No, Teachers Are Not Underpaid

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Salaries lag in some states, but nationally, wages and benefits outpace the private sector.

by Andrew Biggs, Jason Richwine

Recent protests across the country have reinforced the perception that public school teachers are dramatically underpaid. They’re not: the average teacher already enjoys market-level wages plus retirement benefits vastly exceeding those of private-sector workers. Across-the-board salary increases, such as those enacted in Arizona, West Virginia, and Kentucky, are the wrong solution to a non-problem.

Comparing Salaries

Most commentary on teacher pay begins and ends with the observation that public school teachers earn lower salaries than the average college graduate. This is true, but in what other context do we assume that every occupation requiring a college degree should get paid the same? Engineers make about 25 percent more than accountants, but “underpaid” accountants are not demonstrating in the streets.

Teachers rally outside the state Capitol on the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters

Wages are not determined by years of schooling but by the supply and demand for skills. These skills vary by field of study. About half of teachers major in education, among the least-rigorous fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Incoming education majors have lower SAT or GRE scores than candidates in other fields, but—thanks to grade inflation—they enjoy the highest GPAs. Data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment indicate that students majoring in social science, humanities, and STEM fields not only start college with greater skills than education majors but also learn more along the way.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analyzes the skill requirements of different jobs, assigning each a pay grade based on the federal government’s General Schedule (GS). At the lowest skill levels—a GS-6 on the federal scale—teachers earn salaries about 26 percent higher than similar white-collar workers. At GS-11, the highest skill level, teaching pays 17 percent less than other white-collar jobs. This explains how shortages can exist for specialized positions teaching STEM, languages, or students with disabilities, while elementary education postings may receive dozens of applications per job opening.

Contrary to myth, teachers are generally not foregoing higher salaries by staying in the classroom.

The average public school teaching position rated an 8.8 on the federal GS scale. After adjustment to reflect the time that teachers work outside the formal school day, the BLS data show that public school teachers on average receive salaries about 8 percent above similar private-sector jobs.

Contrary to myth, teachers are generally not foregoing higher salaries by staying in the classroom. Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation show that teachers who change to non-teaching jobs take an average salary cut of about 3 percent. Studies using administrative records in Florida, Missouri, Georgia, and Montana showed similar results; the Georgia study found “strong evidence that very few of those who leave teaching take jobs that pay more than their salary as teachers.”

It’s Not Just Wages

It’s true that teacher salaries in several states are lagging. Teachers in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma have good reason to be dissatisfied: their salaries rank near the bottom nationally, even after controlling for cost of living. Even in these seemingly underpaying states, though, pensions can more than make up the difference.

Oklahoma teachers accrue new pension benefits each year, with a present value equal to 30 percent of their annual salaries. Subtract Oklahoma teachers’ own contribution of 7 percent, and employer-paid retirement benefits are worth 23 percent of annual salaries. By contrast, the typical private-sector employer contribution to a 401k plan amounts only to about 3 percent of employee pay.

Many teachers also qualify for retiree health coverage, now practically extinct in the private sector. In some states, retiree health care is modest: Oklahoma teachers get an insurance supplement of about $100 per month. But for teachers in Illinois, future retiree health benefits are worth an additional 8 percent of annual pay, while in North Carolina, retiree health benefits are worth an additional 12.5 percent.

As the New York Times recently reported, public-employee retirement and health benefits are bleeding dry state and local budgets. Neither the public nor teachers fully appreciate the costs of these programs. We forget the value of benefits when considering how teacher pay compares with private-sector work. And research suggests that teachers value deferred compensation less than upfront salary.

Possible Reforms

This opens the possibility of a constructive reform. States could offer newly hired teachers higher pay, coupled with switching those teachers to a generous, well-designed 401(k)-type retirement plan. In Oklahoma, for instance, the state could give new teachers an 11 percent raise—costless to the taxpayer—by providing a 401(k) plan with an employer contribution, which would still be four times greater than private-sector levels.

Research has found that better pay has only a modest impact on teacher quality.

For areas with legitimate teaching shortages—such as in STEM fields or special education—districts could offer targeted salary increases. A strategic approach to filling teacher shortages is particularly important to poorer states such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, where resources are limited.

Across-the-board pay increases, by contrast, are expensive and inefficient. Arizona governor Doug Ducey’s promised 20 percent teacher salary increase will cost $400 million annually before a single new teacher is hired. Such efforts create no incentive for prospective teachers to specialize in areas where shortages exist. And if the salary boost winds up reducing teacher retirements, fewer spots will open up for better-qualified new teachers. Research has found that better pay has only a modest impact on teacher quality.

Teachers enjoy widespread public favor, and their desire for higher pay is understandable. But no nationwide crisis of teacher compensation exists. Most teachers receive market-level salaries and generous retirement benefits. Local hiring problems can and should be addressed without granting windfall benefits to teachers whose compensation is already better than adequate.

Reprinted from the American Enterprise Institute.

Andrew Biggs

Jason Richwine

Jason Richwine

Jason Richwine is a public policy analyst in Washington, D.C.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Myth of Institutionalized Learning

The Humanitarian Hoax of the Muslim Brotherhood

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The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Ikhwan, Arabic for Muslim Brotherhood (MB), is an organizational humanitarian hoax being perpetrated on the American people to bring Islam to America. Islam in America would not be problematic if it was a religion like Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism – it isn’t. Islam is a comprehensive socio-political, military, religious way of life with its own governing supremacist religious sharia laws that are antithetical to Western cultural norms and America’s governing secular Constitutional laws.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an enemy of the United States.

The goal of Islam is to convert the world to Islam. The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood in America is SETTLEMENT not assimilation. Settlement is the incremental process of making Islam familiar, acceptable, normative, and ultimately replacing secular American laws with supremacist religious Islamic sharia law.

The treasonous conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots is fully documented in its 1991 Explanatory Memorandum that details the strategic goal for the group in North America and the necessity for organizational acceptance. The Muslim Brotherhood understood that America is structured by organizations so the parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has spawned hundreds of offspring organizations with the same subversive settlement goal and the same deceitful operating principles.

The Explanatory Memorandum explicitly states, “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The Muslim Brotherhood mission statement is crystal clear – Islam intends to subjugate (settle) host populations in North America and replace host religions and cultures with supremacist Islam and Islamic sharia law. So where is the hoax?

