Drudge has a red light up on Nancy Pelosi’s interview with George Stephanopolous yesterday in which the House Speaker defines “stimulus” in a new and interesting way.  Pelosi has included hundreds of millions of dollars in the economic stimulus package for contraception, apparently concerned that the screwing the federal government plans to give taxpayers may give some of us the, er, wrong idea.  But cui bono – who benefits?

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.

Well, I hate to be the one to explain this to Grandma Pelosi, but contraception doesn’t actually work as a short-term cost control method.  Maybe she forgot this from her high-school health classes, but a lack of contraception in March won’t actually produce extra mouths to feed until December.  Education costs, which Pelosi explicitly mentions in support of this initiative, wouldn’t appear until 2013 at the earliest.  And actually, this would provide an economic stimulus to the education industry, one of the few legitimate areas of government spending at some level to create jobs (although not the federal level).

This line item exposes what we all know about this stimulus package: it’s a pork fest.  Consider where these contraception dollars will go.  It won’t be to Walgreens.  Eventually, this money will go to Planned Parenthood, in order to shore up their operations.  They just laid off 20% of their workforce, and the Democrats need PP to campaign for them in national elections.  Pelosi wants to increase the government subsidy for electoral purposes, and will exploit the “stimulus” package to do so.

Mike Pence has introduced a bill to block all funding to Planned Parenthood.  Contact your Representative and tell him or her to support HR 614 and to end the pork subsidies that have a lot more to do with electoral politics than cost-cutting through contraception.