The United Way is one of the big supporters of Planned Parenthood (and non-supporters of the Boy Scouts). Contributing money through the United Way for any purpose helps support the United Way's other causes. There are better ways to donate money to help those involved in the recent events.

"naive" isn't in the dictionary either...wierd

Remember, it's not how much you give but just that EVERYONE PARTICIPATE.

Sound familiar, comrade?

The Peer Group Collective of the Human Resources Department strikes again.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the United Way helping to underwrite Planned Parenthood's GENEROUS offer to KILL MORE INNOCENT HUMAN LIFE FOR FREE in the wake of a measly 7,000 taken in one day.

Cheers to American charnal houses and their charitable giving.

Yes....I got out of Human Resources because I felt like I was working FOR the government (among other reasons)

I've worried about this too. I gave only to the American Red Cross. I wouldn't give a penny to the United Way anyway because of their betrayal of the Boy Scouts, but I think we can assume that a lot of the money raised is going to end up funding some pet liberal projects that have nothing to do with the victims or their families.

A woman in our group has a daughter who delivered twins last night. The twins were 2.5 months premature and will be unable to function on their own until December. All the same upon delivery they cried until their mother touched them, they were comforted & quieted down. They have perfect little hands & feet, according to grandma they have different personalities.

It's heart breaking to know of the brutal end thousands of similar children receive every week in this country.

I will never donate a penny to any organization that supports Planned Parenthood.

"naive" isn't in the dictionary either...wierd

Naive is in the dictionary....wierd isn't

Worked for a year defending the retrial of a 5 million dollar judgment for sex discrimination against a big bad oil company once.

Eye-opener, to say the least.

Gorbachev likes to call it "corporate governance" with a "great feminine soul".

I can imagine you are indeed relieved no longer to be part of the Compliance Program where it is your duty to report.

I will never donate a penny to any organization that supports Planned Parenthood.

A pity our government FORCES you to contribute to them.

Not to ever say people should trust the government. But what's outlined here lacks certain facts and is misleading (or misled) because of it. The government (and all agencies that get funded by the government, like schools and even charities that have earned federal matching) use a very bizaare and heinous method of accounting called "fund accounting". I know a lot about it because the company I work for (I'm a QA manager) does a fund accounting package.

Quick lesson on what most accountants don't want you to know: most normal people think that all accounting is the same, they are wrong. There are actually 3 methods of accounting used in America (with slight variations all over the world); there is Financial Accounting which is what most of us think of when we hear the word accounting, there is Cost Accounting which is primarily used by bad managers to make bad business descisions (Cost Accounting is not inherrently evil, but evil people really like it), and there is Fund Accounting (aka Public Sector Accounting).

Now, all the math for all the methods are pretty much the same, the difference is in how it's recorded, traced and analyzed. Fund accounting is all about dividing you "business" (all accounting talks about businesses even if it's public sector) into identifiable untils (funds) and subunits (often functions, and programs, other stuff can be applied). In essence fund accounting is just like financial accounting with a thyroid condition and executed by speed freaks. It's very minute in it's detail. Tracking money from a specific source to a specific destination is actually pretty easy (in the relative sense, nothing is really easy in fund accounting) in fund accounting. Even though all the income usually goes into and comes out of the same bank account (technically schools are supposed to use one bank account for payroll and one for everything else, what they usually do is keep nothing in the PY bank account and transfer enough money into there from the general account to cover each payroll when it's processed), because of how fund accounting works you know exactly which section of your business was the source and exactly where it went.

Yes, even if the money cycles through the general fund (there is always a general fund) it's still pretty easy to trace because you have an exact account code that was the revenue source, and part of that account code tells you where the money is intended to be expended and if the two don't match up it's really easy to spot.

Money if fungible, the author is quite correct. That fungibility is exactly why Luca Pacioli in the 15th century invented what is functionally identical to financial accounting today. Then malfeasance during the depression convinced some government officials that his invention wasn't quite good enough to catch the theives so fund accounting was born. Properly used fund accounting removes almost all fungibility from money.

Of course the most recent GAO reports (only part of the government you actually should trust) say the books are a mess. Things could be right back to square one.

I'm not saying that donations to the Sept. 11th Fund might find their way into the general fund. What I'm saying is that each dollar donated to the Sept. 11th Fund frees up a dollar from the general fund that was designated for disaster relief to be put back into the general fund.

Once that freed up dollar is back into the general fund, it can then be redesignated to go to any other organization supported by the United Way, including Planned Parenthood.

"Gorbachev likes to call it "corporate governance" with a "great feminine soul"."

What would be the practical difference between world socialism and mega-corporate capitalism? Would we get Planned Parenthood, Inc. instead of The Department of Population Control?

Maybe fungible is something like niggardly.

FROM DICTIONARY.COM:

fun·gi·ble (fnj-bl) adj. Law. Returnable or negotiable in kind or by substitution, as a quantity of grain for an equal amount of the same kind of grain. Interchangeable. n. Something that is exchangeable or substitutable. Often used in the plural. [Medieval Latin fungibilis, from Latin fung (vice), to perform (in place of).] fungi·bili·ty n.

Forget fungibility, we don't have to even get there. Let me point out the legal loophole: Uses include "longer-term needs of the victims, their families, and communities." So anything the UW interprets as supporting the "longer term needs of the communities" qualifies. They can drive a armored truck of cash through that loophole and dump it on any "community" organization they want to fund.

Given the way UW works you are absolutely correct. The big thing to keep in mind is that when UW says you can "ear mark" your donation they're (for the most part) lieing. They actually predetermine how most of their donations will be distributed. This has loosened up some since the big purge of the late 80s (when UW got in all kinds of trouble for both malfeasance and misfeasance (aka fraud and honest mistakes)) but it still happens.

In general I always recommend to people to NEVER give to UW. All of the places they send money to are valid charities so giving the donation directly to them is still a deduction. Even if you agree with all of the organizations UW feeds (I'm not sure ANYBODY agree with the ALL, but it's theoretically possible) you still shouldn't give to them because they add operating expenses that get taken off of the donations from the top. Even if, by a fluke of fate, the $100 you gave them really went to the charity you indicated at least $10 of that stays within UW for operating expenses (before the great purge only 40 cents out of every dollar given UW actually went to charity, they're percentage is up from there now). If you want Charity X to have 100 of your dollars then give them 100 of your dollars, don't give them to UW or any other "clearing house" charity. It does mean that those of us that are very charitable wind up writing more checks and your paperwork increases at tax time, but all of the money actually goes where you want it to.

I guess what I'm struggling to point out is that the fault isn't in the general fund, or even how the general fund gets used. The fault is in the overall methodology of the organization. I'm very anal about the meaning of words (that's why I'm good at my job), and "general fund" has a very specific meaning in fund accounting and the general fund has specific uses. How you're using the words is accurate outside the world of fund accounting (ie what most people think when you say "general fund"); but this is about the government and government funded charities and in that world the meaning is quite different, in this world the term would more accurately be "non-focused (or unallocated) expenditures" or something on those lines. This is important because you can (sort of) look at the books of these places, and if you do you'll find that almost every dollar that goes through does a layover in the general fund at some point, but that doesn't mean they were hiding anything, it just means it's a lot easier to know how much money you have in the bank if there's only a couple of account codes to look at. The trick is to look at where the money was before and after it hit the general fund.

If under extreme duress (been there), you might consider pledging $1, and asking to be billed on the installment plan. Naturally, these pledges are discarded, as UW knows a money-loser when it sees one.

b

bump.