You are most certainly welcome. Thank you for your support.

- Ben

 

This highlights a couple of aspects of the conservative platform that don't stand up to rational scrutiny.

How is it smaller government when you want the Feds telling a single mother she has no choice but to carry the fetus inside her to full term? If that is not governmental intrusion into our private lives, then nothing is. Personally, I favor individual responsibility over abortion but I am not in favor of the government mandating what goes on inside a womans body.

Also, conservatives want to reduce welfare costs but most welfare goes to support children of single mothers who can't work because they had a baby. When the government makes it a crime to have an abortion there will be more unwanted children with mothers unable to leave their child unattended to go to work and without fathers. This will leave more children without any means of support. Statistics show that crime will go up 18 years after abortion is made a crime. That's because there are more unwanted children and unwanted children tend to turn into unwanted adults who turn to crime as a lifestyle. The delayed effects of making abortion illegal are cities that are less safe and a huge expense on our courts and prisons.

Conservatives want a smaller government but they always want to spend billions to carry out wars in far away lands because it's Islam vs. Christianity. How can you raise military pay and increase veteran's benefits without making government bigger and more expensive? I am actually in favor of raising military pay and veterans benefits but this does not help conservatives achieve smaller government.

The answer is not as simple as the conservatives make it sound. The biggest problem with conservative thought is it is overly simplistic.

 

Then you want to get rid of yourself - you are the one who said:

"3. deport liberals. issue hunting licenses for the ones that stay. They are wellsprings of traitorous, willful ignorance destroying our country."

Liberal thought and speech is protected by the Constitution. If you can't see that you don't understand the meaning of the Constitution.

You only THINK you are a good American.

 

Every great society has crumbled from the inside out! I am afraid the Us is going to do the same thing. I was watching a movie about Naomi Wolf and her ten steps to a closed society... and that was some realy scary stuff. Hittler had the brown shirts, the Italians had the black shirts, now we have black water? They were down in new orleans "protecting" them ... from what?
We have to stand back and say WTF is this government standing for? What are they looking to protect? They allow water boarding, secret prisons, and now the gov can even open our mail and listen to our phone calls. . . JESUS! how is this not early 1930s germany?

 

Real, why would we have to grow Government if we increase military pay? Even if they took on a few more people to actually do the work, lets take back the $50 million of pork that was given to the National Endowment for the Arts in the stimulus and use it to partially fund a pay increase. F the NEA. What the heck do they do anyway? Obviously nothing important.
Obama announced a 1.4% pay raise for all active military for the next 3 or 4 years. Thats pathetic.

I am a Methodist and I believe in personal responsibility. What motivation would there be for a young girl to stop having kids knowing that everyone else will pay for them? We cut off funding and dont allow abortions.
This tells a young girl 'you get knocked up, you're going to claim your responsibility and we will provide minimal help' ; not 'oh sure go ahead and screw like bunny rabbits, Green98 who works hard every day for an American steel company will float the bill.'

Our country is too quickly becoming 1 side paying for the other side. Yes its always been that way, but the wrong side is growing and Obama is simply allowing it. Real, your solution of passing out condoms to middle school kids, allowing high-school age girls to know that the Govt will take care of their child, is enablling. Your way is opening the door for people to screw like rabbits, collect unemployment, and tax the hard working Americans even more. What kind of sense does that make? It works in the exact opposite direction of how our country got to be what it is.

Real, I feel sorry for you, you're got blinders on and you're drunk from the liberal kool-aid. You obviously have never been in the real world much; I take you for some academic, elitist-style thinking. Theroy hardly ever works in reality. Get a clue.

 

Why is it murder only after the baby is outside the body?
Should the government mandate that as well?


Nothing like more made up statistics.
So according to the moron that made these up, unwanted children turn in to criminals at their 18th birthday? In my experience they start a lot younger.
Thanks.

 

There's a lot of slippery slopes in here. Remember, slippery slopes are the weakest argument strategy out there.

 

When the fetus is not longer connected to the mother's blood supply and is breathing on it's own, it is "born" and becomes a baby. The government should not interfere inside a womans body. When the baby is born it has rights of citizenship and protection under the Constitution. The U.S. inherited a lot from English Common Law and a fertilized egg had no Constitutional rights when the Constitution was written and that's the way it should remain.

And just to be crystal clear, I believe abortion is morally wrong but that the power belongs to the people and the government should stay out of the way. The Constitution was not intended to apply to the unborn fetus and did not intend to regulate what went on inside citizens bodies.

True, many criminals do start younger. The reason it takes 18 years is because there is naturally a time lag between the time abortion becomes illegal and there are enough unwanted children to start impacting the crime statistics in a statistically significant way.

And the statistics are not made up, they are the result of years of work by serious statisticians and sociologists whose primary interest was drawing valid conclusions from the data. They were not abortion rights activists or abortion foes. They were sociologists who were well versed in how to implement proper statistical controls and cross-check for validity.