The Explanatory Memorandum was a secret strategic document for internal use only and certainly not intended for public consumption by its targeted society – the United States of America. The Memorandum describes in chilling detail the overarching deceit required to present the Muslim Brotherhood and every one of its hundreds of offshoots as peaceful organizations when their stated objective is to destroy Western civilization and replace it with Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood disguises itself as the compassionate advocate for peace and Muslim tolerance when in fact it is America’s existential enemy – the Muslim Brotherhood is a dangerous humanitarian hoax.

Saul Alinsky instructed his followers to cut their hair, blend in, and destroy the American capitalist system from within – so did the Muslim Brotherhood. In Arabic there is a word for this deception – taqiyyah – lying in the service of Islam. There is no equivalent word in English – only the equivalent deceit. Like Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum details the seditious steps necessary to overthrow the American government from within by blending in, keeping a low profile, and becoming part of the organizational/political structure.

Former radical Muslima Isik Alba describes the 8 types of Islamic jihad currently being waged against Western countries in its campaign to rule the world under Islam – it is the Muslim Brotherhood’s treasonous conspiracy in action:

  • Population jihad – open borders and mass migration of Muslims into Western countries.
  • Media jihad – buying media channels and directing content to promote the deceit that Islam is a religion of peace.
  • Education jihad – buying university chairs and directing curriculum content to promote the deceit that Islam is a religion of peace.
  • Economic jihad – investing in Western banks, properties, businesses, and stocks to buy cultural influence promoting the deceit that Islam is a religion of peace.
  • Physical jihad – killing non-believers until everyone left is either Muslim or recites the Muslim declaration of faith.
  • Legal jihad – bringing sharia tribunals, councils, and courts to the West.
  • Humanitarian jihad – Muslim “humanitarian” organizations requiring registration as a Muslim to receive humanitarian aid and then further requiring prayer meetings and enrollment in Muslim schools to continue receiving humanitarian aid.
  • Political jihad – Muslim politicians in office downplaying the role of Islam in violence and terror.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 has been declared a terrorist group by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the United Arab Emirates. Why not in the United States?

The biggest criticism after 9/11 was that the security services failed to connect the dots. In 2001 President George W. Bush disingenuously tried to separate Islam from terrorism by announcing that Islam is a religion of peace. Fifteen of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers were Saudi yet Bush allowed Saudi nationals to fly back to Saudi Arabia when no other airplanes were allowed to fly. WHY?

America has a complex connection to Saudi Arabia and so does the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabian oil was first discovered in commercial quantities by Americans in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1938. The US went into business with Saudi Arabia and in 1943 the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) was formed. Oil revenues became the primary source of wealth for Saudi Arabia replacing its tourist income derived from pilgrimages to Mecca. Oil made Saudi Arabia rich – very rich. America needed a guaranteed source of oil and Saudi Arabia needed its oil wells protected – a deal was made with exceptions to every rule.

The Muslim Brotherhood came to Saudi Arabia in the 1950s when thousands of Egyptian teachers were recruited to work in Saudi Arabia’s new public schools. The Brotherhood used religion for political purposes but the Saudis refused to allow that platform because it posed a threat to the Saudi royal family. The Brotherhood stayed quiet for years but eventually tried to influence Saudi society. In 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood celebrated the election of Mohammad Morsi in Egypt and stunned the Saudis by openly supported uprisings in other Arab countries. In March, 2014 Saudi Arabia declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

The discovery of the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum in 2004 was shocking and should have been enough to declare the Muslim Brotherhood and every one of its offshoots a terrorist organization in America including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) but that did not happen. WHY NOT?

Pro-oil President George W. Bush protected the Muslim Brotherhood throughout his presidency by repeating the deceit that Islam is a religion of peace. Even after 2004 when the discovery of the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum left no doubt that the Islamists intended to settle America and replace the US Constitution with religious sharia law – Bush protected the Brotherhood at the expense of America’s homeland security.

Pro-Muslim President Barack Obama went much farther by welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood into America and seeding the government with seditious MB operatives. Together Obama and the Brotherhood with CAIR scrubbed any mention of Islam, jihadis, or the stated ideological goals of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood to conduct civilization jihad and destroy America from within.

Pro-Muslim huckster-in-chief Barack Obama successfully conned America into believing that the Muslim Brotherhood was a peaceful moderate voice in Islam. Americans were so enamored with Obama that they actually believed his subversive lies. Rachel Ehrenfeld has written a comprehensive article supporting the argument for President Trump to classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Cynthia Farahat, a Fellow at the Middle East Forum, has written an expose about current Islamists with ties to terrorism lobbying Congress.

It is time for America to equate terrorism with treason. The Muslim Brotherhood and every one of its vile offshoots are terrorist organizations and should be classified as such. Every member of Congress should be required to read the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum which clearly states the purpose of the MB in America – to destroy America from within and settle it under supremacist Islamic sharia law. Any member of Congress, after reading the Explanatory Memorandum, who refuses to reclassify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is either too corrupt or too indoctrinated to hold office. Terrorism is treason. It is that simple.

The Humanitarian Hoax of the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be allowed to continue in the United States. Reuters 3.21.18 article “Saudi Arabia Purges Muslim Brotherhood Influence From Schools” reports Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is revamping its educational curriculum to eradicate any trace of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is time for the United States to reverse Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood infestation and follow the Prince’s lead to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood from America. Let’s begin by scrubbing Obama’s pro-Muslim training manuals from all security and law enforcement training. Eventually we can remove Obama’s treasonous stain on America.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on Goudsmit Pundicity.

How we create fossil fuel resources

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Resources are things you can use. But despite the popular expression “natural resources,” nature gives us very little in the way of usable resources. It gives us raw materials but we need to use human ingenuity to transform those raw materials into resources.

Human beings are not resource depleters, we are resource creators.

That’s the issue I want to discuss here, focusing on energy resources.

We have more fossil fuel resources than ever before

The catastrophic depletion argument says we are depleting energy resources by using fossil fuels, which will be disastrous to us and to future generations because we have made ourselves dependent on these resources. In reality we have more resources now, including more fossil fuel resources, than people had 300 years ago, before we started producing fossil fuels.

