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Romney’s Education Overhaul

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One of the five key elements of presidential contender Mitt Romney’s stronger economy plan is overhauling America’s education system — The Skills to Succeed. The bullet points of this education update are:

-Give every family access to a great school and quality teachers
-Provide access to affordable and effective higher education options
-Focus job training programs on building valuable skills that align with opportunities
-Attract and retain the best and the brightest from around the world

As we wrote in our article of June 11 of this year, NEA Report Card: F, the education problem has been growing in America for decades, as the costs of educating our children skyrocket and students are churned out of the public education system with less and less actual education.

A decades-long growing battle between liberals and conservatives over education is culminating in calls to either get the government and unions out of education altogether, or to entirely overhaul the system.

The first bullet point – affording every family access to a great school and quality teachers is a broadly discussed function of reversing decades of damage done by the teachers’ unions and leftist bureaucrats and administrators. Their intractable resistance to objective standards of excellence and testing of teachers for competency – or even compensation based on merit and results, has left them exposed as the typical “more money for less work” union members they have become. Merit pay for teachers and tuition vouchers for students, to take to any school they desire to attend, will have the immediate and permanent effect of forcing schools to compete for their livelihood—a capitalistic concept quite foreign to the unions and their Democratic partners.

The second bullet point – providing access to affordable and effective higher education options is a cutting-edge concept that is as yet, undeveloped in the public arena. The Federalist Press editors hereby proffer a plan that will revolutionize American higher education.

The major problems with the current system are: 1) costs have artificially skyrocketed and the taxpayer is left holding the bag for much of it while students incur decades of debt; and 2) leftists dominate the system and classrooms, leaving indoctrinated students with little usable education and mush for brains.

The editors propose a new higher education option, patterned somewhat after the current CLEP and DANTES programs. In this age of digital access it is feasible to launch a program that provides students with online classes, with lectures by top experts and stunning graphics and demonstrations. A basic 2 year core curriculum will ensure that all students receive across-the-board instruction in math, science, English, history, etc. Then specialization will occur in 3rd and 4th year online classes. This is essentially how colleges and universities are supposed to offer classes now, but they have strayed far from their mandate.

Third and fourth year specialization courses in the government offered online university should emphasize productive degree programs initially; science, engineering, language, history, chemistry, education, pre-medicine, pre-law, etc., with some liberal arts programs being added as the system is more fully developed to accommodate their greater need for interactivity.

To help reduce cheating on exams, a major problem in the current system as well, testing centers should be established for this online university system with certified proctors to administer computerized tests. Students can take online courses at their own pace, and show up to take the exams as soon as they have completed the course.

Costs, which will be only a fraction of the current $500 billion, can be shared by students and the taxpayers. Students can pay a low flat fee for each course, and the federal government can dramatically cut its higher education budget and finance the remaining cost of the online university system.

This proposal will provide higher education for anyone who wants it, and anyone who is self-motivated enough to do the work. It doesn’t get any easier, cheaper or better than this.

PUBLIUS

Congressman Nugent On SCOTUS Obamacare Ruling

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Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on the President’s healthcare law a few weeks ago, a lot of people on both sides of the issue have asked about my reaction to it. It probably goes without saying at this point that I think the law was an enormous mistake from a policy standpoint – $800 billion in new taxes ($675 billion in the most recent estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation plus roughly another $125 billion in taxes from their 2010 estimates of the individual mandate, employer mandate, and other revenues – likely to go up further), plus $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, zero done to control the growing costs in healthcare, etc – but setting aside the specific issue of health reform, my biggest concerns surround the ruling itself and the precedent it sets. These are issues that frankly, I think the media has a responsibility to make sure Americans are informed about.

Here is the short version. The Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance could not be allowed under Congress’ constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. The Court said very plainly that the federal government does not have the authority to require you to buy something and penalize you for failing to do it.

