Pelosi: Free Condoms And Food Stamps Better For Economy Than Tax Cuts
STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard from Congressman Boehner coming out of the meeting today that again a lot of that spending doesn’t even meet the same test you just talked about right now.
Boehner: We have to find a package that is the right size
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family-planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family-planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those—one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?
PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some of the initiatives you just mentioned. What the economists have told us from right to left: There is more bang for the buck, a term they use, by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cut.
Nonetheless, we are committed to the tax cuts because they do have a positive impact on the economy, even though not as big as the investments.
To follow Pelosi’s reasoning, government spends a lot of money on entitlements for low-income children so obviously spending even more money on free condoms (and tax subsidized abortions, though she no doubt doesn’t want to advocate aborting low-income kids to save the government money on national television) will cause fewer children to be created which in turn will save the government money.
And that’s the “stimulus” I guess. But that supposes that money saved by the government at various levels on child health care will be passed on to the taxpayers thus making government less burdensome. Which gets back to tax relief helping the economy, doesn’t it? It’s the same premise, Pelosi is just going about it in a roundabout way.
But the thing is that the spending spree the Democrats are planning on under the guise of investing in “economic stimulus” isn’t actually going to save the government any money. You can’t save money by spending money, and even if the states do save some money the taxpayers aren’t going to see a dime of it anyway.
Meaning Pelosi’s rather tortured justifications are patently absurd.
Regardless, if we want to see fewer children born to parents who can’t afford them maybe we ought to stop subsidizing those births with health care and food stamps. Perhaps if the people having the children had to bear the full economic consequences of having them they might not be so reckless with their reproductive organs.