Look at this chart.

image

The line on the bottom shows the world’s consumption of oil over time. Notice how the line slopes slightly up, which means every year on average we’re consuming a little bit more oil. Then the line on top represents our oil reserves.

Think about this for a second. We use more oil every year but we have more oil every year.

How we create fossil fuel resources

How is this possible? What’s going on is that fossil fuel resources are created, not taken. We’re taught to think of oil reserves as a fixed amount that nature gives us that we’re constantly using up. That’s not how it works. What happens instead is that people find progressively better ways to find, extract, refine, and use oil.

For example, in the 1800s people discovered something called “skunk oil.” It was unusable because it had a lot of sulfur in it and smelled like rotten eggs. Then people figured out how to refine it so this previously unusable product became oil. They used ingenuity to expand the supply of usable oil. The popular term “oil reserves” just refers to the amount that’s currently in inventory: basically, the amount it makes sense to develop given our current technology and economics.

As we evolve, as we figure out new ways to turn non-resources into resources, we can take more and more unusable hydrocarbon and make it usable. With any given fossil fuel there’s likely at least ten times more of it than we’ve used in the entire history of civilization.

That’s one reason we shouldn’t be worried about running out of fossil fuels. The other reason not to be concerned is that we have the unlimited ability to create other energy resources as well.

image

This doesn’t mean we can just ban some form of energy today without severe consequences. What it does mean is that over time we could potentially transform anything in the world into energy. Just the potential of nuclear technology alone shows that we don’t have to worry about running out of energy.

The key to abundant energy resources is to leave people free so that overtime they can continue to evolve new and better ways to get energy.

If people are free, then even if you would run out of fossil fuels in 200 years, you would gradually transition to something else. If fossil fuels became more scarce relative to demand, the price of fossil fuels would go up and then that would incentivize other people to compete.

I call this “evolving energy.” We’ll never run out of energy as long as we are always free to produce and use the most cost effective energy at any given time. The challenge we face isn’t using up a fixed amount of energy. There’s just an ongoing challenge of figuring out new ways to create the best form of energy under freedom.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence Make History in Dallas

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For the first time in the organization’s history, a sitting president and vice president both addressed NRA members at the 147th Annual Meetings in Dallas on Friday during the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum.  This makes the second year in a row that President Trump’s visit is one for the history books.   Last year, he became the first sitting president to attend the Annual Meetings in more than three decades when he spoke at the 2017 Leadership Forum in Atlanta.  The last president to attend the NRA Annual Meetings was Ronald Reagan in 1983.

And just as he did last year, President Trump promised to the cheering, capacity crowd that he will protect the firearms freedom of law-abiding Americans and that recent efforts to restrict the Second Amendment will be staunchly opposed by his administration.  Vice President Pence echoed the president’s sentiments, noting to the crowd that both he and President Trump will stand strong against any attempts to undermine our freedom.

In addition to the president and vice president, the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum featured speakers from across the country, including elected officials, first responders, veterans, NRA leaders, and freedom-loving Americans from all walks of life:

Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President, NRA 

Chris Cox, Executive Director, NRA-ILA

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX)

Gov. Pete Ricketts (R-NE)

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) 

Dana Loesch, NRA Spokesperson

Mark “Oz” Geist, Former Marine, Author of “13 Hours”

Mark Robinson, Second Amendment Activist, Greensboro, NC.

Diamond & Silk, Social Media Commentators

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union

Charlie Kirk, Founder, Turning Point USA and Kyle Kashuv, Student, Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School, Parkland, FL

VIDEO: Debunking Communism from ‘The School of Life’ — A Rebuttal of Karl Marx

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Steven Crowder presents a rebuttal to the ever-popular School of Life’s defense of Communism and Karl Marx.

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EXCLUSIVE VIDEOS and PHOTOS: Communists Celebrate Their Failed Ideology in NYC on May Day 2018

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EDITORS NOTE: The original The School of Life “Political Theory – Karl Marx” video:

Why Florida is a Magnet for Illegal Alien Workers

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In 1986, 32 years ago, Congress agreed to implement a mandatory system in the U.S.A. To protect American workers jobs by verifying that all workers were legal workers. Obviously that did not happen as all attempts failed.

In 2010 Governor Scott ran promising to make E-Verify mandatory in Florida. He lied. In 2012 he said it was a Federal not state matter. Another lie.

In 2017 the Miami Herald reported:

South Florida is home to nearly half a million immigrants who are in the country illegally, making it the metropolitan area with the fifth-largest undocumented population in the United States, according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center.

About 450,000 unauthorized immigrants reside in the greater Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area, Pew found, based on 2014 estimates from government data. About 55,000 live in the city of Miami alone.

In 2007 the cost to Floridians was $1.85 Billion, in 2017 it was more than triple 2007 at $6.3 Billion. Unchecked, will it triple again in another decade to $20 Billion?

Meanwhile, seven states around us in the South passed what Scott said wasn’t their responsibility and so today we are the only state in the Southeastern part of the country that does not have mandatory E-Verify.

A campaign was launched by Floridians for E-Verify Now to get on the 2018 state ballot to be voted on to become a Constitutional Amendment. Early votes by the Commission were favorable but the final vote was negative. The Chamber of Commerce, Ag owners and criminal illegal alien employers exerted pressure to kill it.

So what some would ask?

The answer is as illegal aliens invade the country looking for jobs they will come to Florida where their legality won’t be checked.

Currently Chairman Bob Goodlatte has a bill, HR 4760, in Congress with 95 co-sponsors that includes mandatory E-Verify. We need to support the bill to protect Florida’s workers and our wallets.

Florida has 27 Representatives in Congress. ONLY FIVE representatives are currently co-sponsors. They are: Rep. Rutherford ®, Rep. Yoho ®, Rep. Posey ®, Rep. Rooney ® and Rep. Bilarakis ®. They are all Republicans and should be applauded for trying to protect Florida’s workers.

That leaves 22 Florida Representatives who either don’t care to protect Florida workers or are being compensated in some way to not support HR 4760.

Give them a call and ask them their reason for not wanting to support Florida’s legal workers. Encourage them to join Goodlatte and get the legislation passed.

