Archive for the ‘Bailouts’ Category
Focus on the Underclass, Not the Upper Class
Jan23
By John Feehery
Reflecting his political upbringing, Barack Obama spends an inordinate amount of his time worrying about how the rich are getting richer.
He practices envy politics. The poor are poor not because of their own pathologies, but because the rich are getting richer.
It’s all bullshit. The rich get rich, by and large, by making smart investments, by going to school and getting a good education, by keeping their families together, by not getting addicted to drugs or alcohol, or by having a parent who did all of those things and who passed the wealth down.
The poor stay poor because they make dumb investments (spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need), they drop out of school, they have kids out of wedlock, they get addicted to drugs or alcohol, and they usually have a parent who passes on all of those bad habits.
Barack Obama has focused almost exclusively on the rich getting richer. He has ignored completely what often makes the poor poorer.
Obama spent his early political years as a community organizer, so he knows how poverty happens in the big city. It is the same poverty that infects rural America.
People don’t get jobs if they can’t keep jobs. They can’t seize opportunities if they don’t understand what they are. They can’t get the most out of education if their parents are addicted to crack or meth or crank or pot or booze.
Single motherhood is probably the greatest predictor if a child is going to end up poor. Single motherhood doesn’t work as a social experiment. The government should figure out a way to discourage it from happening.
A kid can’t learn in school if he or she is worried about the gang-banger down the street. The President has said nothing about fighting crime in crime-ridden neighborhoods. He has said nothing about the killing spree that has infected his hometown. Nothing. It is stunning.
The President talks a lot about education reform and many of his ideas are good ones. But the biggest problem facing our schools is not the teachers. The biggest problem facing our worst schools is the students and what the students learn from their parents (or in most cases, parent). This is not a resource problem. This is a habits problem.
Obesity is not the biggest problem facing America. It is a symptom of the biggest problem facing America, which is the passing down of bad habits.
Obama likes to talk about how the rich are screwing America, and how they need to be punished with higher taxes. There are some bad actors in the upper classes, some rip-off artists, some scammers, some greedy S.O.B.’s. But rich people, by and large, got rich because they did it the right way.
There are some poor people who have bad luck. But most have bad habits. And we need to teach them good habits if we want them to advance to the middle class.
Waiver Nation
Sep29
By John Feehery
It used to be that waivers were a bad thing.
It was bad to be put on waivers if you were in the NFL or played Major League Baseball. That meant you were out of a job.
Now, waivers are a good thing.
The Obama Administration announced that it was going to give waivers to the states of No Child Left Behind.
Too many states can’t meet the requirements of NCLB, so they are begging the Feds to give them a break.
If there is one thing that Mr. Obama and all the Republicans running for President agree on, it is that they don’t really love that landmark law legislated by John Boehner and Ted Kennedy and signed into law by W.
It’s too hard. Let’s give the states a waiver.
That, of course, begs the question: If the law is so bad, why don’t you just repeal it. Good question.
Mitt Romney promised that the first thing he would do if elected President would be to give waivers to all 50 states to the health care law signed by Mr. Obama.
Obamacare is a sure loser. All Republicans agree with that. When Romney announced his idea to gut the law, Michele Bachmann chimed in snidely, “well I am going to repeal the law.”
That would seem to make sense in an alternative universe, but we live in the real world, and there ain’t no way the Democrats are going to join with us in repealing Obamacare, so in the meantime, give me a waiver baby.
It seems that every time the Congress passes a dumb law, states want waivers from it. As Rick Perry rightly pointed out, sometimes that even means getting waivers from the Social Security program.
Because of the wonders of our tax code, close to half of the American people get a waiver from paying any Federal taxes. No wonder the country is going broke.
Pretty soon, every body is going to want their own personal waiver from dumb Congressional laws. The problem is that there are so many stupid Congressional laws, that it is hard to know where to start.
We are becoming a waiver nation. I can think of several politicians I would like to see put on waivers.