I do understand how statistics can be misused to say whatever you want but I am confident that was not the case here. And, it makes sense, more unwanted children = more crime down the road.

 

Purely an opinion.

Please post a link to the "not made up statistics" and studies. Thanks.

 

$50 million might sound like a lot to you but if that money was applied to military pay raises instead, it would not have been enough to go from a 1.4% raise to 1.5%. It's a drop in the bucket.

You complain about the measly military pay Obama approved but if instead he offered a 10% pay increase the very same people would be screaming that he's spending like a drunken sailor!

That may be how YOU would do it if you wanted to run our country as if it were your personal household and you were the head of the household but I do not think that is a good way to run a great nation. That's the kind of moronic conservative thought that is overly simplistic and moralistic - it sounds good on the surface but in actual practice it does not work and the results are often disasterous.

This shows how little you know.

I am a retired Alaskan commercial fisherman and construction and oil-refinery worker and have run my own business and been very successful with my personal investing. If 'elitist' is supposed to be something negative, there is nothing 'elitist' about me (although I do strive to be the best person I can be). Isn't that what 'elite' is all about? Somehow conservatives have taken this noble word and turned it into something dirty. I believe it's because they don't like people who can play chess with awareness three or four moves deep.

 

Here is one of the more rigorous peer-reviewed studies on the subject:

http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf

There are others that reach similar conclusions from the data.

 

Did you actually read that?
I do not think so.

It was written to debunk a previous paper and basically concluded that "we find
no compelling evidence that abortion has a selection effect on crime."

 

I think where you use "conservatives" should be replaced with republicans. True conservatives have as many conflicts with republican's as democrats IMO.

Holy crap we agree on something! I don't approve of abortion, but I don't think the federal government has any right to be messing with it.

This is a touchy subject...but we need to get the American people to understand, if you can't support a baby, don't have one! There doesn't need to be government money handed out for popping out babies. Same for tax right off's for having some. If you can't afford them, don't have any. Eventually the American People will get the idea.

I too don't understand this BS about "helping" other nations... Let them ***holes blow each other up.. Spend the money protecting the United states, not relationships. Half these countries that are fighting one another will continue fighting one another whether we are there or not.

I'm also all for increase military pay... They are way way underpaid.

If "conservatives" aka Republicans would actually practice what they preach a lot of problems would be solved. Unfortunately they are just as bad as Democrats..

I'm for a much smaller federal government. MUCH bigger state government. Let the federal government be there to serve the states, and the states serve the people.

If a state want to ban guns, have gay marriage, have socialized health care, have abortion clinics on every corner with Mary Jane vending machines. Let it. If the people don't like it they can move to another state.

If a state wants full auto, man/woman marriage, privatized health care, anti-abortion, and no drugs what so ever legal then let it. If the people don't like it they can move to another state.

Somewhere, out of 50, there is bound to be a state that someone will like.

80% of the problem solved right there...

 

You're right, I copied the wrong link. This is to the study published in "The Quarterly Journal of Economics":

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=174508

The abstract reads "We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

And here is further data refuting the paper that I linked to and that was critical of the original study:

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...tReply2004.pdf

In the end you will believe what you want to believe but, in my mind, there is little doubt that restricting access to abortion has the undesireable effect of increasing the number of unwanted children and thus crime in later years.

It would be nice if we could wave our magic wands and eliminate unwanted pregnacies before they happened but I do not think it's realistic because sex is such a strong drive and young people often have little self-restraint. The best we can do is provide meaningful sex education and have parents encourage their children to be responsible. Many conservatives want to restrict information about birth control (favoring abstinance only education) and that has disasterous consequences.

I am not in favor of handing out condoms to minors but I am in favor of very clear and science based sex education so kids will know exactly what to expect if they don't protect themselves from disease and pregnancy. This can be accomplished two ways, abstinance or with condoms. Abstinance only education does not work at all. Children who are exposed to abstinance only education have unwanted pregnancies at much higher rates than those exposed to complete, science based sex education.

 

First of all, I'm glad we finally agree on a number of important points - you are obviously not the typical shallow-thinking, knee-jerk republican conservative that are so common these days.

While it's true that there are a number of bad-apple Democrats I do not see that it is as endemic as it is within the Republican party. So we will just have to disagree that the R's are "just as bad" as the D's. What bothers me most about so many of the R's is that they are often so hypocritical. The same Republicans running on a platform of family loyalty, church and morality are the same ones that are hooking up with gay prostitutes and drug dealers or jetting around the world to boink their mistress's. Yes, Democrates have been caught too but it's so much more hypocritical when you preach family, god and pro-life. And the Republicans seem to have a real penchant for gay prostitutes and young page boys. Sickening really. But neither side is blameless.

I don't have any real issue with that if it would work and if it actually solved anything but I'm not convinced of either.