Shocker: Sarah Palin Slashed Funding For Pregnant Teens By Expanding It
In the wake of the announcement that Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, is pregnant many in the media and on the left have been making a big deal about Sarah Palin apparently having slashed funding for teenage mothers in Alaska.
Here’s an example from the Washington Post.
ST. PAUL—Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.
The problem, of course, is that Palin didn’t really slash funding for teen mothers at all. Instead she agreed to grow it by $3.9 million. And what’s worse is that the Washington Post knows this. They even printed it right in the article that accuses Palin of slashing the funding.
After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation—“SP”—Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million.
It takes a special kind of dishonesty to think that growing spending on a program by $3.9 million instead of $5 million is “slashing” its funding.
Update: For what it’s worth, the $3.9 million Palin did approve for Covenant House represents an approximate tripling of state funding for that organization over 2007.
And by the way, Covenant House is a faith-based organization. I thought liberals hated that?
