Probably of the unintentional variety, but one never can be sure. Also says a lot about the faux Christian ideals of the Bush administration (and Congress for that matter). Isn't feeding the hungry supposed to be one of the prime directives?
Contrast and compare, fun on so many levels:
To Feed the Needy, Iowa Looks Hungrily At Its Glut of Deer - WSJ.com : ... Before this year's hunting season, the state's deer population had soared to about 450,000, from only 10,000 in the 1950s, matching a nationwide Bambi boom. Like residents in many other states, Iowa's farmers and suburban gardeners have watched deer ravage their crops. Insurance payouts from deer-vehicle crashes -- as many as 20,000 a year -- have escalated to upward of $50 million in Iowa alone.“In Iowa, there's so much food for the deer with all the corn,” says Fred Haskins, executive director and legislative counsel of the Iowa Insurance Institute, an association of property-casualty companies.
At the same time, the number of people in Iowa without enough food was also increasing. In 1999, about 7.6% of households couldn't afford to feed their families at some point during the year. In 2005, it was 10.9%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
and, also from today's WSJ -
How a U.S. Official Promotes Marriage To Help Poor Kids - WSJ.com : The notion that government can help children escape poverty by promoting marriage for their parents was once considered a fringe idea from right field. It is now federal policy. In very large part, that's due to Wade Horn, a child psychologist turned bureaucrat who has put marriage atop the Bush administration's limited antipoverty agenda.As head of the federal Administration for Children and Families, Dr. Horn has employed the zeal of an ideologue and the discipline of an academic to inject marriage promotion into a host of government programs under his purview, even before Congress authorized an official marriage program. Today, more than 200 programs are at work across the country, seeking to change public attitudes surrounding marriage, persuade teenagers to aspire to matrimony and teach relationship skills to young couples.
Along the way, Dr. Horn has co-opted critics, fine-tuned his rhetoric, and persuaded Congress to insert his marriage agenda into this year's welfare legislation, winning $500 million over five years. A host of grants were doled out last month, to organizations ranging from large coalitions of social-services groups to antiabortion pregnancy-counseling centers that plan relationship classes for teens.
“Wade Horn has shown the influence a bureaucrat can have,” says Ronald Haskins, a welfare expert who has worked for Congress and the current President Bush's White House. “Anything that wasn't nailed down over there is now devoted to marriage.
Not everyone is persuaded. Women's groups say his emphasis on marriage unfairly demonizes unwed mothers, and pressures women to stay in sometimes unhealthy, violent relationships. Libertarians say government has no business using tax dollars to probe so deeply into people's personal lives. Some note that there's no proof yet that any of these efforts can work. Others say the money would be better spent elsewhere.
The idea that poverty is, in significant measure, the result of broken families and unwed mothers has been contentious since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial 1965 warning that the disintegrating black family was an obstacle to black advancement. In that year, 8% of children were born to unmarried parents. Today, more than one-third of all children -- and nearly 70% of black children -- are.
Personally, I don't like the government injecting itself into family matters. Seems a little creepy and totalitarian, if you ask me.
Tags: civil_liberties, /poverty