Congressional Delegation from Florida

SENATE

Name Room Phone
Nelson, Bill 716 HSOB 202-224-5274
Rubio, Marco 284 RSOB 202-224-3041

HOUSE

District Name Room Phone
1 Gaetz. Matt 507 CHOB 202-225-4136
2 Dunn, Neal 423 CHOB 202-225-5235
3 Yoho, Ted 511 CHOB 202-225-5744
4 Rutherford, John 230 CHOB 202-225-2501
5 Lawson, Al 1337 LHOB 202-225-0123
6 DeSantis, Ron 1524 LHOB 202-225-2706
7 Murphy, Stephanie 1237 LHOB 202-225-4035
8 Posey, Bill 2150 RHOB 202-225-3671
9 Soto, Darren 1429 LHOB 202-225-9889
10 Demings, Val 238 CHOB 202-225-2176
11 Webster, Daniel 1210 LHOB 202-225-1002
12 Bilirakis, Gus M. 2112 RHOB 202-225-5755
13 Crist, Charlie 427 CHOB 202-225-5961
14 Castor, Kathy 2052 RHOB 202-225-3376
15 Ross, Dennis 436 CHOB 202-225-1252
16 Buchanan, Vern 2104 RHOB 202-225-5015
17 Rooney, Tom 2160 RHOB 202-225-5792
18 Mast, Brian 2182 RHOB 202-225-3026
19 Rooney, Francis 120 CHOB 202-225-2536
20 Hastings, Alcee L. 2353 RHOB 202-225-1313
21 Frankel, Lois 1037 LHOB 202-225-3001
22 Deutch, Ted 2447 RHOB 202-225-9890
23 Wasserman Schultz, Debbie 1114 LHOB 202-225-7931
24 Wilson, Frederica 2445 RHOB 202-225-4506
25 Diaz-Balart, Mario 440 CHOB 202-225-4211
26 Curbelo, Carlos 1404 LHOB 202-225-2778
27 Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana 2206 RHOB 202-225-3931

RELATED ARTICLE: More than 56 per cent of crimes in German town are committed by asylum seekers

VIDEO: President Trump, “Who signs a deal when they’re shouting ‘Death to America’?”

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Excellent point. This disastrous deal must be scrapped.

“Trump in Dallas:’You know what causes nuclear war? Weakness,’” by Hagay Hacohen, Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2018 :

Speaking at the NRA convention in Dallas Texas Friday night US President Donald Trump argued against the Iran deal made by the previous administration by arguing that the deal should not have been made as long as Iranians are shouting “Death to America.”

Trump also argued that John Kerry is “not the best negotiator we’ve ever seen.”

When addressing the crowd the US President said: “You know what gets you nuclear war? Weakness gets you nuclear war.”

While discussing gun laws Trump made the comparison between banning guns and banning cars because terrorists use them to attack civilians….

RELATED ARTICLE: Post Deal, How the US Can Keep Pressuring Iran

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Geller Report. The featured image is of President Donald Trump speaking at the NRA convention in Dallas on May 4, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Leading Economist Now Says Trump Policies Are Restoring America’s Economy

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Sean Snaith is not a household name but he is one of the nation’s top economists and highly regarded in economic circles for the depth and accuracy of his projections.

So much so that he is on multiple national economic forecasting panels, including The Wall Street Journal’s Economic Forecasting Survey, the Associated Press’ Economy Survey, CNNMoney.com’s Survey of Leading Economists, USA Today’s Survey of Top Economists, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Survey of Professional Forecasters, Bloomberg and Reuters.

All this is stated upfront because what he says rightly carries weight in a lot of influential circles, and probably should outside those circles. And he is now supremely optimistic about the American economy going forward.

He made projections last year he said were based on the assumption of a Hillary Clinton victory and her policies being instituted — because that is what all of the political pundits told him. When Trump won, he says, he had to re-think things. He went back to the drawing board and began a new set of calculations which he is constantly updating. The differences are dramatically better for the American economy and the American worker.

In fact, to hear Snaith speak recently to a large Florida economic development group, its almost jarring how much of a MAGA Trumper he sounds like — well, on economic policies anyway. And the projections he announced were almost goose-bumpy good.

Snaith said the tax cuts and deregulatory efforts will generate a 3.5 percent national GDP this year — much higher than at any point since before the Great Recession — and will remain very strong at least through 2020. He said this is more where the American economy should be and will be (barring any major, unforeseen disruptions.)

That has positive implications for American workers. The jobless rate is hovering at about 4 percent right now, but he predicted that as policies really start generating economic activity, the unemployment rate will fall to 3.4 percent by late 2020 — and that is even as the labor participation rate increases. So even as more Americans re-enter the job market after giving up for the past six years or more, they will all be absorbed into new jobs, plus some.

This tight labor market means there will be competitive market pressures driving wages and salaries specifically at the lower ends to begin with. In fact, that is already beginning to happen.

“Markets are magical and will solve the labor problem” by increasing wages to attract workers, he said. “The lowest end jobs are seeing the fasted income growth rate right now.”

Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, said there are two driving policies at work here. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and the ongoing regulatory relief.

The key elements of the tax reform package boosting the economy include: lower income tax rates; higher standard deductions; expansion of the child tax credit; reducing the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world from 35 percent to 21 percent; tax breaks for small businesses; and a one-time tax break to 15.5 percent to repatriate American companies’ offshore profits — which Apple already announced they will take advantage of to the tune of $252 billion.

The tax package will increase take-home pay for American workers — something that has not happened since President Bush was in office — and will generate more consumer spending, stimulating the economy and GDP growth. American companies will be more apt to keep their profits at home and reinvest a portion of them — several have already announced their intentions with plant expansions and sharp increases in employee pay.

But Snaith sees deregulation as every bit as important because of the tremendous drag that excess regulation places on companies and the economy. “Deregulation is the special sauce that will juice the economy,” Snaith said.

The Code of Federal Regulations exploded from 140,000 pages in 2005 to 185,000 today, he said. Those endless rules strangled the economy by trillions of dollars as companies spend so many resources on compliance rather than innovation, expansion and employee pay. Last year, the Trump administration took 22 deregulatory actions for every one new regulation, saving about $8 billion in regulatory compliance costs alone.

Interestingly, Snaith is not worried about a trade war undercutting his economic projections because he does not think there will be one.

