Progressive-Democratic Party Disdain for Education

Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor Josh Shapiro is providing the latest demonstration. As the WSJ editors noted in their piece,

Only a third of Philadelphia students were proficient in English, and a quarter in math, on state tests last year. That’s the horrifying return on school district spending of about $32,000 per student, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.

The State does offer tax credits to private entities and individuals who donate to privately run scholarship programs, but those programs don’t come close to covering the cost to parents of pulling their students out of the State’s failing public school systems and enrolling them in private schools.

Shapiro stands sharply in the way of any improvement, though.

Even though the State’s legislature is moving to increase the value of existing programs, Shapiro is demanding that much of the funds sought must be diverted public-school supplemental activities rather than private-school tuition.

Shapiro is actively blocking legislative efforts to create new tuition vouchers worth much more.

Shapiro refuses to opt the State into the Federal government’s education scholarship tax-credit program, even though that program is funded exclusively with Federal tax dollars and wouldn’t cost the State a single Continental.

This active obstruction of children’s education is as abusive as any direct emotional abuse. If we want our children actually to be educated, if we want this sub rosa abuse to be stopped, we need to stop electing Progressive-Democrats to office.

One Way to Reduce Welfare Fraud

The lede laid out the breadth of the problem.

The Trump administration’s work to pare back waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government has reportedly exposed a vast network of taxpayer-fleecing scams, abuses of immigration, and of the citizenship process across all corners of the United States.

It’s necessary, certainly, to act to correct these abuses and to bring the abusers and fraudsters to justice—including State officials who ignored the problems in their States or were actively complicit in them.

It’s necessary, though, to act proactively against these frauds on the American people. One means of going on offense is simple and straightforward, if politically difficult (though only difficult in the minds of timid politicians). That is to set about reducing the opportunities for fraud. Eliminate some welfare programs that are redundant or overlapping and to greatly reduce the scope, eligibility for, and funding of the remaining welfare programs.

With less money to steal, there’ll be less opportunity to steal it, and more usefully, those attempts will be more readily detected and the fraud wannabes caught and jailed.

Symptomatic

Alex Shepherd, writing in the 7 May edition of the Left-wing The New Republic, exposed the core position of the Progressive-Democratic Party going into this fall’s mid-term elections and the continuing run toward the 2028 Presidential election.

…the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.

That’s it. That’s the sum of what Party has on offer for the coming election cycles. No substantive policies to tout and to contrast with Republican or Trumpian policies. Nothing to say about how their positions are better than Republicans’ or Trump’s for our nation.

Just anti-Trump, no to all things Trumpian or Republican, Never Trump.

A party with no substance, only anti-ism and hate, is a party that cannot be trusted with the reins of power.

“Politically Viable Tax”

That’s what New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Party and Democratic Socialists of America Party mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking for in order to address the city’s budget shortfall.

This is yet another installment in Party politicians’ cynical (I say) effort to raise ever more taxes in order to cover ever more spending, or as so often is the case with Party’s resolutely profligate spending, to “chip away” at the budget deficits and resulting debts that Party’s habits create.

It’s instructive that Mamdani wants to raise taxes in whatever way he can get away with. It’s further instructive that he can’t—no Party politician can, it seems—conceive of cutting spending, if not overall, at least in those areas not part of his social(ist) program, in order to free up non-deficit and -debt inducing spending for his goals. Mamdani can’t even conceive of simply reallocating existing spending goals to achieve his social(ist) goals.

This ever-increasing taxing is what New York City voters affirmatively chose to inflict on themselves, and it’s a threat the rest of us face if we don’t choose more wisely in our own coming elections, from the national level on down to our city and village levels.

New Style Job Hunting

FCC commissioner and sole Progressive-Democrat agency member Anna Gomez wrote a letter in her official capacity to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro (Disney owns ABC) advising him that the FCC’s investigations of ABC were nothing more than a weaponization of the FCC and a campaign to censor news media.

It’s bad enough that a Federal government bureaucrat would so blatantly seek to blow up an agency action with which she disagrees, and she should be fired on that ground alone.

It gets worse, though, as the news writer at the link noted at the end of his piece.

In her letter, Gomez pledged to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

Gomez knows full well that she won’t successfully block the FCC’s investigation; she can only cast those public aspersions. This isn’t an FCC Commissioner seeking fairness and justice in a government action. This is a Federal government bureaucrat trying to burnish her resume and set up her job hunt, first with Disney or ABC, for when she leaves government. This is abusive even for revolving door bureaucratic practice.