But in the same breath, citing Congress’ authority to levy taxes, the Court said that although the federal government can’t force you to buy health insurance, they can compel you to buy it by taxing you if you don’t. In a nutshell, the government can’t fine you for not buying something, but they can hit you with a tax penalty if you don’t… I frankly don’t see a meaningful difference between the two.

Think about it this way: the federal government has long been able to encourage certain behavior through the tax code (think about the mortgage interest tax deduction), but it has never been able to compel you to go out and buy a house by threatening to hit you with a tax penalty if you didn’t. That is a huge difference. On page 39 of his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts used the example of energy efficient windows. He suggested that although the federal government couldn’t require you to buy energy efficient windows, it could essentially force you to do so by levying a tax on you if you don’t.

I don’t think anybody out there disputes the benefits of having health insurance or lowering your electricity bill, but in the United States of America, those decisions have always been up to the people – not up to the federal government. And regardless of how you feel about the healthcare law, I think this is something that all Americans should consider very carefully. Should Congress have the power to force American citizens into buying things that they don’t want? Should the federal government be able to force you to buy a certain car, or windows, or insurance, or anything else that the Congress thinks you should have? Is that a power that We The People want to surrender?

I don’t believe it is. But that’s what the Supreme Court has done here. Regardless of whether or not the President’s healthcare law is repealed, the precedent has been set. The government now has the legal authority to force you to buy things. That wasn’t the case before the ruling and it is not something that is easily undone. Following on the heels of our Independence Day, when all Americans gather together to celebrate our freedom and the sacrifices of those who made it possible, this is an issue that I think we should all consider very carefully. Are we less free as a people in the wake of this ruling and is that something we should be comfortable with?

You know where I stand.

Congressman Richard B. Nugent

Benedict Roberts and Stare Decisis

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts exploded from the closet last week, revealing himself for the undercover leftist that he is, forever propelling the US into an Orwellian nightmare of government control and loss of personal liberty.

As the White House braced for a Supreme Court ruling on its Health Care legislation, which is not only extremely unpopular among voters, but had been telegraphed as facially unconstitutional by a majority of the Court in oral arguments, only a few die-hard socialists believed the act would be upheld upon judicial review by the Court. White House spokesman Jay Carney was already carrying out the left’s Talking Points Memo agenda of trying to saddle the GOP with the idea of the unconstitutional mandate, which forced Americans to buy a government mandated commodity, or suffer a penalty for disobedience.

The usual luke-warm judicial slug on the Court, Justice Kennedy, was thought to be the only conservative-leaning justice with the poor judgment to actually consider such an expansion of government power. He had made it clear during oral arguments, however, that even he was opposed to such an exponentially compounded expansion of government intrusion into the lives of American citizens. As the ruling came down, all of us, left and right, were shocked that Chief Justice John Roberts had actually made himself the swing vote to uphold the draconian law, shifting heretofore unconstitutional powers to the federal government.

Since that fateful day last week we have heard members of the left and their media propaganda outlets spiking the ball in celebration. We have simultaneously heard those on the right analyzing Justice Roberts’ written majority opinion, incredulous, sifting for some scintilla of logic or constitutional authority to make some sort of sense of it all. Perhaps the dear boy was telegraphing a method of ensuring Obama’s defeat in November, we have heard.

In fact, no such response for the ruling is possible. What many pundits fail to understand is the concept of stare decisis. This is the principle that once the Court has decided a constitutional principle, it remains decided–forever!

Indeed, the law of the land will always be that the federal government has no restrictions on what it can force the American people and the states to do, as long as it can be imposed under the taxing authority. The implications of this contorted theory of constitutional law cannot be overstated. The long-term ramifications of this unmitigated power shift are incomprehensible, and WILL become a source of unspeakable sorrow for this people in years and decades to come.

The Constitution written by our Founding Fathers is no more. The Tenth Amendment is dead.

