Will American Liberals Ever Wake Up?By W.A. Beatty
America
is in the throes of a presidential campaign that presents real hope for
the future of America (Romney) versus the same-old, same-old (Obama).
While it appears right now that Obama and his socialist policies will lose in November, America will still be faced with many problems that have crept into society in the past fifty years.
While America has many liberal-caused problems, let's examine just three of them: welfare, race relations, and education.
Welfare:
In his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon
B. Johnson declared "war on poverty." Johnson's speech led Congress to
pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of
Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of
federal funds targeted against poverty. Since then, the federal
government has spent approximately $16 trillion on welfare. Welfare includes,
among other programs, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program
(SNAP), the former food stamp program, and unemployment insurance.
In
2011, the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and
Government Spending of the House of Representatives Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing
on the issue of "Duplication, Overlap, and Inefficiencies in Federal
Welfare Programs." At that hearing, Patricia A. Dalton, the chief
operating officer of the General Accountability Office (GAO), testified
that the GAO could not identify all existing welfare programs in the
various federal departments and agencies or determine how much they
cost.
She
said further that she and the GAO could not give a specific number of
welfare programs or even "hazard a guess" as to what percentage of those
programs are actually accomplishing the purposes for which they were
created.
America now spends 15 percent
of its Gross Domestic Product on welfare. Welfare is now the third
most expensive government spending program. Welfare spending has
outpaced spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and defense.
And welfare rolls and spending continue to expand. Welfare spending
increased on SNAP alone between FY2008 and FY2011 from $39.3 billion to
$75.3 billion. Over the next 10 years, welfare spending is projected
to cost taxpayers $10.3 trillion. The Obama administration is now
working to expand welfare further, spending $2.5 million on an ad campaign to get more people on welfare.
While campaigning in 2008, Obama
said that "the war in Iraq is costing each household about $100 per
month." But applying the same spending criteria revealed that welfare
cost each household $560 per month in 2009 and $638 per month in 2010.
So where are we now? A study
in April 2012 by the Cato Institute says that America spends nearly $1
trillion each year to fight poverty. Since Obama took office, federal
welfare spending has increased by 41 percent.
But despite increased spending, the poverty rate that remains at nearly
15 percent, roughly where it was in 1965, when President Johnson
declared his War on Poverty. In fact, the poverty rate has never fallen
below 10.5 percent. The Cato Institute study also says that current
programs are focused on making welfare recipients more comfortable --
providing more food, better shelter, and health care for poor people --
rather than proving the tools that will help poor people escape poverty.
Race Relations: Attorney General Eric Holder, in 2009, said that Americans are cowards
when it comes to discussing race. Well, Mr. Holder, I am not a coward,
so here is my discussion. Too many blacks have succumbed to the idea of
"blaming" somebody and/or something for their problems. They have
learned that idea from, among others, Rev. Jesse (love child) Jackson
and Rev. Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton. For most blacks, their favorite
target for blame is "whitey." Their favorite word has become "racism." Any
criticism of anything they don't like is "racist." Black cultural
integrity can be good, but not when the culture is manufactured in the
name of a blame-game.
From New Century Foundation's The Color of Crime, we learn:
Police and the justice system are not biased against minorities.
Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder.
Blacks are eight times more likely than people of other races to commit robbery.
When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more
likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to
use a knife.
Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime
against a white than vice-versa, and 136 times more likely to commit
robbery.
Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.
Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year
involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit
15 percent.
We also learn
that whites constitute 72.4 percent of America's population but
constitute 35.6 percent of all recipients of Aid for Dependent Children
(AFDC). Blacks constitute about 12.9 percent of America's population
but constitute 37.2 percent of AFDC recipients. One argument loudly
forwarded by black "leaders" is that whites make up the majority of
welfare recipients. That fact is true from an absolute numbers
perspective, but not from a percentage of the American population
perspective.
What does all of this mean? Blacks are going to have to save themselves.
Blacks are not helped by the claim that all
their problems are racially motivated. Black-on-black crime is not the
fault of "whitey." Out-of-wedlock births are not the fault of
whites. High dropout rates among blacks are not the fault of whites.
The solution is not to cry "racism" and blame everything on whites. And
blacks won't find a solution to their problems by appealing to the
government.
Welfare
programs have done a lot to suppress black families by subsidizing
family fragmentation and promoting multi-generational dependency. So
cast off your shackles of government dependency and work to correct
problems. Will you receive help from "whitey?" Yes, but we
non-guilt-ridden whites won't do it if the answer is going to be more
government, guilt, and charges of "racism" every time you don't like
what's being offered as a solution. Black problems aren't solved by
naming streets after Martin Luther King, Jr. or declaring a national
King Holiday or a Black History Month. These are liberal crumbs to
appease the black community, but have any of these actions actually
helped blacks solve any problems?
It was Obama who said he would heal America's racial divide. Well, we certainly have a racial divide now, and Obama continues to exacerbate it.
To paraphrase FDR, "the only thing you [blacks] have to lose are your chains of dependency and victimhood."
Education: People who attended
public school in the 1960s and early 1970s experienced an educational
system far different from that of today. In the '60s and early '70s,
teachers still had authority to actually teach and discipline students.
If a student turned in failing work, teachers didn't hesitate to assign
an F or even hold a student back a grade.
Educators
believed that education was more important than making students feel
good about themselves. It wasn't uncommon for a teacher and/or school
administrator to use corporal punishment on disruptive students when
necessary.
Today's
teachers have no authority. They aren't allowed to use corporal
punishment, or to do anything that will injure student self-image or
self-esteem. Many public schools have become a training center for a
quite liberal social agenda.
As a result, confidence in public schools has fallen to a new low of 29 percent. That number was 58 percent in 1973.
Americans
lost more and more confidence in public schools as schools turned away
from sound teaching and toward social training grounds, as they replaced
teaching sound moral values with decadence and promiscuity, as they
rewrote American history and replaced it with secular lies.
The
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S.
Department of Education, periodically administers the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to American students in grades
4, 8, and 12. In all subject areas, private-school students
consistently score well above the national average. According to the NCES,
in 2006, in grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students
in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public
schools. Only through "adjusting"
for student attributes such as ethnicity, family income, and English
language proficiency, as well as the skill and experience of the
teaching staff, was the NCES able to get public school student
performances up to or higher than private school students.
As a result, more
parents are opting to put their kids in private schools, where they can
be taught the basics, but also can be taught morals and values they
wouldn't learn in public schools.
Will liberals ever
wake up and face the facts that their ideas and policies don't work?
How many times must they be shown that policies they implement have
never worked? You would think that fifty years would be long enough for
them to view the results of their labors. But in the face of what
their policies have wrought, their only response is that America has not
spent enough money! For liberals, evidence be damned -- it's their
policies that count.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/will_american_liberals_ever_wake_up.html
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