts and helpful PDFs each side puts out.

Also, not to invoke Goddard's law, but PP claiming it prevents abortions is like the Nazis claiming they prevent the gassing of Jews. You know you could probably make that argument. More Jews survived the Shoa than died in it.

Nazis: Jew savers!

This is very weird. Our government once practiced Eugenics to forcibly sterilize poor folks because they were a burden on society. Now the GOP wants the poor to have lots of children and be a burden on the welfare system.

Of course one way to bring back PP and their dispensing contraceptions is to to inform these rich fat asses how minority babies will overwhelm the country without PP. That ought to scare the white folks.

Luke, I find your comparison of Planned Parenthood to the Nazis offensive and disturbing. If you don't want to invoke Godwin's Law...then don't.

Don't worry Dan. I'm sure they're aborting kids who would eventually be fat. Good news for you.

@14: LOL WAS
Seriously, your comparison makes no fucking sense. A more apt comparison would be to say that the police force reduces incarcerations through initiatives that prevent crime; even though the police lock criminals up, their presence reduces the amount of crime that takes place overall and thus reduces the need for incarceration.
Anti-police shitstorm in 3...2...1...

@5: Really? Let's see who's suckling at the taxpayer teat again.
Planned Parenthood: ~$350 million/year
Richest 5% of Americans, from Bush tax cuts: ~$100,000 million/year
PULL YOUR OWN WEIGHT, FAT CAT RICH BOYS.

Again with Wingnut (Anti-)Logic: "You pull out your charts and we could pull out ours."

Except they never have charts, a link to facts, nope, never, never, never. They got 'nuthin.

And then there are Wingnut Analogies: which also never work within rational logic. Nazis, that's all they got. "Well, I pulled Nazis out of my ass, and that's that."

They're never able to make any sort of rational argument: lies, yes. Catch phrases, sure. Inane talking points, they've memorized.

But rational arguments, facts: nope, never.

11.4 million is the total number of services provided by PPFA afiliates across the nation, not a dollar amount. As Klein's article makes perfectly clear, as the context of the original chart makes clear. Every time someone comes to a clinic, or a rep goes to a school or organization and gives a presentation about birth control, STI prevention, that is a service. They have to count these by law and they have to be audited annually. These audits are extremely strict.

It's really not that complicated, people.

@Everyone The point of the analogy was to show how stupid it was, not that I actually think Nazis saved Jews.

(A bell tolls from a church on a distant hill, marking the passing, from this discussion, of rationality.)

The police prevent incarceration??! When liberals are willing to do the mental contortions needed to justify the police, you know something's gone wrong.

Why can we all just admit that some people think abortion is wrong and they don't want to pay for it with taxes? What is so difficult about that? If what liberals are actually worried about is all the other services PP provides, then get an independent auditor (from Mars, perhaps) to find out exactly how much of PP's budget goes to abortions, and cut govt funding by that percentage.

All the liberals who are so desperate for poor women to get funded abortions can set up a charity. Like those charities that advertise in the New Yorker, with pictures of kids with hairlips. We could have pictures of the women who need abortions, and how much it will cost to "help just one woman."

Why the fuck not? If y'all are so intent on paying for other people's abortions, man up and do it yourselves!

@23: "mental contortions needed to justify the police"
Anarchistfag detected.

@23

You blaming anybody else for this not being a rational discussion anymore would be like Hitler blaming the Jews for walking into the showers.

@23 You said: Why can we all just admit that some people think abortion is wrong and they don't want to pay for it with taxes? What is so difficult about that?

A: Tax money *doesn't* go for abortion. The Hyde Amendment prohibits that.
B: I'll admit the Hyde Amendment is acceptable when they pass amendments disallowing the government from spending tax money enforcing marijuana prohibition and funding wars.

Here we go again: wingnuts who never have a link to evidence supporting their statements, disappear after their lone "fact" is proved to be a lie.

Poof! Instead of proof.

So my tax dollars should pay for lower class individuals to have contraception provided for them? I'm sure most liberals think I'm a retard for my political views and don't want me reproducing, so why can't I get free condoms too?

Not to be as obnoxious as someone boasting about bringing fire to the Earth or dividing families, but I can't understand what Nazis have to do with Goddard's Law ('As a thread in an internet forum grows longer, the probabilty of the invocation of the notional superiority of liquid-fuelled rocketry tends to 1.')

@29:
>implying you can't get free condoms at a sexual health center

SLOG mods, please consider adding some code to make text following a '>' green-colored. Sarcasm just doesn't have the same ring when it's not in greentext.

@29 Why can't you get free condoms? Do you not know where your planned parenthood office is?

Again the wingnuts with no links to any evidence whatsoever of the wild ass claims from some idiot, that they repeat, endlessly.

But told we're supposed to look up their paranoia dreams for 'em.