Now, we are at the fork in the road.  We either follow Obama and his socialists down the path they offer, or we turn them out of office, forever, and put those into office who value the personal liberty we obtained and fought to maintain in every war since the Revolution.

Perhaps the time has inexorably arrived that we must re-invoke the wisdom of one of those Founders:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Thomas Jefferson

The Biggest Tax Increase In History!

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Barack Hussein Obama has promised the American people on numerous occasions that he would not increase taxes on any American or American family earning less than $250,000 a year.  When pressed for clarification and commitment, his response has been a consistent No New Taxes, reminiscent of Bush I’s “Read My Lips.”

“I can make a firm pledge: under my plan no family making less than two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars a year will see any form of tax increase.”

Video: Barack Obama Pledges Not to Raise Taxes

The president and his congressional leaders on the left specifically pitched his health care act as not being a tax. They claimed vehemently that it was not a tax, and ridiculed conservatives who said it was indeed a tax. They insisted that Obamacare was constitutional pursuant to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Then, of course, as soon as the administration got in front of the supreme court they began claiming that Obamacare was indeed a tax. The argument seemed ridiculous if not ingenuous in light of all of the left’s posturing and protesting that it was not a tax.

Today the supreme court announced that Obamacare passes constitutional scrutiny because it is . . . A TAX!

And not just a tax.  As a tax, Obamacare is the biggest tax increase in the history of the U.S. Will it increase the taxes of Americans earning less than $250,000 a year? YES!!!

Of course, the upshot is that President Obama and all of those on the left who forced Obamacare down America’s collective throat were lying. It was indeed a tax. It was a Trojan Horse. It was subterfuge on the scale of a stolen revolution, or of a communist power takeover.

Today is a day of decision for the American people. Each of us must ask ourselves the questions:

Are we ready to join the left in its march toward socialism?
Or do we take back our country today?

There is no longer any middle ground. The die is cast, and we either end the government’s expansion into every aspect of our lives, and shut down 90 percent of the bureaucracy and rein back entitlements to a safety net level, or we capitulate to Obama and the left and allow the federal government to completely take over.

Video: Barack Obama Pledges Not to Raise Taxes In Any Form

NEA Report Card: F

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We hear constantly about how American students are losing ground in worldwide performance standards. We score around 500 out of 1,000 in a number of important categories like reading and science.

Every three years the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report is compiled and released, comparing the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world. The United States ranks 14th of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science, and a dismal 25th for mathematics.

The man-on-the-street interview has become common fodder for comedy shows, because the ignorance of the average American is overwhelmingly predictable. If you don’t believe it, casually ask someone in Starbucks the most fundamental of social studies questions: how many senators are in the US congress, or even the name of the vice president. You will be surprised at the number of blank stares you receive.

The Dumbing Down of America

So what do children learn in schools under the stern directives of the National Education Association? They learn about global warming, necessary tolerance for abhorrent human behaviors, and about how bad President Bush was. They are taught to speak out vehemently against anything and everything that is traditional or moral, and to blindly embrace every edict and dogma of the left.

Our classrooms are often filled with NEA union “change agents,” set in place to transition impressionable minds from logical and moral thought to leftist nonsense of redistribution and “fairness.” Our children don’t dare question the dogmatic edicts of these “community organizers” whose job it is to preach the gospel of the left, numbing the minds of the children and getting them to thoughtlessly repeat the chants and talking points of liberals.

Even in conservative Provo, Utah, we’ve received reports of a female seventh-grade teacher who recently bullied a female student in front of the class for having a note in her papers on the desk that she was supporting Mitt Romney for president. When the girl’s father asked the principal why his daughter was berated in front of the entire class and called “stupid” for her written thought, he was threatened with a lawsuit and a restraining order if he mentioned the incident outside of the principal’s office.

With all of that “education” going on, it’s no wonder that there is no time or energy left over for things like reading, writing and arithmetic.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investing in education.”