“Are we going to have a trade war? My answer is no. Everybody knows that no one wins in a trade war,” he said. However, he thinks that some of the nation’s trade deals do need renegotiating because they were unbalanced, and China was cheating on them.

“If you are a manufacturer, you are not on an even playing field with China,” he said.

Snaith is about as mainstream as you can get in the economics field. And his projections record is stellar. His optimism is worth paying attention to.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act. Please visit The Revolutionary Act’s YouTube Channel.

The SPLC File — An Exclusive Report on the Southern Poverty Law Center

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James Simpson is an investigative journalist, businessman, and author. Mr. Simpson has published an extensive report on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which appeared in the Spring Edition of The Social Contract. The investigative report is titled “The Southern Poverty Law Center – Institution of weaponized hate.”

According to Discover The Networks:

Founder, Chief Trial Attorney for SPLC Morris Dees

SPLC was founded in 1971 by two young Alabama lawyers, 35-year-old Morris Dees and 28-year-old Joseph Levin Jr.  The latter served as the Center’s legal director from 1971-76, but it was Dees who would emerge as the long-term “face” of the organization. A leftist who views the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation, Dees, upon launching SPLC, joined forces with an African American who would serve as a perfect complement to him ideologically — the civil-rights activist Julian Bond, who served as SPLC’s first president from 1971-79.

SPLC’s work of “fighting hate and bigotry” while “seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society,” is rooted in the premise that the United States is perpetually “seething” with “racial violence” and “intolerance against those who are different.” “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant,” says the Center, and violent crimes against members of minority groups like blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and Arabs/Muslims “are not isolated incidents,” but rather, ubiquitous “eruptions of a nation’s intolerance.” [Emphasis added]

Dees and the SPLC see themselves as doing good by exposing evil. However, Simpson shows that the SPLC uses its power to demonize those who disagree with it. Simpson notes:

To reconcile the SPLC’s often contradictory and usually false narratives, one must understand that its constant vilification of political enemies is entirely tactical. The terms “hater,” “bigot”, “racist,” and so forth are frequently misunderstood as a spontaneous, visceral reaction to policies the Left opposes. Those with more political savvy recognize such narratives as an application of Saul Alinsky’s Rule Number 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.17

But this rule actually comes from a very specific tactic first articulated 100 years ago by Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Communist Party, who said:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding, and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.18

SPLC spokesman Mark Potok.

Simpson quotes former Senior Fellow and SPLC spokesman Mark Potok:

In an interview with NBC’s Chris Matthews, SPLC spokesman Mark Potok stated:

Well, let me say for starters that our—when we name groups “hate groups,” that has nothing to do with any allegation of criminality or some kind of measure of expected violence.It’s purely about ideology.14

At a public speaking event, Potok was even more pointed:

Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes and so on … I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them…15

Simpson masterfully traces the history of political correctness from the Frankfurt School’s German Communist Herbert Marcuse to Angela Davis, the black American Communist, to Critical Theory, an intellectual tool to deconstruct the West through constant criticism, to today what is commonly referred to as Cultural Marxism or Political Correctness. 

Timothy Dionisopoulos in a Campus Reform article titled “[VIDEO] Director at Southern Poverty Law Center tells students parts of Tea Party are filled with ‘racists’” wrote:

Parts of the Tea Party group are “filled with racists,” a prominent director from the Southern Poverty Law Center told a group of university students late last month.

Heidi Beirich, the Intelligence Project Director, at the left-leaning organization, made the claim in a speech to students at the Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU).

A video sent to LI’s Campus Reform reveals Beirich making a number of statement’s affiliating the Tea Party with racism and violence.

Beirich also suggested Obama’s Presidency had pushed many conservatives to engage in acts of violence.

“So there’s that, there’s the populism, the reaction against Obama that has helped drive up the number of hate groups,” she said. “It has fueled this movement, fueled a lot of domestic terrorism… This was about that black man with those liberal policies.”

Here is Beirich speaking in a video titled: Hate Groups Are Growing Under Trump. Beirich follows the SPLC ideal of demonizing those that it disagrees with.

Simpson writes:

Our First Amendment allows for the free exchange of ideas, even radical ones. Marcuse claimed that despite this apparent “tolerance,” an oppressive imbalance exists in Western societies, which he said, “favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.”28 To correct this imbalance, he [Marcuse] followed Lenin’s lead, suggesting that leftists had a special right to lie, suppress truth, and engage in violence and law-breaking to get their way:

Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent… I believe that there is a “natural right” of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate… If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one.29

Simpson makes this critical observation about SPLC:

Unlike most of its targets, the SPLC is the organization that genuinely expresses hate. In fact, hatred is its stock-in-trade.

Simpson concludes:

The Southern Poverty Law Center is an extreme Left, communist-inspired, if not communist-led, influence operation designed to rationalize demonizing and silencing critics of the far Left’s agenda for America. This agenda is no less than a fundamental transformation of our Constitutional Republic into a Soviet-style, one-party Socialist state. The SPLC’s tax-exempt status should be immediately revoked, its assets seized under RICO statutes, and its leaders investigated for participating in a continuing criminal enterprise to subvert America.

RELATED ARTICLE: Social Contract magazine devotes entire issue to educate readers about the Southern Poverty Law Center

SOURCE: The Southern Poverty Law Center – Institution of weaponized hate By James Simpson 

EDITORS NOTE: In October 2017 Gonzaga University hosted its the 4th International Conference on Hate Studies. One of the keynote speakers was the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Joe Levin. The conference was titled “Engaging with Communities for Justice.”  According to the description, “Levin has worked with Morris Dees to shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBT community and the disabled, protected low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation, and more.”

Here is a short video of the history of SPLC.

The Iran deal is dead — Iran killed it

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The Iran nuclear deal is dead – and the mullahs who rule the Islamic Republic have only themselves to blame.

There is no need for President Trump to even announce that the United States is pulling out of the deal. Iran killed the agreement through its own willful actions and blatant lies, even before the deal was officially implemented on Jan. 16, 2016.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry – who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran and the European Union, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – heaped praise on the agreement when it was reached in July 2015, ignoring its fatal flaws.

