Chris Quackenbush from the Florida Citizens’ Alliance explains the Florida Education Stakeholders Empowerment Act:
Readers may download the Florida Education Stakeholders Empowerment Act by clicking here.
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It’s time to call off the child care regulators by JEFFREY A. TUCKER:
Social democrats want to nationalize childhood by having government fund and manage universal day care. Social conservatives want the family to be the day care, which is a lovely idea when it’s affordable. Libertarians don’t seem much interested in the subject at all. That leaves virtually no one to tell the truth about the only solution to the shortage and high price of day care: complete deregulation.
Let’s start the discussion right now.
The Obama administration has the idea to model a new program for national day care on a policy from World War II that lasted from 1944 to 1946 in which a mere 130,000 children had their day care covered by the federal government. Here’s what’s strange: right now, the feds (really, taxpayers) pay for 1.3 million kids to be in day care, which means that there are 10 times as many children in such programs now as then. The equivalent of the wartime program is already in place now, and then some. The shortages for those who need the service continue to worsen.
How did this wartime program come about? The federal government had drafted men to march off to foreign lands to kill and be killed. On the home front, wives and moms were drafted into service in factories to cover the country’s productive needs while the men were gone. That left the problem of children. Back in the day, most people lived in close proximity to extended family, and that helped. But for a few working parents, that wasn’t enough.
Tax-funded day care
Tax-funded day care became part of the Community Facilities Act of 1941 (popularly known as the Lanham Act). The Federal Works Agency built centers that became daytime housing for the kids while their moms served the war effort. Regulation was also part of the mix. The federal Office of Education’s Children’s Bureau had a plan: children under the age of 3 were to remain at home; children from 2 to 5 years of age would be in centers with a ratio of 1 adult to 10 children. The standards were never enforced — there was a war on, after all — and the Lanham Act was a dead letter after 1946.
The program was a reproduction of another program that had begun in the New Deal as a job creation measure (part of the Works Project Administration and the Federal Economic Recovery Act, both passed in 1933). It was later suspended when the New Deal fell apart. Neither effort was about children. The rhetoric surrounding these programs was about adults and their jobs: the need to make jobs for nurses, cooks, clerical workers, and teachers.
Obama’s day care solution
Obama wants not only to resurrect this old policy but to make it universal, because day care is way too expensive for families with two working parents. This proposal is piling intervention on intervention; it is not a solution. Do parents really want kids cared for in institutions run the same way as the US Postal Service, the TSA, and the DMV? Parents know how little control they have over local public schools. Do we really want that model expanded to preschoolers?
Still, for all the problems with the Obama proposal, its crafters acknowledge a very real problem: two parents are working in most households today. This reality emerged some 30 years ago after the late 1970s inflation wrecked household income and high taxes robbed wage earners. Two incomes became necessary to maintain living standards, which created a problem with respect to children. Demand for daytime child care skyrocketed.
The shortage of providers is most often described as “acute.” Child care is indeed expensive, if you can find it at all. It averages $1,000 per month in the United States, and in many cities, it’s far pricier. That’s an annual salary on the minimum wage, which is why many people in larger cities find that nearly the whole of the second paycheck is consumed in day care costs — and that’s for just one child. Your net gains are marginal at best. If you have two children, you can forget about it.
Perhaps this is why Pew Research also reports a recent rise in the number of stay-at-home moms. It’s not a cultural change. It’s a matter of economics. And the trends are happening because the options are thinning. Parents are being forced to pick their poison: lower standard of living with only one working spouse, or a lower standard of living with two working spouses. This is a terrible bind for any family with kids.
The reason behind the day care shortage
The real question is one few seem to ask. Why is there a shortage? Why is day care so expensive? We get tennis shoes, carrots, gasoline, dry cleaning, haircuts, manicures, and most other things with no problem. There are infinite options at a range of prices, and they are all affordable. There is no national crisis, for example, about a shortage of gyms. If we are going to find a solution, surely there is a point to understanding the source of the problem.
Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economic policy:
When you find a good or service that is in huge demand, but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing the high price.
This principle applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or day care.
Child care is one of the most regulated industries in the country. The regulatory structures began in 1962 with legislation that required child care facilities to be state-licensed in order to get federal funding grants. As one might expect, 40 percent of the money allocated toward this purpose was spent on establishing licensing procedures rather than funding the actual care, with the result that child care services actually declined after the legislation.
