Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 02:46 pm
Senate Republicans are set to vote to defund Planned Parenthood Thursday afternoon, which is going to increase government spending by $130 million.
Even after Republicans tried to make the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) scoring process partisan to favor their inaccurate claims, that body has determined that yet another Big Republican Idea is going to cost $130 million over ten years. Yes, that is the cost of permanently defunding Planned Parenthood for something they didn’t do.
Here’s the tricky part. The CBO determined that defunding Planned Parenthood would reduce spending by $520 million in ten years. Wow, right? So fiscally conservative! This is the number you will probably be hearing a lot from Republicans.
But wait.
Defunding Planned Parenthood would also increase spending by $650 million over ten years.
Now, if you are doing Republican math, that might look good but it is actually a $130 million increase in government spending.
Netting those costs against the savings estimated above, CBO estimates that implementing the bill would increase direct spending by $130 million over the 2016-2025 period,” they wrote in their letter to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
Defunding Planned Parenthood is the new Benghazi for Republicans. They created a false flag using edited videos that don’t actually, even with the edits, provide evidence of their accusations. But facts are not friends when you’re trying to whip up votes from the people you are stealing from, so it is incumbent upon Republicans to stir emotion, hence their attacks on Planned Parenthood, which they somehow lump in under a fake moral high ground of being against abortion.
But of course, Planned Parenthood reduces abortions more than any Republican idea yet, because access to affordable birth control and family planning is what in fact reduces the need for abortions. Even if we didn’t have statistics to prove this, it should be self-evident through logic.
So Republicans are planning to increase government spending in order to drive home a lie built on fabricated non-evidence, and in what can only be a two-punch to their stated agenda, their actions will also result in more abortions.
The CBO points out that the Republican plan would cause more unplanned births, and Medicaid would have to pay for some of those births. Then some of the children born would be on government programs, and so on.
All of this over an entirely fictional claim. This is a good time to remind everyone, because Republicans like to move the goal posts so much that it’s easy to forget, the government doesn’t fund abortions. We do not give federal funds to Planned Parenthood to give abortions because there is a law prohibiting federal funding for abortions. We give money to Planned Parenthood to do things like cancer screenings and birth control.
The CBO made this clear in their letter:
In 2013, Planned Parenthood received approximately $60 million under Title X. Services funded by Title X include contraceptive education and counseling; pregnancy diagnosis and counseling; cervical and breast cancer screening; and education, testing, and referral services associated with sexually transmitted diseases. CBO estimates that the bill would not affect spending subject to appropriations because any discretionary grants, such as those made under Title X, that might otherwise have gone to Planned Parenthood would be awarded to other health clinics or medical practitioners.
Republicans: Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to drive up the abortion rate. That’s a tag line for an election if ever I heard one.
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