What they can never explain is why when the rich paid their fair share of taxes (when Democrats were in office, for instance) we had booming economies.

The 1950s after decades of Democratic governing -- booming economy -- tax rate on the rich was something like 90%, and I'll bet corporations even paid their fair share, and union participation was high, back in those glory days conservatives claim they want to return to.

1960s -- boom economies -- rich still taxed, corporations paying taxes, unions still strong.

The 1970s -- ah, I remember the Ford recession, just as there have been recessions (or Great Depressions) after the Republicans have been in office for any length of time and allowed the looting of the Treasury by the very, very rich.

Reagan set on breaking the unions, the rich get tax breaks upon breaks, corporations wiggle out of any taxes at all, and we get a major Recession, of course. Bush One has the nerve to raise taxes to try to pay for the deficits under Reagan and the Republican base stays home at the next election.

During the Republican regimes taxes for the rich have been cut down to 35%, but Clinton still manages, as Democrats must, to pull the country out of the lastest Republican caused recession.

Bush Two steals an election and he and the Republican Congress go wild and deregulate banks, the stock market, give the rich and corporations such back-breaking tax cuts that the middle-class pays more by percentage, but not enough to pay for the start of two wars and the tax cuts for the rich, and voila! Another Republican Depression.

Democrats get two years to try to clean up the mess, with the Republicans in Congress obstructing as much as possible, jobs begin to come back and voila, a Republican House!

Intent on repeating the very policies that broke the world-wide economy (except for Socialist countries like Germany and Australia, gee how did that happen?)

Odd how the U.S. is plunged into Great Depression (1930s and now) and Recessions, after Republicans have been in control of government for any length of time.

Funny how that works out.

@34: Hey, how about GE's taxes, huh?
I know that feel, bro.

GE paid no taxes. Google pays about 2% in taxes. The small, local business I used to work for (in Oregon) paid just under half of their income after expenses in taxes. It's the mega-corporations that are exempt from rules that 99% of us have to abide by.
The United States accounts for almost 50 percent of the world’s total military spending; yet our share of the world’s GDP is less than 25 percent. This official budget does not take into account money secretly allocated to the “black budgets” of the Pentagon, CIA and other clandestine operations. Neither the democrats, or republicans really seem to want to talk about this when they pander to their bases.

Both charts could easily be right.

A doctor performing an abortion is expensive. STD tests are cheaper but still kind of expensive. Condoms are dirt, dirt cheap.

Therefore, the "percentage of the PP budget spent on abortion" could be astoundingly high, even if PP only performs a handful of abortions.

But still. This is an absurdity. Just make an easy comparison between the total budget and the amount that planned parenthood gets. It would be like throwing a huge hissy fit about your personal finances because your SO went out and bought a single, solitary chocolate bar last year, and you're diametrically opposed to chocolate. It's not about the money.

You don't start cutting fat from the *bottom* of your budget. You start cutting fat from the big expenses. Even small percentages will make a huge difference there. Certainly boatloads more than PP.

@44: Sure, there are plenty of people who pay no federal income tax, due to tax credits that offset their obligations. However, those people DO pay taxes; let me know if you figure out how that can possibly be true.
Now, I can understand if Joe Blow the minimum wage earner doesn't pay any federal income tax. But General Electric, the second largest corporation on the planet?
That feel, bro...do you know it?

@46: How about GE? Is General Electric crescent fresh?

Wingnuts with the talking points they've been given on taxes can never explain how raising taxes for the wealthy under Clinton produced a booming economy and a budget surplus (and the reverse produced our current recession/depression):

"Most of all, Clinton thwarted the biggest announced goal of the Republicans -- cutting into the growing surplus with a flurry of tax cuts. Just three weeks later, voters went to the polls and handed Republicans one of the worst losses for a party not occupying the White House.

The result was that 1999 brought a new record surplus, and in the fall of 1999, Clinton was ready to negotiate again. Though not with Newt Gingrich. Newster had failed to deliver at both the negotiating table and the voting booth, and his party was done with him by then. For the 2000 budget, Clinton again fended off attempts to drain the surplus through tax cuts. The result was the largest surplus in history, and the first time the federal government had posted three consecutive years of surplus since the 1940s.

What made these budget surpluses possible was not something that happened in 1998 or 1999, it was something that happened in Clinton's first year in office. In 1992, the last year before Clinton took office, the deficit grew significantly. In 1993, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act took action against the deficit in a way that proved directly and immediately effective: it raised taxes, and it raised them most for the rich. Those earning around half a million a year saw their taxes jump from 29% to 36%. Those at the very top were hit with a surtax that set an effective tax rate of just under 40%. The bill also removed the cap on Medicare taxes. It set that much despised 35% corporate tax rate. It even included a 4 cent per gallon gas tax.

