Sunday, August 26, 2012

Charles Blow's Inadvertent Indictment of Leftist Politics

Charles Blow is a Democrat-oriented columnist for the New York Times. He has written a column this week entitled "Starving the Future." Blow's intention in the column was to build a case for Democratic entitlement policies (and thereby to attack VP candidate Paul Ryan) by envisaging the dire competitive future that American children face vis-à-vis their Chinese and Indian peers.

Here's Blow's rationale, excerpted in his own words from the article and presented faithfully and true to the flow of his rhetoric:

  1. "Emerging economic powers China and India are heavily investing in educating the world’s future workers while we squabble about punishing teachers and coddling children."
  2. Why is the future so bright for the children of China and India? Because "by 2030, China will have 200 million college graduates — more than the entire U.S. work force," and "by 2017, India will graduate 20 million people from high school — or five times as many as in the United States."
  3. What is it that makes the future so bleak for American children? The facts that "Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment," "More than a quarter of U.S. children have a chronic health condition, such as obesity or asthma, threatening their capacity to learn," "More than 22 percent of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2007," and "More than half of U.S. postsecondary students drop out without receiving a degree."
  4. Also, Blow would like you to know that American "students regularly come to school hungry because they are not getting enough to eat at home," and "The saddest are the children who cry when we get out early for a snow day because they won’t get lunch."

Do you follow the line of reasoning there? China and India are about to dominate the future workforce by producing more workers in the youngest demographic than we have in our total workforce. The solution is to make sure our children can do well in school by using government entitlement programs to combat hunger and poverty among our children and to hire more teachers.

Blow's statistics are impressive and should alarm us all. Blow's reasoning from them is insane.

The nations that he says are about to dominate us (China and India) have HIGHER rates of childhood poverty and hunger than we do. By quite a bit. At least, that's what UNICEF says (not exactly a right-wing group).

Also, these nations that are about to dominate us have HIGHER student-teacher ratios than we do. Ours (sitting at about 14) is less than half as much as India's and is slightly better than China's.

How are China and India about to dominate the world economy and leave the USA in the dust? Not by having more effective government handouts. Not by having more teachers in their schools. China and India are about to surpass us simply by having more children.

American society hates children. It is sacred to us to make sure that we can delay childbearing, prevent childbearing, murder children before they are born, and normalize and promote sexual relationships that have no hope of producing children. With each passing generation we have fewer and fewer children.

Charles Blow and his party are the number-one reason why.

Our future is not hungry for more government welfare. Our future is not hungry for more liberal indoctrination. Our future is starving all right, but it is starving for functional family life and an embrace and promotion of historic traditional parenting as a blessing to our society.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good word.

Paul S. said...

Wow, great stuff here Bart. Right on.

Ray said...

What constitutes "poverty" in America is highly subjective. I carried a PB&J sandwich to school everyday and a bag of chips. By some organizations standards I would have been classified as poor and malnourished.

Also, saw a report last week that only Sweden spends more per-child on education than the US. CA, constitutionally, must spend 40% of its State budget on education and yet they are at the bottom. Certainly money is not the problem.

Bart Barber said...

Ray,

PB&J only constitutes "poverty" if you're having to consume that creamy garbage.