The premise of the deal, which was designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, was simple: Iran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear activities and said it would provide the International Atomic Energy Agency with a full accounting of its past military activities – meaning its secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

In exchange for Iran accepting these restriction and disclosure requirements, the international community agreed to lift crippling economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Doing this pumped an estimated $100 billion and $150 billion into the coffers of the Iranian regime. It was as if Iran hit the jackpot in the richest lottery in the world – quite a victory.

But Monday’s revelation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be a game-changer. Netanyahu revealed a spectacular coup by the Mossad (Israel’s foreign intelligence agency) that spirited away Iran’s Atomic Archive, providing unequivocal proof that Iran never kept its commitments to disclose information about its nuclear weapons program.

Instead, the Atomic Archive shows that Iran lied to keep its nuclear program a secret. The Iranian government’s lies mean the Iran deal is null and void, because Iran never fulfilled its end of the bargain.

Iran got the money from the nuclear deal and by all accounts has been using it to brutally repress its own people, support Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in his civil war that has killed hundreds thousands of people in seven years, and wage a proxy war in Yemen against Saudi Arabia.

In addition, Iran has expanded funding for the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, which today bracket Israel from north and south with over 150,000 rockets and missiles. New armed Iranian drones, based in Syria, have attempted four separate attacks on Israel. The first was shot down by Israel inside Israeli air space and the other three drones were shot down by the Russians before they left Syria.

The Netanyahu press conference was blocked initially by Twitter when Netanyahu posted segments on his official Twitter account. This is not surprising. Netanyahu’s revelations have got the Obama-Kerry “echo chamber” in the media and the arms control community in full damage control mode, trying to save an agreement that never should have been signed in the first place.

A report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency in December 2015 clearly shows that the agency acknowledged that Iran had stonewalled its questions, failed to provide answers about multiple nuclear weapons-related programs, and flat-out denied it ever had a plan to build five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads. The Atomic Archive that Netanyahu revealed on Monday exposed Iran’s denial as a lie, and proved that Iran had maintained a clandestine nuclear weapons program beyond 2003, when Iran falsely claimed its program had ended.

The International Atomic Agency report also exposed other Iranian lies about its nuclear program, including Iranian claims denying that it did metallurgy work for nuclear devices; denying that it conducted nuclear weapons-related multipoint initiation experiments; and hiding that fact that it deliberately scrubbed an area of the Parchin military complex where it had been engaged in explosives testing of non-nuclear components of a nuclear weapon.

The report also showed Iran lied when it denied doing computer modeling of nuclear explosive devices up through 2009; was clearly hiding information when it refused to answer questions about 2002 preparations for underground nuclear tests; and hid the fact that it operated two workshops where it conducted tests to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile.

These are key areas of Iran’s previous nuclear weapons development activity that Iran failed to resolve with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In other words, the agency report that the Obama administration claimed “resolved” Iran’s previous bad behavior did nothing of the sort. It was a whitewash.

But Iran was taking no chances, even with a toothless “watchdog” like the International Atomic Energy Agency and a rock-solid guarantee from the Obama-Kerry team that no U.S. inspectors would ever visit Iran. As Netanyahu revealed on Monday, Iran gave the order in January 2016 to collect all incriminating documents dealing with its nuclear weapons development program and hide them away in high-tech vaults in a nondescript warehouse in the south of Tehran.

For two years, Mossad probed and planned. And then, as Netanyahu revealed Monday, in January Mossad pulled off what must be the most astonishing intelligence coup of Israel’s history and spirited out documents weighing over half a ton and brought them – or copies – to Israel.

So now we have incontrovertible proof that Iran was never in compliance with the nuclear deal. It never came clean on its past nuclear activities, and it set up an Atomic Archive so it could resume nuclear weapons work at a moment’s notice.

In other words, there never was an Iran nuclear deal. It was a hoax – a deception crafted with the full participation of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to let Iran off the hook.

In a YouTube message Thursday, Iranian Foreign minister Javad Zarif said you don’t broker the sale of a house, move in, and then two years later get to renegotiate the price. To extend his metaphor, if you move into the house but fail to make any payments on the mortgage – including the initial down payment – you get evicted.

It’s time for President Trump to serve Iran with its eviction notice.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on Fox News.

Saudis Draw Line in the Sand for Christians

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Imagine a country of 830,000 square miles — bigger than Alaska — without a single church. Right now, that’s Saudi Arabia. For Christians, it’s a suffocating place to live. Bibles are illegal, and Muslims knows that if they convert, there’s a very real chance they’ll face the death penalty. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has again identified Saudi Arabia as a country of particular concern. So this week’s news — that Saudi Arabia might finally be opening the doors to Christian churches — is a breakthrough of epic proportions.For the first time in history, Vatican officials sat down with Saudi officials and signed an agreement to let churches put down real roots without fear of government retaliation. Cardinal Tauran, who helped pave the way for the deal, told the royal family that Pope Francis has been following the plight of the “hundreds of thousands of Christians in the Saudi kingdom with close attention.” That must have resonated with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman, who’s been genuinely invested in turning Muslims away from the violence of radical Islam.

With his government in turmoil, bin Salman knows this is an opportunity to make a sign of good faith to the West. Maybe he’s making a bid for foreign support for his reforms. Or maybe he’s trying to build a stronger alliance against Iran. Either way, it’s a historic pact.

To understand just how significant this development could be, take the story of one young Saudi mom, who became a Christian years before she met her husband. When her own mother found out about her conversion, she put her under house arrest. Our friends at Open Doors, who’ve been trying to disciple believers in hiding like Nawal, said her mother “kept her inside for years, afraid she’d meet other believers if allowed outside.” She was forced to marry a Muslim man, who even now doesn’t know her secret. According to Saudi law, if he did, he’s “entitled to beat her, divorce her or even kill her. Nobody will come to her rescue.”

So, here Nawal is now. A wife and mother married to a man who cannot find out about her faith. That discovery may cost her life, and her daughter will grow up without a mother. She behaves like a proper Muslim, performing the Muslim prayer rituals five times a day, at least when other people are around. But in her heart, she is still praying to Jesus and asking Him to give her the strength to keep believing, even though she’s completely isolated.

But the reality is that fear, depression, and the feeling of being isolated are continuously threatening Nawal’s faith. On her wedding day, she grew so afraid of being exposed as a believer that she felt she had to say goodbye to the believers who were still in touch with her through social media. Her last message to them: ‘I will delete your contact information, and I may not respond anymore for my own safety. But please know that I will read whatever you send me.’

