Category Archives: News

News

Do government-run public schools succeed at educating children?

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CNS News compares per-pupil costs to the taxpayer to student proficiency levels in a variety of Democrat-dominated cities.

Excerpt:

In Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party held its national convention, the public schools spent a total of $18,241 per student in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In Detroit… the public schools spent a total of $18,361 per student that year.

In Washington, D.C., where the federal government makes its home, it was $23,980.

What did these schools produce while spending more than $18,000 per student? Not well-educated children.

In the Philadelphia public schools in 2015, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores published by the Department of Education, 80 percent of eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Eighty-four percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

In the Detroit public schools, 96 percent of eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Ninety-three percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

In the District of Columbia public schools, 83 percent of the eighth graders were not grade-level proficient in math. Eighty-one percent were not grade-level proficient in reading.

If you pay federal taxes — no matter where you live and no matter where you send your children to school — you help subsidize the public schools in Philadelphia, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

In fact, if you pay federal taxes you help subsidize the public schools all across America.

What I have noticed about American education is that whenever anything is said about the poor performance of the government-run public schools, the teacher unions and school administrators all cry that the problem is not enough money.

But as you can see, we have been spending more and more money on these schools, but not getting any return on the investment:

Education spending has tripled since 1970
Education spending has tripled since 1970

Where is all that money going? A lot of it is donated to Democrats:

Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union
Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union

(Source)

The Democrats repay the teacher unions by protecting them from competition from private schools and homeschoolers. Democrats shut down every attempt by Republicans to reform public school education to make it more responsive to parents.

In the free market, there is no protection for businesses that fail to perform. They have to shape up or shut down. Maybe instead of shoveling taxpayer money into a bottomless pit, we should give money for each child’s education directly to the parents, and let theparents choose schools that actually focus on the job of educating the children in valuable skills?

The CNS News article continues:

The cost and the poor performance of public schools in the United States should inspire Congress to do two things: Shut down the federal Department of Education and enact legislation creating complete school choice for families that reside in the District of Columbia.

Voters in states and local communities elsewhere in the country can then decide for themselves whether or not to replace the relatively small percentage of local school revenue that now comes from the federal government.

But the right decision would be for states and local communities to stop giving their education money exclusively to government-run schools.

Instead, they should give that money to parents — and let parents decide where to send their children to school.

Communities should grant every child in their jurisdiction a voucher worth the same amount of money currently spent per pupil in the local government schools. Then they should let families decide whether they want to send their children to one of those government schools or to a private school.

Attaching the money to the child makes the parents the consumer, and empowers them to buy the right school – the school that does the job that they want the school to do. Instead of focusing on global warming, gay rights, transgender bathrooms and putting condoms on cucumbers, the schools should be focused on math, engineering, technology and science. STEM is where the money is – not in liberal crybaby indoctrination.

News

European countries generously fund terrorism suspects with welfare

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

This is from the Washington Free Beacon.

Excerpt:

Several terrorist suspects were collecting Belgian welfare benefits while plotting attacks in Paris and Brussels, according to investigators.

Belgian authorities concluded that at least five of the suspected conspirators in the Brussels and Paris terrorist attacks were partly financed by the nation’s social-welfare system, receiving in total about $56,000, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Surviving Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam collected about $21,000 in unemployment benefits until three weeks before the November assaults. Abdeslam, who was a manager and part owner of a Belgian bar at the time, should have been ineligible for public assistance, officials said.

Numerous suspected terrorists involved in a thwarted Belgian attack had also received welfare benefits, according to a judge who sentenced more than a dozen people who were part of an Islamic State cell to prison last month.

Tom Keatinge, director of the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the European benefit system was “vulnerable to abuse for terrorist financing purposes.”

Keatinge suggested that European governments offer benefits as vouchers or take a closer look at how people are spending their benefits.

“If you’re paying benefit to people in certain parts of Brussels, maybe you need to be a little more observant about who you’re paying to, and what they might be doing with it,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

The Paris and Brussels terrorist suspects who collected welfare were citizens of the European Union. Current Belgian law prohibits benefits from being suspended until an individual is convicted of terrorism or the suspect leaves the country.

ISIS issued a 2015 manual called “How to Survive in the West: A Mujahid Guide” that included a section advising jihadists,“If you can claim extra benefits from a government, then do so.”

While Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Denmark have collectively severed hundreds of people from welfare who traveled to Syria to fight with ISIS, European countries have struggled to find a longstanding solution because of generous social-welfare systems.

This is interesting:

Fred Cauderlier, the Belgian prime minister’s spokesman, defended the nation’s welfare system.

“This is a democracy,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We have no tools to check how people spend their benefits.”

No, that’s not democracy, that a socialist welfare state – the kind favored by our own Democrat party. And the Democrat party actively resists attaching any kind of accountability or work requirement to welfare payments. After all, this is how they buy the votes of their favored groups, and they need those votes. They need those votes bad enough to import them, too. And so what if a few of you taxpayers have to die in terrorist attacks so that our Democrat betters can get the votes they need to seize power? The important thing is that they are seen as generous and they get to tell you how to live your life.

News

Foreseeing America’s future: Spain’s Social Security system goes bankrupt

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Socialism in action: Youth unemployment rate in European countries
Socialism in action: Youth unemployment rate in European countries

I lamented the election of an outright socialist (Zapatero) as leader of Spain when it happened (in 2004, and again in 2008), and indeed he did nothing to fix the problems with unfunded entitlement liabilities in Spain.

Investors Business Daily explains what happened:

Spain is dangling on the edge of a very dangerous fiscal precipice. Not only is its government budget still deep in the red, but its social security fund is about to completely run out of money. Once that happens, the real fun begins.

As recent reports note, Spain’s social security fund will run out of money sometime in 2018. The reason? “Bonus payments” to pensioners, similar to expansions in Social Security benefits for current retirees and women that Hillary Clinton seeks to put in place in the U.S. Unless the Spanish government finds the money to patch the coming social security blowout, deep cuts in benefits or steep rises in taxes will have to be made.

And this is a problem that won’t just go away with improvement in the business cycle. “The financial problems are not a temporary problem,” noted Spain’s El Confidencial newspaper, as translated by financial advisor and blogger Michael Shedlock. “Revenue from social security contributions is not sufficient to meet payment obligations.”

How bad is it? Well, so far this year there’s a 12.24% deficit in social security contributions vs. the forecast. That gap will likely worsen in coming years, as more workers opt for retirement and fewer people enter the workforce. Payments to some people already deep in retirement may have to be cut — adding to the already disruptive fiscal chaos that has roiled Spain, despite its rebound from the financial crisis.

We have a similar problem in the United States, thanks to the Democrats. A long time ago, the Democrats created a Ponzi scheme called Social Security in order to buy votes of retirees today with money to be paid by younger American workers tomorrow. There is no Social Security fund, just buying the votes of one group of voters with the votes of a much less politically-aware group of voters (young people).

The same IBD article assessed the American system, as well:

By 2034, the U.S. Social Security program, too, will be bankrupt. We have one edge on Spain: We can print our own money. But as we’ve found over the past eight years of quantitative easing, that doesn’t exactly solve the problem. And anyway, while inflation is virtually zero today, there’s no guarantee it will be the same in 18 years.

[…]Today, the total unfunded liability of the U.S. Social Security program is in excess of $25 trillion. There are already 60 million Social Security recipients, with some 10,000 baby boomers retiring each and every day. Three out of five current retirees depend on Social Security for their income. Knowing this reckoning is coming and doing nothing is malfeasance of the worst sort.

In Spain, there is so little free market capitalism that young people cannot even find jobs. The unemployment rate for youth in Spain is second only to Greece – the same Greece that elected the socialists for decades. So young people cannot find work in either Greece or Spain. If the young people cannot pay into these systems at the same rate that people did in the past, that just makes them go bankrupt faster.

Millennials, take note. When you vote Democrat, you are voting to pay some of what you earn into a system that will not be there for you when you retire. I have paid into it, and it will be bankrupt long before I retire. And the Democrats are importing more takers (unskilled illegal immigrants, Syrian refugees, elderly family members, etc.) who will be taking more out of the system than they pay into the system. You are making yourselves into slaves because of your gullibility, listening to the lies that your teachers and professors tell you about who to vote for. Think for yourself.

The wonderful thing about having other countries is that you can look at them and see what happens when they implement different laws and policies. Socialism – of the sort championed by the Democrat party in America – has already been tried. It’s been tried in Greece, it’s been tried in North Korea, it’s been tried in Cuba, and in Spain. It’s not working anywhere. It’s not working here, either.