This was an early but obvious case study in how regulation actually reduces access. But the lesson wasn’t learned and regulation intensified as the welfare state grew. Today it is difficult to get over the regulatory barriers to become a provider in the first place. You can’t do it from your home unless you are willing to enter into the gray/black market and accept only cash for your business. Zoning laws prevent residential areas from serving as business locations. Babysitting one or two kids, sure, you can do that and not get caught. But expanding into a public business puts your own life and liberty in danger.
Too many regulations
Beyond that, the piles of regulations extend from the central government to state governments to local governments, coast to coast. It’s a wonder any day cares stay in business at all. As a matter of fact, these regulations have cartelized the industry in ways that would be otherwise unattainable through purely market means. In effect, the child care industry is not competitive; it increasingly tends toward monopoly due to the low numbers of entrants who can scale the regulatory barriers.
There is a book-length set of regulations at the federal level. All workers are required to receive health and safety training in specific areas. The feds mandate adherence to all building, fire, and health codes. All workers have to get comprehensive background checks, including fingerprinting. There are strict and complex rules about the ratio of workers per child, in effect preventing economies of scale from driving down the price. Child labor laws limit the labor pool. And everyone has to agree to constant and random monitoring by bureaucrats from many agencies. Finally, there are all the rules concerning immigration, tax withholding, minimum wages, maximum working hours, health benefits, and vacation times.
All of these regulations have become far worse under the Obama administration — all in the name of helping children. The newest proposal would require college degrees from every day care provider.
And that’s at the federal level. States impose a slew of other regulations that govern the size of playgrounds, the kind of equipment they can have, the depth of the mulch underneath the play equipment, the kinds of medical services for emergencies that have to be on hand, insurance mandates that go way beyond what insurers themselves require, and so much more. The regulations grow more intense as the number of children in the program expands, so that all providers are essentially punished for being successful.
Just as a sample, check out Pennsylvania’s day care regulations. Ask yourself if you would ever become a provider under these conditions.
A couple of years ago, I saw some workers digging around a playground at a local day care and I made an inquiry. It turned out that the day care, just to stay in business, was forced by state regulations to completely reformat its drains, dig new ones, reshape the yard, change the kind of mulch it used, spread out the climbing toys, and add some more foam here and there. I can’t even imagine how much the contractors were paid to do all this, and how much the changes cost overall.
And this was for a well-established, large day care in a commercial district that was already in compliance. Imagine how daunting it would be for anyone who had a perfectly reasonable idea of providing a quality day care service from home or renting out some space to make a happy place to care for kids during the day. It’s nearly unattainable. You set out to serve kids and families but you quickly find that you are serving bureaucrats and law-enforcement agencies.
The economic solution to the day care shortage
Providing day care on a profitable basis is a profession that countless people could do, if only the regulations weren’t so absurdly strict. This whole industry, if deregulated, would be a wonderful enterprise. There really is no excuse for why child care opportunities wouldn’t exist within a few minutes’ drive of every house in the United States. It’s hard to imagine a better at-home business model.
What this industry needs is not subsidies but massive, dramatic, and immediate deregulation at all levels. Prices would fall dramatically. New options would be available for everyone. What is now a problem would vanish in a matter of weeks. It’s a guaranteed solution to a very real problem.
The current system is a problem for everyone, but it disproportionately affects women. It is truly an issue for genuine feminists who care about real freedom. The regulatory state as it stands is attacking the right to produce and consume a service that is important to women and absolutely affects their lives in every way. In the 19th century, these kinds of rules were considered to be a form of subjugation of women. Now we call it the welfare state.
From my reading of the literature on this subject, I’m startled at how small is the recognition of the causal relationship between the regulatory structure and the shortage of providers. It’s almost as if it had never occurred to the many specialists in this area that there might be some cost to forever increasing the mandates, intensifying the inspections, tightening the strictures, and so on.
A rare exception is a 2004 child care study by the Rand Corp. Researchers Randal Heeb and M. Rebecca Kilburn found what should be obvious to anyone who understands economics. “Relatively modest changes in regulations would have large and economically important consequences,” they argue, and “the overall effect of increased regulation might be counter to their advocates’ intentions. Our evidence indicates that state regulations influence parents’ child care decisions primarily through a price effect, which lowers use of regulated child care and discourages labor force participation. We find no evidence for a quality assurance effect.”