Who knows how many Nawals are in Saudi Arabia, desperately wishing for the freedom to worship that we take for granted? Not surprisingly, activists like Nina Shea, who’ve worked their whole lives to fight the spread of these dangerous ideologies, are skeptical about such a sweeping reform coming to fruition. But, as even she’s pointed out, it could be that President Trump’s tough rhetoric on terrorism and Islamic extremism is finally paying off. Other Europeans are starting to speak up too, demanding that King Bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud lift its ban on all “non-Muslim religious activities.”

Under Obama, she explains, the State Department gave the Saudis a pass for years. “It deflected criticism of the Saudi Kingdom and reassured the public in its annual religious freedom reports that Saudi Arabia has ‘reformed’ and ‘improved… My investigations show that it hadn’t. Even after a 2014 New York Times report that Saudi texts were being used by ISIS in schools in its then-stronghold of Mosul, Iraq, the State Department concealed [it]…” Now, she says, cautiously optimistic, “the West finally seems to be waking up.”

A lot of that credit belongs to the Trump administration, who, together with Secretary Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Sam Brownback, are once again making religious freedom a foreign policy priority — bringing hope and help to the persecuted around the world.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Amazon a Prime Suspect in Charity War

Two States, One Goal: Freedom

Threats to Apostates “Most Severe” in Muslim Countries and Beyond

RELATED PODCAST: The World Wide Persecution of Christians.

Two States, One Goal: Freedom

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LGBT activists have been fond of saying that same-sex marriage would never affect you. Well, now, it’s not only affecting you — it’s affecting needy kids.

Across the country, Christian charities and adoption services have been bracing themselves against wave after wave of attack from liberals, desperate to kick them out of the child welfare industry. As far as these extremists are concerned, no organization — including an explicitly religious one — should be allowed to operate if they hold a biblical view of marriage. In places like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, their crusade has gone so far as to close down one of the largest child placement services in the area — Catholic Charities — because it refused to compromise its core beliefs.

Fortunately, in some states, the bullying is prompting a counter-attack from common sense lawmakers, who think it’s well within a charity’s right to decide which homes are the best and most loving options for children. In Oklahoma, the state legislature followed in the suit of at least five other states, sending a measure to Gov. Mary Fallin’s (R) desk that would give religious groups the freedom to exercise their faith in their placement policies. Democrats were so irate during the debate that the presiding officer threatened to have one member removed.

In nearby Kansas, legislators acted hours later, passing their version of the “Child Welfare Inclusion Act” 63-58 in the House and 24-15 in the Senate early this morning. “This is a matter of activist groups who don’t like certain religious beliefs and they want to use the power of the government to crush people that operate according to those religious beliefs,” said Michael Schuttloffel, the director of the Kansas Catholic Conference. With, as the AP points out, an already overloaded foster care system, the state can’t afford to lose a single provider – let alone one of Kansas’s biggest.

Governor Jeff Coyler (R) must have agreed, promising to make the bill law. “Catholic Charities and other adoption agencies are key to the fabric of our communities. I look forward to signing this bill because it increases the opportunities for needy children to find loving homes.” Hopefully, his counterpart in Oklahoma will follow suit, recognizing that liberal activists are more concerned with pushing their intolerant agenda than they are with finding children good homes.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Saudis Draw Line in the Sand for Christians

Amazon a Prime Suspect in Charity War

Trump Initiative Protects Religious Rights, Faith Groups’ Equal Access to Federal Dollars

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday focusing on protecting freedom of religion and exploring new ways faith-based agencies can partner with government to effectively provide services.

“We condemn all crimes against people of faith, and today we are launching another historic action to promote religious freedom,” Trump said at a National Day of Prayer ceremony in the Rose Garden before signing the executive order to create a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

“The faith initiative will help design new policies that recognize the vital role of faith in our families, our communities, and our great country,” the president said. “This office will also help ensure that faith-based organizations have equal access to government funding and the equal right to exercise their deeply held beliefs.

“We take this step because we know that, in solving the many, many problems and our great challenges, faith is more powerful than government, and nothing is more powerful than God,” Trump continued.

The White House initiative will be made up of faith leaders and experts on charity and religious freedom from outside the government and will be led by the newly created position of adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

It will make recommendations about providing services to the poor and to apprise the Trump administration of any executive branch failures to comply with religious liberty protections under law.

During his remarks in the Rose Garden, the president talked about the Rev. Billy Graham, the legendary evangelist who died earlier this year, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the iconic civil rights hero assassinated 50 years ago in 1968.

“Today, we remember the words of Reverend Graham, ‘Prayer is the key that opens us to the treasures of God’s mercies and blessings,’” Trump said. “Always beautiful, and when he said it, it meant so much. When I say it, it means something, but I liked when he said it better. … I think he did that a little better than I do.”

Trump continued:

The prayers of religious believers helped gain our independence, and the prayers of religious leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King—great man—helped win the long struggle for civil rights.

Faith has shaped our families, and it’s shaped our communities. It’s inspired our commitment to charity and our defense of liberty, and faith has forged the identity and the destiny of this great nation that we all love.

Trump signed a religious freedom executive order last year at a similar Rose Garden event.

A Family Research Council analysis released Wednesday found the religious freedom executive order Trump issued in May 2017 allowed charities and other entities to provide up to 13.7 million people with health care and other social services, and enabled at least 44 schools that provide education for more than 148,000 students to continue operating.

“The announcement of President Trump’s faith initiative is further evidence that this administration is not only committed to protecting our first freedom, but in also acknowledging that our faith in God contributes to the guidance and well-being of our country,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a social conservative advocacy group.

“I look forward to working with the president to make sure the community of faith will be able to bring hope and help to people in the United States and around the globe,” he said in a statement.

However, Americans United for Separation of Church and State contends the executive order will instead trample on religious freedom.

“Our government should protect religious freedom, not use it as a sword to harm others,” Rachel Laser, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “Our country is strongest when we are all free to believe, or not, as we see fit and to practice our faith without hurting others.”

Executive departments and agencies will designate a liaison to the White House faith initiative.

Similar initiatives were begun under the previous two administrations.

President George W. Bush established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. President Barack Obama continued with the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Both focused on charity. Trump’s version extends the focus to also protecting religious freedom.

