It is an article of bad faith that in the public arena, politicians love to crow as to how much they love the children. The children are our future. Everything is for the children.
And it is all a huge steaming pile of balderdash.
Oh, rest assured the pols do indeed adore the kiddos. They really do, just as long as they aren't poor, or sick, or troubled, or at-risk, or in any way shape or manner ... high maintenance. Then the little waif is toast.
We are supposed to have a safety net in place for displaced children. It's called the foster care system. And in Florida the safety net is stretched about as thin as it can get.
RELATED COVERAGE Group homes brace for radical overhaul of federal foster care funding
One vital cog of foster care is group homes, where children removed from dangerous and/or toxic environments can live in a safe space and receive an array of services, including critical counseling care.
But that system could be at risk, thanks to your government in action. A new federal law, the Family First Prevention Services Act, would shift priorities away from group homes to providing more money to pay for in-home counseling and parenting classes.
That sounds awfully nice. But the act is also designed to reduce funding for group homes, which in turn would greatly decrease the time allowed for children to receive care in a group home setting.
Currently most group homes accept children that foster homes are unwilling or unable to take in.
As the Christopher O'Donnell of the Tampa Bay Times has reported, facilities such as the 23-acre Lake Magdalene group home campus in north Tampa, which is operated by Hillsborough County, provides housing, food and care for children for up to an average of 18 months. The Family First Prevention Services Act would slash that time to about two weeks.
This issue here isn't about taking care of people in need. It's about money.
O'Donnell noted the average cost-per-child in a group home setting is roughly between $100 and $190 a day, with the federal government picking up about 50 percent of the cost.
Meanwhile, individual foster homes receive about $450 a month per child.
This is a classic case of being penny wise and pound myopic.
Yes, group home care is expensive. But many operations such as Lake Magdalene, which as been in business since the 1940s, also serve a unique clientele.
Many of the children placed in Lake Magdalene are abused and neglected and abandoned teenagers. And many of these clients come to the facility along with their siblings. Lake Magdalene keeps these family members together, rather than splitting them up among foster families. This is not a good thing?
Cutting funding to the group homes would place a strain on foster families and reduce the services available to troubled teens already dealing with the stresses imposed on their lives.
It was one of the great advertising taglines. A mechanic pitches Fram oil filters by saying: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later." It was true then and it is true now.
In order to save some money, the federal government would prefer to break up siblings and impose a draconian reduction in services offered to places like Lake Magdalene, running the risk of long term psychological and emotional damage to these teens. How does that make any sense?
Lake Magdalene boasts a 90 percent school attendance rate among its residents.
Long term, what might be the impact of gutting the benefits of maintaining Lake Magdalene and other group homes? Higher truancy rates? Higher crime rates? The potential for higher unemployment rates? And who ultimately pays for all of that? You do.
Society and its politicians can preen all they want about how they loves their children, even the least of them. But love, real love, also comes with a price tag.
And as we all know, no good comes from trying to love on the cheap.