This is a mild statement that reinforces what all economic logic suggests. Every regulatory action diminishes market participation. It puts barriers to entry in front of producers and imposes unseen costs on consumers. Providers turn their attention away from pleasing customers and toward compliance. Regulations reduce competition and raise prices. They do not serve the stated objectives of policy makers, though they might serve the deeper interests of the industry’s larger players.
Creating a free market for child care
And so the politicians and activists look at the situation and say: we must do something. It’s true, we must. But we must do the right thing, which is not to create Orwellian, state-funded child care factories that parents cannot control. We must not turn child care into a labyrinthian confusion of thousands of pages of regulations.
We need to make a market for child care as with any other service. Open up, permit free entry and exit, and we’ll see the supposed problem vanish as millions of new providers and parents discover a glorious new opportunity for enterprise and mutual benefit.
But isn’t this laissez-faire solution dangerous for the children?
Reputation and market-based quality control govern so much of our lives today. A restaurant that serves one bad meal can face the crucible at the hands of Yelp reviewers, and one late shipment from an Amazon merchant can ruin a business model. Markets enable other active markets for accountability and intense focus on consumer satisfaction.
It’s even more true of child care. Even now, markets are absolutely scrupulous about accessing quality, as these Yelp reviews of day care in Atlanta, Georgia, show. As for safety, insurers are similarly scrupulous, just as they are with homes and office buildings. As with any market good, a range of quality is the norm, and people pick based on whatever standards they choose. Some parents might think that providers with undergraduate degrees essential, while others might find that qualification irrelevant.
In any case, markets and parents are the best sources for monitoring and judging quality; certainly they have a greater interest in quality assurance than politicians and bureaucrats. If any industry is an obvious case in which self-regulation is wholly viable, child care is it. Indeed, the first modern day care centers of the late 19th century were created by private philanthropists and market entrepreneurs as a better alternative to institutionalizing the children of the destitute and poor new immigrants.
The shortages in this industry are tragic and affect tens of millions of people. They have a cause (regulation) and a solution (deregulation). Before we plunge wholesale into nationalized babysitting, we ought to at least consider a better way.
Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.
Thirty-two million laws passed (some pretty stupid)…perhaps we should just get back to the big ten that God gave us to run the whole world.
The Ten Commandments as listed in Exodus 20:2-17:
Photo from the top of the Florida Capitol: L-R Kathy Doan, Yvonne Isecki, Chris Quackenbush, Mitzi Hahn
BREAKING NEWS! There is a bill in bill drafting to solve Florida’s education issues. Here are the details.
Issue 1: Standards – What they are learning. The Commissioner will select several of the best standards from pre 2009 for the local districts to select. The Commissioner will select these standards for English and math are free and not copyrighted, well vetted and highly rated (higher than our existing standards). Districts will have local control to choose from this list based on their varied needs. Florida’s school districts are diverse and one size does not fit all. Rural, urban, and minority needs should allow for local flexibility to address their needs.
Issue 2: Accountability – Yes, we need to measure, but there are already nationally normed tests that will do a better job comparing us to the rest of the nation and the world. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or force our kids to be guinea pigs. We propose the districts should have local control to choose from a list of the best of these, such as the Iowa Basics and Stanford Achievement Tests. They would administer ONE test at the end of the year between 3rd and 10th grade. These tests are less expensive and pre-common core versions are available. Teachers will not be teaching to the test if it is a nationally normed test and it is NOT used to determine graduation or promotion, but simply to inform us on our students’ progress.
Issue 3: Testing – These tests can be administered on paper and taken at the student’s own desk, eliminating the “musical chairs” now needed to address the lack of computers for testing. This has, by some reports, absorbed as much as 40% of class time for learning. By going to paper tests, we can reduce costs by BILLIONS of scarce education dollars, AND increase time for learning. It will also allow schools more control of the data to prevent data mining. Student data can be aggregated with individual identifiers removed to prevent data companies from collecting and using individual data.
