If Ignorance Were Indeed Bliss - The Republican Party is Full of Blissful Sons of Bitches These Days . . .

Sigh . . . The Gadfly is despondent at having to share with you, dear readers, yet another peer-reviewed study demonstrating exactly how expensively and dangerously out of touch with reality the know-nothing conservative right is in this country:

Publicly funded family planning services, the kind currently being gutted by state lawmakers across the country, saved the government $10.5 billion and helped women prevent 2.2 million unplanned pregnancies and 760,000 abortions in 2010, according to a new study released by the Guttmacher Institute.

To break it down even further, taxpayers saved $5.68 for every dollar the government spent on contraceptive services that year.

Health centers that received some funding through the federal Title X program, which Republicans have also been working diligently to axe in the name of austerity, served 4.7 million women in 2010, helping to prevent 1.2 million unintended pregnancies, which would have resulted in an estimated 590,000 unplanned births and 400,000 abortions.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/family_planning_services_saved_the_u_s_10_5_billion_prevented_760000_abortions_in_2010/


Read it a few more times if you need to - the easier that you may wrap your head around the cost savings numbers and societal benefits that are to be had by having a robust and publicly funded family planning infrastructure in place in America.

It is just one more glaring example of how the right wingers are so woefully and infuriatingly fucking uninformed on issues such as this one, that they do not even realize that their own dogmatic policy positions are entirely at odds with the known and provable truth, and by virtue of such, producing results 180 degrees the opposite of what they claim to want to accomplish with those policies.

The right claims that they are rabidly slashing public funding for family planning services because their morals dictate to them that abortion is evil and that family planning services are a waste of taxpayer dollars.  Yet here is a well documented study which concludes that, at the federal and state dollar level, in ONE YEAR ALONE (2010), these same planning services saved the government (we the taxpayers) $10.5 BILLION, prevented more than two million unplanned births and nearly three fourths of a million abortions.

Another way of stating it is that the entirely wrongheaded policies of the GOTP (Grand Old Tea Party) are directly responsible for more money being removed from taxpayer pockets - and even more destructive than that - millions of additional unplanned pregnancies and the inevitable abortions pursuant to such pregnancies.

And thus The Gadfly's despondency -- for The Gadfly knows that it has become a fruitless endeavor trying to speak even a measured level of sense and rationality to the modern day GOP, and specifically the Teahadists who now pretty much control the party.  They are so intent on thwarting the Muslim Kenyan in any way, shape or form, that they are more than willing to cut off their own noses to spite the rest of America's face.


----TFG