Does Education Need More Money?

Duncan’s use of the word “investing” is liberal-speak for raising taxes and feeding the NEA with more money to donate to Democratic candidate political campaigns. In fact, where students are more likely to drop out of school, and to be unemployed when they leave school, we find the highest levels of NEA influence, and the highest support for Democrats. Think east coast and west coast cities, Chicago, Detroit, etc.

Indeed, we constantly hear how underpaid teachers are, and how our schools need more money for the classrooms. Let’s look at some real numbers.  First, we spend more than $9,000 per student per year on K-12 education (far more than all the countries who beat us in PISA reports), totaling over $120,000 per student by high school graduation. That is over $800 billion annually, which is a full 4.5% of our gross domestic product.

So where does all of this money go? Around 60% goes to classroom instruction, including teachers’ salaries. The rest (40%) goes to non-teaching employees and extras, in place mainly to ensure federal compliance, to qualify for the small percentage of the local budget that comes from Washington, D.C.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, mechanical engineers earn $31.93 per hour, but public school teachers earn on average more than $34.00 per hour, with an average annual salary of over $47,000. That salary is for a job that consumes just 36.5 hours per week compared with many hours more for nearly everyone else. Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less. It is true that there are those who earn more than public school teachers. Nuclear engineers earn 17% more; actuaries, 9% more; and physicists, 3% more. There are public school teachers working for a number of failing school systems who are earning a lot more than most people. The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.

We need to invest more? No, we need to take back control of our schools and ensure that motivated teachers are teaching basic educational courses—the kind of subjects that are tested and measured internationally. We need to make sure there is competition in the teaching profession, something the NEA has fought with tremendous ferocity. We need to reward teachers who excel, and fire teachers who aren’t teaching useful subject matter to our children.

PUBLIUS

Bringing Fairness to Taxes

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As the propaganda press stirs up the occupying proletariat in our nation, and our streets become filled with couch potatoes demanding their fair share of that which has been earned by others, the insanity and impossibility of the scene serves as ample proof that too much weed indeed dulls the human brain’s ability to reason.

The 99 percent demand that they be supported by the 1 percent. They demand that taxation be applied “fairly.”

Indeed, 47 percent of the country pays no federal income taxes whatsoever, and the top 25 percent of earners pay 87 percent of the total burden. The top 1 percent pay 36% of all federal income taxes, while the top 5 percent pay 58%.

In fact, this distribution scheme is unfair, but it is not those who now bear a significantly higher portion of the burden who should be made to shoulder even more of the load.

There is a story that I heard years ago about the fairness of the distribution of tax burdens that I think will be instructive. It’s precise origin is unknown as far as I know, but I would like to give proper credit if I could find the person who developed it.

Suppose that every day ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Publius

True Champions of American Blacks

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Under the British system, a system where the king could do no wrong, and all subjects were essentially his private property, indentured servitude and slavery were common. It is how many young people escaped the class poverty of Europe, by indenturing themselves until the age of 18, or later, then receiving their freedom. Others were indentured to repay family debt. Many of these became successful free citizens under the system, while many never escaped the bonds of servitude. Europeans had developed quite a system of slave trading before the foundations of America, and under the British Empire slaves were tasked with working the vast agricultural holdings of the colonies, including those in the New World.

Most of the founders were very hostile to the system of servitude, and although they existed within it, they sought to extinguish it. When the founders declared our liberty from Great Britain, they did so with the intent of retaining the new nation’s faith and credit. Huge holdings were offered as guarantee of repayment of war loans, including vast agricultural empires, which included the slaves that worked them. The slavery question was hotly debated in the forming nation, and it is the one failing of the founders that they were unable to win the day against slavery—due mainly to the collateralization of debt issue—but could only “kick the can down the road,” as our current government does daily.