The executive order on Thursday shows that Trump understands the benefit of the government partnering with faith-based groups, said Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, legal adviser for the Catholic Association, a group advocating the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

“The order also restates the government’s commitment to protect freedom of conscience and religious liberty by increasing oversight of federal programs,” Picciotti-Bayer said in a statement. “Everyday Americans respond to God’s call to serve, offering their time and talents to aid and assist their neighbors. People of all faiths, and those with no faith at all, find compassion and professionalism in the care they receive from groups motivated by faith.

“Today’s executive order hails their work—a wonderful product of the rich religious pluralism of our country,” she said.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of President Donald Trump holding up a signed executive order “to ensure that all faith-based communities have strong advocates in the White House” during a National Day of Prayer event Thursday, May 3rd, 2018 in the Rose Garden. (Photo: Alex Edelman/CNP/AdMedia/Newscom)

The Consequences of Historical Ignorance

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America is suffering through a crisis in education, especially when it comes to history.

Many were horrified when a poll, released in April, showed that two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is, despite the fact that it was the most notorious Nazi death camp in World War II.

That was hardly the only worrisome poll of late.

Americans should be outraged that our schools have failed to teach even the most basic historical facts to the younger generations. Worse, the education they receive has often only turned into a justification for superficial social activism, lacking in depth and veracity.

David Hogg, the teen survivor of the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, who became a gun-control activist, exemplifies this worsening problem. He recently tweeted:

This is little more than bumper sticker history, demonstrative of Hogg’s historical illiteracy.

For one thing, it’s unlikely that Gandhi’s pacifism would have been of much use against the Nazi war machine. People willing to put other humans in ovens are unlikely to be moved by passionate pleas for peace.

It should be noted, too, that Hogg’s two examples of nonviolent movements succeeding—Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and the U.S. civil rights movement—were not exactly nonviolent.

The Partition of India was incredibly violent, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people. And the civil rights movement certainly wasn’t an entirely nonviolent affair, either. The rights of many black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were secured almost entirely by gun ownership.

These so-called nonviolent movements occurred in countries with a tradition of respecting the rule of law and individual rights, giving them an actual chance to succeed through ballots instead of bullets.

In China, nonviolent student protests in the 1980s were crushed by the state—literally in the case of the Tiananmen Square protest. Historically, repression has been the norm, not the exception.

For Americans, the right to speak freely and protest was only secured because young men, mostly teenagers, were willing to take up arms—arms that Hogg and others have so relentlessly crusaded against—and risk their lives to fight for their God-given liberties against the British Crown.

At one time, every American would have known this and would have acknowledged the blood and suffering of the Revolution that secured our freedom and independence.

War is a terrible thing, but it is often just and necessary, and it has certainly served to stop tremendous evil in this world.

To deny that is absurd.

Despite the clear gaps in his historical knowledge, Hogg hasn’t shied away from insulting the civic acumen of others and hectoring them. He once said, “Our parents don’t know how to use a f—ing democracy, so we have to.”

Not content to simply insult his parents’ generation, he then followed up in a later interview claiming that those who were against him were on the wrong side of history—a history that his generation would presumably be writing.

“Regardless of what your opinions are or where you come from, you need to realize we are the future of America,” Hogg said in an NPR interview. “And if you choose not to stand with us, that’s OK, because you’ll be on the wrong side of the history textbooks that we write.”

If that’s so, then future history textbooks will look more ideological and baseless than accurate portrayals of the historical record. But perhaps that’s because many current textbooks are, too.

Americans are free, regardless of their education or knowledge level, to use a public platform to espouse their views. At the same time, it’s hard to have a substantive and productive debate on the issues of the day when even the most basic facts of history are unknown to those doing the debating.

Platitudes begin to sound like profound insights when one has an extremely narrow view of history and world events.

It would be nice to see a little more humility from those who have such an incomplete understanding of that history.

Nevertheless, we have only ourselves to blame if we are not doing more to fix the increasingly deplorable state of American schools.

We must admit that the public school education model is failing our youths, despite how much money we’ve pumped into the system.

We should take it upon ourselves to improve our republic through better schools—perhaps charter schools, or even better, private schools funded by caring parents who increasingly can use vouchers or education savings accounts to escape the current institutions that have failed them.

Currently, many of our schools don’t meet even the basic requirements of what Americans need to be informed citizens. Worse, the education students are receiving, especially in civics, is heavily skewed toward left-wing politics.

As my wife, Inez Stepman, wrote for The Federalist:

If education reform is going to be about more than ticking up the United States’ score on international exams, and if school choice is also our only opportunity to break a left-wing ideological monopoly on public education, we must deliver meaningful, universal education choice to parents now, while Generation X parents are still the majority of those with school-age children.

We must give all parents the opportunity now to choose education options that align with their values, or the values we cherish will continue their slide into extinction.

Historical ignorance and cultural disintegration are only going to become more pronounced until we find a way to expand the net of education that works for the youngest generation.

School choice can no longer be treated as a back-burner issue.

Our future and our freedom depend on it.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman is an editor and commentary writer for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. Twitter: .

RELATED REFERENCE: NAZI FIREARMS LAW AND THE DISARMING OF THE GERMAN JEWS – Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, No. 3, 483-535 (2000)

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBER

VIDEOS: New York Times Writer Calls Motherhood ‘Dumbest Job Ever’

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Is motherhood “the dumbest job ever”? Just in time for Mother’s Day, that’s what one New York Times writer is suggesting. We talk about this, along with a new book detailing Hillary Clinton’s campaign hypocrisies, and the trend of members in Congress sleeping in their offices because they can’t afford rent (or so they say) in this week’s edition of “Problematic Women.”

Plus, we break down the backlash surrounding Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner performance, and the cultural appropriation police coming after high school student Keziah Daum for daring to wear a Chinese-inspired dress to prom. Watch in the video above, or listen in the podcast below.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Kelsey Harkness

Kelsey Harkness

Kelsey Harkness is a senior news producer at The Daily Signal and co-host of “Problematic Women,” a podcast and Facebook Live show. Send an email to Kelsey. Twitter: .

Portrait of Bre Payton

Bre Payton

Bre Payton is the culture and millennial politics reporter for The Federalist. Twitter: .

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY