Tag Archives: responsibilities

Progressive-Democratic Party Disdain for Education

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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

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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.

Mindset

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The problem is laid out early in the Wall Street Journal article:

Republicans are playing defense in Ohio and a growing number of other red states….

No. Republicans should not be playing defense anywhere, but especially not in the so-called battleground constituencies. That’s a purely reactive mindset and behavior, and it meekly surrenders the initiative to the Progressive-Democrats.

Republican candidates should be out among their constituents and among heretofore Progressive-Democrat Party constituencies and among areas where voters are typically undecided or are uncommitted to one party or the other. They should be talking about their own policies in concrete, measurable terms, and they should be talking similarly about their particular Progressive-Democrat opponent’s policies, where that one has any, and about the utter lack of policy beyond Never Trump ideology where that Progressive-Democrat candidate has nothing else on offer. In talking about those two sets of policies or about policy vs Never Trump, Republicans should be emphasizing both those differences and the failures of those Progressive-Democrat positions.

In particular, Ohio Republican Senate candidate Jon Husted should be talking about his specific policy successes and comparing those to what Progressive-Democrat candidate Sherrod Brown has on offer—a prior three-term record of progressive taxing and spending with nothing accomplished for the benefit of Ohio’s workers, steelworkers included. Just money taken out of Ohio citizens’ pockets and wasted.

But that’s not enough by itself. Mid-term elections are characterized by Progressive-Democratic Party voters coming out in droves while Republican voters sit on their couches in the supposed comfort of their homes. Republican candidates need to be encouraging those voters to get out and vote. They can best do this by explicitly and repeatedly urging them to go vote and by showing how their own policies best support the needs and wants of those voters.

There’s more required, though. Those Republican voters need actually to bestir themselves to vote. They shouldn’t be waiting to be told; they should be acting on their own initiative. Republican voters need to understand that every decision to not bother to vote is an active decision to favor the Progressive-Democrat candidate with their non-vote.

In the end, Republicans need to be forcing Progressive-Democrat candidates to react to their initiatives, always and everywhere. If they don’t, they’ll lose this election in both houses of Congress, the Presidential election in ’28, and for elections to come for generations.

Leakers and their Leaks

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The lede publishes the shameful leak in summary form.

Israel set up a clandestine military outpost in the Iraqi desert to support its air campaign against Iran and launched airstrikes against Iraqi troops who almost discovered it early in the war, people familiar with the matter including US officials said.

Who leaked this stuff? Those US officials and people familiar need to be identified and prosecuted for their mishandling of classified material. This sort of leak damages our nation’s and Israel’s national security, revealing as it does critical, secret operations and methods and techniques each of our two nations employ in the pursuit of defeating our enemies. It also unnecessarily embarrasses another nation, making this sort of operation more difficult to set up and execute in the future. That, in turn, makes our prosecuting the next war we’re forced to fight even more expensive in treasure, equipment, and lives.

To what end? What material good comes from publishing these leaks? Yes, yes, we all have a right to know, but at what cost does the knowing right damn now come? The primary gain in the immediacy is just clicks and status for journalists and their publishers for being the ones to publish.

The press does get to print this stuff, as irresponsible as publishing national secrets is, because the Ellsberg case involving the unauthorized leak (pardon the redundancy) of the Pentagon Papers made legal the receipt of and profit from that receipt of stolen goods, as long as the receiver/publisher is a press outlet.

But the leaks that get such information into the hands of an irresponsible press remain illegal, and the ones doing the leaking are still criminal by their leaking. They need to be prosecuted vigorously and sanctioned heavily.

Excuses

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Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.

One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:

Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?

Then there’s the other letter-writer.

When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.

This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.

The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.

For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.

The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.

Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.