Where the GOP gets it right - families, jobs, school reform
Published April 12, 2014
by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, published in News and Observer, April 11, 2014.
Republicans may seem like ultimate Scrooges. Many want to slash food stamps, unemployment benefits and just about any program that helps the needy. So they know nothing about poverty, right?
Wrong. Actually, conservatives have been proved right about three big ideas of social policy. Liberals may grimace, but hear me out on these points:
Strong families. Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they’re right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.
One historic mistake by liberals in social policy was the condemnation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning in 1965 of the breakdown of the African-American family. He wasn’t racist; he was prescient, for the same breakdown has since occurred in white-working-class families as well.
Yet if Republicans were shown to be right in their diagnosis of family breakdown as a central problem, they have mostly been proved wrong in their prescriptions. Particularly under President George W. Bush, millions of dollars were spent on marriage promotion initiatives, and follow-up studies show that overwhelmingly they failed to have an effect. Abstinence-only sex education is another demonstrated failure.
What does work to strengthen families and reduce out-of-wedlock births?
There are no magic wands, but family-planning programs have reduced unplanned births – and 70 percent of pregnancies among unmarried women under 30 are unplanned. The Guttmacher Institute calculates that without family-planning services, the rate of unintended teen pregnancies would be 73 percent higher.
So it’s hard to think of a more anti-family policy than the closure of family-planning clinics in states like Texas, or the two-thirds cut (after inflation) in the main federal family-planning program since 1980. That’s a national shame.
One landmark initiative to help in this area is the Affordable Care Act, which requires insurers to offer free long-acting contraceptives to all women. Research suggests strongly that this will reduce abortions and out-of-wedlock births, while strengthening marriage, yet Republicans are fighting this mandate.
Job creation. President Ronald Reagan was right when he said that the best social program is a job. Good jobs also strengthen families. Evidence has grown that jobs are important not only to our economic well-being but also to self-esteem. Indeed, long-term unemployment seems to lead to shortened life expectancy.
Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton pushed to “end welfare as we know it.” Liberals protested that the poor would be devastated, while conservatives hailed this as an avenue out of poverty. In retrospect, neither prediction was right. Welfare reform pushed the poor into jobs, but mostly marginal jobs that rarely offered an escalator to the middle class.
So how do we get good jobs? Expansion of the earned-income tax credit. Job training for people coming out of prison. Reduced incarceration, since a prison record makes people less employable. Subsidies to hire the long-term unemployed. Vocational programs like Career Academies.
Yet these are the kinds of social policies that Democrats tend to embrace and Republicans are leery of.
School reform.Republicans were right to blow the whistle on broken school systems, for education in inner-city schools is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Democrats, in cahoots with teachers’ unions and protective of a dysfunctional system, were long part of the problem.
Bravo to Republicans for protesting that teachers’ unions were sometimes protecting disastrous teachers (including, in New York City, one who passed out drunk in her classroom, with even the principal unable to rouse her). Likewise, some of the most successful schools in the inner cities have been charters in the Knowledge Is Power Program, showing what is possible even in troubled cities.
Yet Democrats, led by President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are coming around, and teachers’ unions have moderated. Republicans sometimes suggest that our biggest educational problem is teachers’ unions themselves. That’s absurd. States with strong teachers’ unions in the North like Massachusetts have better schools than states in the South with weak unions.
Meanwhile, one of the most important evidence-backed school reforms is public preschool and home visitation for disadvantaged kids, yet Republicans are blocking any national move to universal prekindergarten (even though Republican-led states like Oklahoma are leaders in pre-K).
So, come on, Republicans! You’ve highlighted enduring truths about the importance of family, jobs and school reform. But, while your diagnoses deserve respectful consideration, your prescriptions have mostly been proved wrong.
One more thing: These aren’t just abstract policies. These are ethical issues, touching on our obligations to fellow humans.
If we offer the needy nothing but slogans and reprimands –“Strengthen your family! Get a job! Get an education!” – then our anti-poverty programs are a cruel joke, as bankrupt as Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake.”
