Halloween has started, and the first trick of the day is a bit of flim-flam from a group called the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy.
The headline of an article about them in this morning’s Herald online jumped out at me: “Massachusetts teen moms and their kids cost the state $109 million a year in social services.”
Holy moley, $109 million: that translates to almost $24,000 per teen mom, which happens to be about 3 1/2 times the _maximum_ annual welfare benefit in Massachusetts (about $7,000).
Gee, what could possibly be the point of inflating a number by 350%?
For those of us too obtuse to recognize a run for our wallets, the article even includes this semi-articulate, bald-faced quote from the Alliance’s public policy director: “That’s money that could be saved if we were doing a better job in Massachusetts of really funding teen pregnancy efforts.”
Okee-dokey, so everyone in the Commonwealth should “really” (really) put their minds to “funding teen pregnancy efforts,” which, by the way, same Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy has been doing, apparently with little good effect, since 1979.
But how did they come up with that $109 million?
Checking out their website, I found that the page “Cost of Teen Pregnancy” is, well, under construction.
Reading through the rest of the article, though, I learned that even these buttinskis-on-the-take admit that their number comes not from hard statistics, but from a pantload of questionable assumptions about the true “cost” of teenaged parenthood, including the “incarceration of children of teen parents, health care and lost tax revenue”.
In fact, “Most of the costs are associated with the child, not the mother, according to the report.”
No doubt someone at the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy has friends at the Herald, and they may very well have friends on Beacon Hill. They have a list as long as your arm of member organizations, which pay anywhere from $125 to $1,200 a year for such benefits as savings on their annual conference and quarterly breakfasts, discounts on their publications and a link on their website.
Their “services” include training of “youth-serving professionals”, lobbying “at the state and local levels” and other such talking-head activities.
In other words, they aren’t using a penny of their money to provide direct help to young mothers and their kids: no child care centers, no MCAS or SAT prep, no health clinics.
Talk about a razor in your apple.