Nearly every affront to liberty in this country has been perpetrated under one simple slogan – it’s for the children. Obamacare, gun control and environmental regulations are just a few examples of government intrusion into civil liberties couched as being necessary to help sweet, nourishing crumb-crunchers avoid the certain harm and probable death that awaits them by existing in a world similar to the one we all grew up in. Even with all we’ve done “for the children,” it’s never enough, and it never will be.
It’s always amusing to hear Democrats talk about the need to “invest” in education, “green” energy, and every other manner of pet project that just happens to line the pockets of their campaign donors. But what do we get for that “investment”?
Merriam-Webster defines “investment” as “the outlay of money usually for income or profit.” In essence, an investment is an outlay of cash for which you expect a return. That return is the part Democrats never mention because, like a broken boomerang, it doesn’t come back.
For instance, our “investment” in public education is not yielding much in the way of results. We are spending more on education than at any time in history, yet schools are failing at alarming rates. Children aren’t learning, aren’t graduating, can’t read or write, but are passed along anyway. It’s a failure of epic proportions. But the answer coming from Democrats is “more,” always more.
In watching the Democratic gubernatorial race in Maryland, you see the latest push on this from the left – universal pre-K. Universal pre-K is the latest “fix” Democrats across the country are offering to the failed government-run education system. Each of the Maryland candidates, Lt. Governor Anthony Brown, Attorney General Doug Gansler, and Del. Heather Mizeur, are promising universal pre-K to all Marylanders. Why? Because it sounds good.
Head Start is, according to the government’s own website, “a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development.” As we all know, low-income students are out-performing everyone else, so why not extend this wonderful, successful program to all children? Do you hate children?
Wait, Head Start is a total and complete failure. That’s not me saying that, it’s President Obama’s own Department of Health and Human Services. A 2010 study by HHS concluded, “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole. For 3-year-olds, there are few sustained benefits, although access to the program may lead to improved parent-child relationships through 1st grade…”
And what did these bureaucrats suggest? Not scrapping the failed program and saving the billions spent on it, noooo. They suggested, wait for it…further study.
This unmitigated and self-confessed failure hasn’t stopped Democrats from calling for an expansion of the program to all children, because “THE CHILDREN!!!”
Democrats from Maryland to New York (and coming soon to a state near you) are calling for everyone to get a steerage ticket on the Titanic, er, access to Head Start, all the way down to age 2. Why stop there? Why ignore newborns for two years? How long until they’re advocating for universal pre-natal-K? Laugh all you want; it’s coming.
Failed programs and ideas don’t go away in the Democratic Party. They just get renamed and grow.
And so, on Monday, the president announced new standards for American power plants, requiring them to spend hundreds of billions of dollars retrofitting themselves to cut CO2 emissions by 30 percent. It’s pretty much the cap-and-trade legislation the Democratic super-majority rejected in 2010, only without the pesky constitutional mumbo-jumbo of winning a vote behind it. And why? You guessed it, the children.
The president took the opportunity of his weekly radio address to officially announce his usurpation of the legal process and, so as to not miss an opportunity to exploit children, he took his gas-guzzling motorcade to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to record it.
The president opened his remarks from a children’s hospital by saying there are many kids “being treated here all the time for asthma and other breathing problems. Often these illnesses are aggravated by air pollution, pollution from the same sources that release carbon and contribute to climate change. And for the sake of all our kids, we’ve got to do more to reduce it.”
So your energy prices have to “necessarily skyrocket” for the children! Don’t like that idea? Can’t afford to pay significantly higher energy bills? Why do you hate children?
Since the president is more dependent on strawmen than Dorothy was in Oz, he revisits the children near the end of his remarks with “In America, we don’t have to choose between the health of our economy and the health of our children.” He then bravely says he refuses to “condemn our children to a planet that is beyond fixing.”
The word “hero” is thrown around an awful lot these days, usually unjustifiably. But in this case the dictionary may have found itself a new example picture.
He ends promising “a future where we can look our kids in the eye and tell them we did our part to leave them a safer, more stable world.” The irony of a man who’s doubled the national debt can’t be lost on anyone but the truest of believers.
“For the children” will continue to be used to bludgeon the American people into submitting every right last we have left, maybe not in our lifetimes, but soon, and forever. Unless, that is, the various factions on the right get over their self-pity and anger and realize that just because their chosen candidate lost the primary, they can’t stay home this and every election day hereafter. And if you’re still having difficulty bringing yourself to vote for someone you don’t wholeheartedly support, think about what we’ve already lost and “do it for the children.”
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