The New York Times
April 12, 2014 at 10:21 am
Norm Kelly says:
Family planning is DEFINITELY the best way to prevent kids from being born to out of wedlock parents. Does it take initiative by the central planners to have reasonably productive 'family planning'? Of course not! This is where libs get it wrong. Not every 'problem' requires action by the central planners. Not in a 'free' society anyway. Central planners are responsible for EVERY situation in fascist states and totalitarian states. NOT in free countries. Family planning consists of more than abortion. Libs. Did you hear that!?! This is important for you libs to hear. So I'll repeat it. Family planning DOES NOT involve abortion. I know this is the holy grail of the lib religion, but it's the wrong holy grail. (like just about everything else about libs, they are wrong on this!) Family planning starts with EXPECTING adults to be responsible. This means that the responsible party MUST pay at least a portion of, hopefully the majority of, the cost of an abortion so they'll think about ever needing it again. It starts with PREVENTION in the first place. Trojans are inexpensive. Birth control pills are inexpensive. Neither of these requires ANY involvement of the central planners. Covering the cost of inexpensive morning-after pills by US TAX PAYERS is also not required. The way to force adults to be responsible is to MAKE ADULTS PAY for themselves when they need to take advantage of pregnancy prevention methods. I AM NOT responsible for YOUR ACTIONS! YOU ARE! And the only way to make sure you are responsible is to GET THE CENTRAL PLANNERS out of the family planning business! Just another area where the central planners DON'T BELONG!
Job creation. Libs get this wrong in 2 ways. First, libs are hell-bent on creating GOVERNMENT jobs. Libs want to pay for roads & bridges to be built & repaired. Except this IS NOT job creation. It is money transfer. Just like MOST other lib programs. Take money from one group to give it to another group. Pointless. Plus there's money lost everytime it has to pass through the hands of the central planners. PRIVATE SECTOR jobs is what spurs the economy. Jobs that are allowed to be created by PRIVATE companies. Another tenet in the lib religion. Another way libs are dead wrong. The current occupant of the White House has gotten it even more wrong than the average lib president. Not only does he only want to create government jobs, perhaps doesn't even know other types of jobs exist, but he actually implements programs and supports programs that punish private sector businesses. Take obamacancer as a perfect example. Take outrageous regulation as another example. Punish private business for creating jobs. Reduce unemployment roles by having people quit looking for a job; they are no longer counted, the number comes down. Ta-da! Magic.
The second way libs get it wrong when it comes to job creation is the idea of job training. We already have some 50+ job training programs in place, just at the central planner level. When libs get the wild hair that they need to sponsor job training because they've screwed the economy through their tax/regulation/socialist policies, they CREATE A NEW job training program. So, you see, for libs it's not about being effective. It's about spending money at the central planner level. It's about more power/control at the central planner level. If it were about creating jobs, there would be a review of existing training programs, eliminating the ineffective ones, and beefing up the effective ones. But that's NOT the lib way. Don't bother with what's already there. It's time to create A NEW way for central planners to spend money. It's not whether ANY program is effective. It's whether libs can CLAIM they are trying to do something, for the people or for the children; if they can claim they've created a program to solve the problem. And just like the current WH occupant, it's not that the problem is actually solved, but that they've created a program. Once the program is created, libs celebrate that the problem is resolved. Their answer always is that they've taken action, therefore the problem is solved. Don't look at the results, cuz that's not what is important. To EVERY lib at the central planner level, it's their intent that is important. They intend to solve the problem, therefore they get credit. Ta-da! It's like magic. Cuz nothing else explains their attitude. For libs it really is magic. They simply do NOT understand why it doesn't make sense to us!
'yet Republicans are blocking any national move to universal prekindergarten'. For good reason. This is NOT a central planner issue. There is NO NEED for our money to be sent to Washington, to be filtered through their fingers, to be returned to the states at a much, much, much diminished level to promote pre-K. And to add to the problem would be the standard requirements that come along with central planner programs and money. We are perfectly capable of setting up our own pre-K program, and it will cost us considerably less if we do it without central planner involvement!
All of the problems mentioned deserve our attention. But most of the problems are best handled at a less-than-centralized level. States are supposed to be allowed to experiment and find what works. Every time the central planners get involved, we end up with one-size-fits all solutions. Like obamacancer. Perhaps someone could show that obamacancer is a good idea from some perspective. But it's doomed to fail because it's central planning at it's worst. A one-size-fits-all plan for something like education, health care/insurance, and most other day-to-day concerns are always doomed to failure. It's just that libs have no other approach to any problem. Their solution is ALWAYS a central planner one-size-fits-all idea. It's absolutely correct for Republicans in Washington to be pushing for state level ideas/solutions. It's time the central planners got back to the US Constitution. Let's put libs in the minority, where they belong.
