by James C. Sherlock
Progressives in America have perfected the art of winning by failing.
They create demand for more government with devastatingly destructive government programs badly run.
It is the idea of control and the money it brings policy makers from rent seekers rather than the management of programs that attracts them. Plenty of progressives make fortunes playing the strings of the government program violins they have created.
Ask Terry McAuliffe.
When those policies inevitably fail to produce the promised results and simultaneously restrict human achievement, the Left considers that a feature not a bug. That is the job, for example, of many prominent ed schools.
As insurance of failure, the Left has perfected incompetent government. It creates opportunities for yet more government control.
Pure alchemy.
Progressive goals. Progressives work every day:
- to make the government the arbiter of every person’s life all of the time in every detail — to control the actions if not the beliefs of adults and control of how the state, not the parents, raises the children;
- to discourage marriage;
- to trap the poor into lives of total government dependence;
- to trap children into government schools that are builders of social warriors, reliable leftists, even if they cannot read or calculate.
The Great Society.
Democrats totally controlled Congress with huge majorities when Lyndon Johnson was president. Johnson had two pet projects, the Vietnam war and the Great Society. Guns and butter.
He and his Democratic Congress screwed up both.
In the best societies, poverty for most who are able in body, mind and spirit is a waypoint, not a destination. In those societies governments help the poor help themselves.
The Left tries to lock them into their existing conditions by paying them to stay there. Great Society welfare and housing programs embodied the latter approach.
The thing about poverty is that it is always defined by the Left as the economic condition of those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. A relative measure, not an absolute one.
By the progressive definition, then, poverty will never be ‘solved’.
How about Black people, the constituency that the left expends every effort to prod to the polls on election day?
Black lives matter. Indeed they do. Yet the Great Society is widely viewed as the greatest disaster to befall America’s Black community since slavery.
Thomas Sowell has written:
“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”
From 1965 to 2017, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among Blacks in America jumped from 21% to 77%.
The Left is taking us back to the future, both in Virginia and in the national government.
Sowell as prophet:
“Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.”
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Let’s fly there. We’ll look integration of Virginia’s child care and pre-school programs under control of the government education bureaucracy ahead of the pending Build Back Better legislation.
Birds of a feather.
Virginia. The progressive dream of government control of children from birth has been implemented in Virginia by the transfer by Democrats of the oversight of day care from the Department of Social Services to the Department of Education.
Child care centers are now schools. Pre-school, now for three- and four-year- olds, is a now a government program for poor kids. Richmond Public Schools runs the government pre-schools for kids in that city. What could go wrong?
Regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s election, Virginia will still have a Democratic Senate, so those new laws won’t be changed soon. The Board of Education (BOE) the governor appoints will tell child care centers and pre-schools what to teach and how to teach it.
Terry McAuliffe doesn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” I absolutely take him at his word.
The Virginia Preschool Initiative pilot in a four-year trial failed to provide any measurable benefits after spring of first grade.
Progressives at VDOE are pressing forward and contend it just needs more money. Even if in Richmond the program is run by the dreadful RPS.
Build Back Better. Virginia progressives and those in Congress and the White House are of one mind.
The Wall Street Journal points out this morning that the latest draft of Build Back Better:
“would create a large new federal child-care program. For each year that a couple has children under 5, being unmarried could easily save them over $10,000 annually in child-care costs compared with being married.
That’s because of how the subsidies are structured. A single mother earning 75% of the median household income in her state would pay nothing for child care, regardless of how much the child’s father earned.
But the father’s income counts if he is legally part of the family. A husband and wife who each earned about 75% of the median income would have to pay thousands for the same daycare. In 2022-24, the married couple would pay full price, which would likely exceed $15,000 a child a year — $30,000 for two children under 5.”
You will notice that the bill contains all of the progressive ‘features’ of government legislation with which I led this piece.
“Free” child care refers to a very narrow segment of the population. As the Journal points out:
“Most families, especially those that don’t qualify for a full subsidy or that have older children, will pay more for child care. One reason: Under the heading of “quality regulation,” the bill requires that child-care workers be paid a “living wage” and that their earnings be “equivalent to wages for elementary educators with similar credentials and experience.”
No word, as I wrote earlier in this space, on where these child care personnel will come from.
But the enormous new government-created costs and reduction in supply (regulations) of child care and preschool will create popular demand for more help — perhaps a Child Care Corps and certainly more money for subsidies.
Progressive perfection in legislation personified.
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