There is much to do and supporters are invited to help to get this bill passed. There is something for everyone to love in this bill. It saves money, provides more time for learning, provides high standards and accountability. Supporters are having a “March for the Children” event in the Capitol March 5, 2015. Busses are being organized from several cities. If readers want to help organize this event they may contact Debbie Gunnoe or Karen Schoen. Interested parties may register at www.eventbtite/c/march-for-the-children-tickets-15317379695.
Supporters of the bill are asking Floridians to contact their legislators and let them know parents want local control and needed solutions, not posturing in Tallahassee. Credit goes to Senator Alan Hayes and Representative John Tobia for putting this bill into bill drafting. Once it emerges from Bill Drafting in about two weeks, it will have a number. Supporters still must identify who will be best to carry this bill and who is willing to do that job. Neither Rep. Tobia nor Sen. Hayes have firmly committed to carrying this bill.
Readers may Go Here to find their legislators and send a letter to support ACTION on this bill.
Many important steps remain, and supporters are counting on concerned Floridians and Common Core groups to help make a change NOW. There is no DO OVER for our kids.
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Can anyone remember how awful the U.S. healthcare free market system was that it needed to be replaced by the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare? Can’t remember? That’s because it was ranked one of the best of the world and represented 17.9% of the nation’s economy in 2014. That’s down from the 20% it represented in 2009 when ObamaCare was foisted on Americans.
One of the best ways to follow the ObamaCare story is via Health Care News, a monthly newspaper published by The Heartland Institute. The January issue begins with an article by Sean Parnell, the managing editor, reporting that ObamaCare enrollment is overstated by 400,000.
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) once again lowered its estimate of the number of Americans enrolled in health plans through government exchanges in 2014. The 6.7 million enrollees who remain are far lower than the eight million touted in May at the end of the last open-enrollment period.”
ObamaCare has been a lie from the moment it was introduced for a vote, all 2,700 pages of it, to the present day. Everything President Obama said about it was a lie. As to its present enrollments, they keep dropping because some 900,000 who did sign up did not make the first premium payment or later stopped paying.
Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, said the dropout rate is a troubling trend. “It means that potentially hundreds of thousands of Exchange enrollees are realizing they are better off waiting until they get sick to purchase coverage. If enough people come to that conclusion, the exchanges collapse.”
Elsewhere in this month’s edition, there is an article, “States Struggle to Fund Exchanges”, that reports on the difficulties that “states are experiencing difficulty in paying the ongoing costs of the exchanges, especially small states. “’The feds are asking us to do their jobs for them. We get saddled with the operating costs,’ said Edmund Haislmaier, senior research fellow for health care policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.” Some are imposing a two percent tax on the insurance companies which, of course, gets passed along to the consumer. Even so, the exchanges are not generating enough income to be maintained.
Why would anyone want ObamaCare insurance when its rates keep rising dramatically? In Nebraska the rates have nearly doubled and another article notes that “A 2014 study finds large numbers of doctors are declining to participate in health plans offered through exchanges under the Affordable Care Act, raising questions about whether people buying insurance through exchanges will be able to access health care in a timely manner.” One reason physicians gave was that they would have to hire additional staff “just to manage the insurance verification process.”
Dr. Kris Held, a Texas eye surgeon, said ObamaCare “fails to provide affordable health insurance and fails to provide access to actual medical care to more people, but succeeds in compounding existing health care costs and accessibility problems and creating new ones.”
Health Care News reports what few other news outlets have noted. “In Section 227 of the recently enacted ‘Cromnibus’ spending measure, Congress added critical but little-noticed language that prohibits the use of funds appropriated to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pay for insurance company bailouts.” William Todd, an Ohio attorney, further noted that “Congress did not appropriate any separate funding for ‘bailouts.’” Todd predicted that “some insurers are likely to raise premiums to avoid losses, or they will simply stop offering policies on the exchanges altogether.”
The picture of ObamaCare failure emerging from these excerpts is a very true one. Its momentum, in fact, is gaining.
In mid-December, the Wall Street Journal opined that “With the Supreme Court due to rule on a major ObamaCare legal challenge by next summer, thoughts in Washington are turning to the practical and political response. If the Court does strike down insurance subsidies, the question for Republicans running Congress is whether they will try to fix the problems Democrats created, or merely allow ObamaCare damage to grow.”