What was the economy crushing, job destroying effect of all this? Not only did the government immediately begin to pull in additional revenue and cut into the deficit, but the economy grew as well. In 1992, with taxes low, the US hit a 15 year high in unemployment at 7.6%. At the end of 1993, following the tax increases, unemployment had dropped by half a percent. It kept dropping. It was down again in 1995, and 1996, and 1997, and 1998. By 2000, the unemployment rate had settled around 4% for three solid years. A figure sometimes referred to as "full employment."

This long surge of growth, prosperity, and surplus would not end until George W. Bush became president and shepherded through the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. This act cut taxes, with by far the largest benefit going to those at the top. The highest bracket was reduced to 35%, capital gains taxes dropped to 8%, the size of untaxed estates was sharply increased. US industry responded almost immediately... by cutting jobs, moving more work overseas, and channeling more funds to those at the top. In the next four months, before the 9/11 attacks, unemployment spiked. At the same time, the budget surplus evaporated.

In just over one year, the Bush tax cuts converted the largest surplus ever into a growing deficit, and while deregulation of fiscal markets did help to create a revenue boost after 2004, that boost never brought the budget close to balance. Eventually any gains created were more than erased by the destabilization of the economy.

The result of the Bush years was that by 2008 the US was facing growing deficits at the same time there seemed little choice but to pony up trillions to save the financial institutions and try to keep what remained of the economy breathing. As a result, about a third of 2009 and 2010 budget deficits were directly due to efforts to salve the hideous results of deregulation and "creative" finance. But that's no longer true. The amount of stimulus and bailout money going into the federal budget has dropped precipitously, and will keep dropping.

The difference between the surplus years of 1997-2000 and the current deficit comes down to three things: the soaring defense budget driven largely by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing giveaway to the rich written into the Bush tax cuts, and the decline in revenues directly related to the economic downturn."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/10…

Repeal of glass steagall: under Clinton; NAFTA and GATT free trade agreements: under Clinton; Opening up trade relations with China; under Clinton. Bill Clinton had the luxury of escaping office before multiple bubbles his administration helped create collapsed. Does that mean that the Bush presidency was good? No!
US debt is about to surpass our GDP. The Fed predicts we will hit the debt ceiling in May. The debt accrued in just the two years after the crash in 2008 was more than the entire sovereign debt in the previous history of the United States combined. After years of stonewalling the Fed finally announced where at least some of the trillions of bailout dollars went after the crash: Foreign banks. Your tax dollars are guaranteeing bad loans made to off-shore banks, with money printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and all backed by our labor.
http://www.allgov.com//ViewNews/Federal_…

@3: Abortion provision is neither flattering nor unflattering, as PP doesn't adopt the stance that abortion is wrong/bad. They have no motivation to lie or misrepresent the numbers, because the fundies will hate them even if they stop providing abortions entirely (the fundies are just anti-sex and anti-woman generally). As the article says, PP prevents abortions; this has nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with trying to shut down an organization that helps women make decisions about their own bodies instead of letting their fathers/boyfriends/husbands/rapists/etc. make those decisions.

gnot: Facts can lie when they contradict Truth. Examples: the fossil record, the efficacy of some pot in treating some ailments, the teeny amount spent for foreign aid, the efficiency of Medicare in dealing with a difficult insurance pool, and now your data on per-capita Planned Parenthood expenditure.

They are Lying Facts, as they lead to Wrong Conclusions.

My comments regarding conservatives wanting to cut funding to Planned Parenthood:
(1) "Red" states have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and divorce, as well as buy the most online porn. Sort of summed up by Bristol Palin's experience.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr52…
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/opinio…

It's not evangelical christianity that is responsible for this correlation, but socioeconomic status.
http://tinyurl.com/3rz7cxf

(2) Red states are subsidized by the taxes of those in the blue states--the ones the red states like to complain "don't pull their own weight." I.e., states that tend to support Republican presidential candidates (red states) also tend to receive more from the federal government than they send in taxes. Thus red states are welfare states."
http://www.inlander.com/spokane/article-…
http://americanreality.wordpress.com/200…

Conservatives should be more than happy to fund Planned Parenthood in my opinion.

The people bitching (falsely) about "having to pay for abortions" through their tax money need to shut the fuck up. What makes you so special that only your concerns get to be addressed one by one? Since when does the government take an opinion poll on where people want their taxes spent? I never supported this war-- which today is widely regarded to have been unnecessary and which has cost a hell of a lot more than Planned Parenthood will ever see-- and no one asked me if I wanted to express my opposition by diverting my taxes somewhere else. The Hyde Amendment prevents any government money from being spent on a legal medical procedure-- abortion. As far as I am concerned, until that day comes when everyone gets to pick and choose where their taxes are spent, you should have to pay for abortions, like it or not, and get over yourselves. I'm not interested in your self-indulgent moral outrage.

PP helped me. I had no insurance and I got birth control pills, mammograms and pap smears. I believe in PP.