Per Drudge this morning:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic “stimulus” package, claiming “contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” …
The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC’s THIS WEEK.
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.
Notice the thinking here. The government has decided to make itself the default provider of education as well as, more recently, children’s health insurance. These are things that many dedicated private individuals and groups have proven quite adept at being able to provide ? there is no compelling reason for them to be state-issue goods. But they are, and that places on parents the burden to choose either the “free” service paid for by taxpayers or one of the costly, private services paid for by themselves.
Predictably, the government is spending itself into a hole trying to do with coerced funding what individuals bearing the risks themselves are able to do, better, with voluntary funding.
So what’s the government’s solution? Get out of things government doesn’t need to be into? No, no, no ? it’s getting into another industry to try to reduce children.
