Bristol Palin Sure Loves Candy. Oops! I mean Candie’s.
Teaching young teens that they shouldn’t make the same mistake you made by getting pregnant at an early age is hard work. For Bristol Palin it’s also extremely lucrative. The oldest daughter of the world’s “barracudaiest” former Alaskan Governor was hired by Candie’s last year to be their spokesperson. Candie’s is a non-profit, anti-teen pregnancy organization that was apparently paying Bristol a pretty penny to lend her name to their cause.
The Associated Press released a report earlier this week that shows that the former “Dancing with the Stars” competitor raked in a grand total of $262,500 in 2009, according to the non-profit’s tax returns. While such a high salary for someone who had no administrative duties within the organization is eye popping on its own, more staggering is the percentage that this salary represents of Candie’s total 2009 expenditures. Most people would likely assume that the company, which is spending over a quarter of a million dollars to help one single teen mother (Bristol) make a better life for her child, must also be laying out money hand over fist to help other teens avoid one of the biggest mistakes of their lives. However, most people would be shockingly, mind-numbingly wrong.
A closer look at Candie’s tax returns shows that the company spent a grand total of…$35,000 in actual grants given out to teen pregnancy and counseling programs. Candie’s handed out just $25,000 to the Mt. Sinai Adolescent Health Center and a minuscule $10,000 to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. For those not willing to do the math, that means that a non-profit organization supposedly dedicated to preventing teen pregnancy paid in salary to the country’s most famous teen mom seven times what they paid out in grant money. But wait! That’s not all. In addition to the more than $250,000 salary to Bristol, the organization spent $165,000 in advertising, including cutting spots with Ms. Palin herself and one of the morons from “Jersey Shore.”
Keep in mind that this news comes just a few scant weeks after Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee claimed that Natalie Portman was doing young women a disservice by flaunting the fact that she was pregnant and unmarried. In particular, Huckabee claimed that Portman was living the kind of life that few unmarried young mothers could ever hope to aspire to. Hmm. I wonder if any day now we will see Huckabee all over the news talking about the travesty of an unmarried Bristol Palin receiving a 6-figure salary from an anti-teen pregnancy non-profit organization? I doubt it.
image: popfi.com