The intent of the founders was to phase out slavery, but agricultural interests in the southern states resisted all attempts. Finally, the Republican Party was formed and at the peril of national civil war, its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, ran on the platform that slavery must finally be abolished. Over a half million Americans lost their lives in the ensuing conflict, but the issue was officially, if not finally settled. In fact, hundreds of Republican whites and blacks were murdered in the South even after the Civil War, during “Reconstruction.”

Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to enforce voting and civil rights to the descendants of African slaves emancipated during the Civil War, but they were blocked by the Democrats and Southern state “Dixiecrats,” who blocked passage while they blocked black students from entering Southern universities. Who were these Democrats who filibustered and voted against civil rights and voting rights for blacks? John F. Kennedy, Al Gore, Sr., Lyndon B. Johnson, George Wallace, and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, otherwise known as the Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few.

It was when “progressives” adopted the charlatan policy that they “adopted” African Americans and other “minorities” as their charges. In the name of the oppressed, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, most of whom were that way because of the old prejudices of the Southern Democrats or have become that way through the taxation and confiscatory policies of the expanded left leaning US government, “progressives” have created a fatherless and helpless nation of minorities in America. Once all left leaning politicians received the Memo that all things were possible in the name of the downtrodden, those very politicians who had so vehemently opposed voting and civil rights for American minorities suddenly became their “champions.”

The Republican voting and civil rights bills were immediately redubbed Democratic legislation, and were passed, with several new powers being given to the federal government in the deal.  The “Great Society” was born and American blacks instantly went from struggling to get into the middle class to dropping directly into the abyss.  American minorities are well on their way to becoming completely dependent on government handouts, and feel beholden to politicians who keep them on the public dole.

Does every American liberal or moderate set out with these leftist results as their goal? No. They are fooled by their leadership, who have their own secret agenda, as recently lamented by Bob Beckel, Liberal Commentator:

“We liberals made a terrible mistake, going back 30 years ago.  We made a dependent society because we thought we were doing the right thing.  We had things like public housing, and we had welfare payments, and all that bred dependence.”

African-Americans would do well to return their support to those who have their collective well-being and personal liberty at heart.

Publius

The Stem Cell War is Over

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Those who read George Bush’s Decision Points may have been interested to learn that up until the 9/11 attacks the most important issue facing his administration in his opinion was stem cell policy.

The stem cell problem is rooted in the abortion issue. Liberals support embryonic stem cell research because it bolsters their argument that abortion is socially desirable. President Bush echoed the conservative dilemma as he wrestled with the cost/benefits analysis of stem cell research—at what cost would stem cell benefits come?

President Bush wrote that he labored over the issue, holding out hope that adult stem cells (non-embryonic) would become available and the problems inherent in embryonic stem cells would become irrelevant.

According to Roger Nocera, M.D., that day has arrived. In his book Cells That Heal Us From Cradle To Grave: A Quantum Leap in Medical Science (Amazon ebook), Dr. Nocera reveals that useable adult stem cells were discovered in 2003 and have been used to treat serious diseases in clinics around the world since then.

Although Dr. Nocera is a self-described liberal Democrat who supports Roe v. Wade, and admits in the book that the Democrats have been backing the wrong horse on the stem cell issue, because of their misguided devotion to the abortion issue.

The completely naturally occurring adult stem cell discovered in 2003 has been utilized in treatments in offshore clinics—offshore, because stem cell treatment is currently banned by the FDA. This newly discovered adult stem cell is found stored in our own body fat or is left in umbilical cords and thrown out as bio waste.

Many incurable diseases, conditions and injuries are being cured with simple treatments. One of my favorite cases is a middle-aged doctor who needed a heart transplant and would die within a few more months, and was given a simple I.V. with these Healing Cells, and his heart is now as good as new.

This new technology completely vindicates conservatives, and it WILL LOWER HEALTH CARE costs dramatically . . . by cheaply healing serious conditions that currently drag on for years, requiring expensive drugs and medical care.

Publius

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