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A Compassionate Budget
08 February 2005While President Bush's proposed budget is making headlines for its hidden surprises and its suggested cuts to more than 150 traditional social service programs -- including health care, veterans' prescriptions, food stamps, and housing benefits for the poor or disabled -- it's found the odd hundreds of millions of dollars to increase federal funding to faith-based programs that promote abstinence, marriage, religion-based mentoring, and other priorities of the "compassion agenda." Jim Towey, director of the White House faith-based initiatives program, defended the budget, explaining that Bush believes that "'America's armies of compassion mean a lot in the lives of the poor.'" Critics say the faith-based increases are simply a means to fund a clear, conservative social agenda. But Wade F. Horn, who heads abstinence and marriage initiatives for the Department of Health and Human Services -- some of the few programs in the HHS that would receive increases rather than cuts -- offers this consolation: at the end of the day, teens will have one more person telling them to wait to have sex.
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