“King v. Burwell will be heard in March with a ruling likely in June. “Of the 5.4 million consumers on federal exchanges, some 87% drew subsidies in 2014, according to a Rand Corporation analysis.”
The Wall Street Journal recommended that “The immediate Republican goal should be to make insurance cheaper so people need less of a subsidy to obtain insurance. This means deregulating the exchanges, plank by plank. Devolve to states their traditional insurance oversight role, and allow them to enter into cross-border compacts to increase choice and competition. Allow insurers to sell any configuration of benefits to anyone, anywhere, and the private market will gradually heal.”
Or, to put it another way, eliminate ObamaCare entirely and return to the healthcare insurance system that had served Americans well until the White House decided that socialism was superior to capitalism.
The problem with the Affordable Care Act is that the cost of the insurance sold under the Act is not affordable and ObamaCare is actually causing hospitals and clinics to close their doors, thus reducing healthcare services for those who need them.
ObamaCare must go. If the Republicans in Congress did nothing more than repeal ObamaCare, the outcome of the 2016 election would be a predictable win no matter who their candidate will be. If not repeal, some separate actions must be taken such as eliminating the tax on medical instruments.
If the Republican Congress fails to take swift and deliberate action on ObamaCare between now and the 2016 elections, they will have defeated themselves.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
The FBI wants to search through your electronic life. You may think it’s a given that the government is in the business of collecting everyone’s personal data — Big Brother run amok in defiance of the Constitution. But under the limits of the Fourth Amendment, nothing it finds can be used to prosecute its targets. Now the FBI is taking steps to carry out broad searches and data collection under the color of authority, making all of us more vulnerable to “fishing expeditions.”
The investigative arm of the Department of Justice is attempting to short-circuit the legal checks of the Fourth Amendment by requesting a change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. These procedural rules dictate how law enforcement agencies must conduct criminal prosecutions, from investigation to trial. Any deviations from the rules can have serious consequences, including dismissal of a case. The specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a search warrant.
It’s called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without providing any specific details as long as the target computer location has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network. It would also allow nonspecific search warrants where computers have been intentionally damaged (such as through botnets, but also through common malware and viruses) and are in five or more separate federal judicial districts. Furthermore, the provision would allow investigators to seize electronically stored information regardless of whether that information is stored inside or outside the court’s jurisdiction.
The change may sound like a technical tweak, but it is a big leap from current procedure. As it stands, Rule 41(b) only allows (with few exceptions) a court to issue a warrant for people or property within that court’s district. The federal rules impose this location limitation — along with requirements that the agentspecifically identify the person and place to be searched, find probable cause, and meet other limiting factors — to reduce the impact an investigation could have on people’s right to privacy. Now the FBI is asking for the authority to hack into and search devices without identifying any of the essential whos, whats, wheres, or whys — giving the FBI the authority to search your computer, tablet, or smartphone even if you are in no way suspected of a crime.
All you have to do is cross the FBI’s virtual path. For instance, the proposed amendment would mean that agents could use tactics like creating online “watering holes” to attract their targets. Anyone who clicked on law enforcement’s false-front website would download the government malware and expose their electronic device to an agent’s search (and also expose the device to follow-on hackers). One obvious target for this strategy is any forum that attracts government skeptics and dissenters — FEE.org, for example. Such tactics could inadvertently impact thousands of people who aren’t investigation targets.
This sort of sweeping authority is in obvious conflict with the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment makes it clear that the government cannot legally search your house or your personal effects, including your electronic devices, without (1) probable cause of a suspected crime (2) defined in a legal document (generally, a search warrant issued by a judge) (3) that specifically identifies what is to be searched and what is to be seized.
The FBI is not the first government agency to find itself challenged by the plain language of the Fourth Amendment. Past overreach has required judges and Congress to clarify what constitutes a legal search and seizure in particular contexts. In the 1960s, when electronic eavesdropping (via wiretaps and bugs) came about, Congress established the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (the Wiretap Act). The law addressed concerns about these new surreptitious and invasive investigative tactics and provided several strictures on legal searches via wiretap or bug. Since covert investigative tools can be hard to detect, it was important to institute more rigorous standards to keep agents in line.
The same concerns that Congress addressed in the 1960s are present today, but they take on far greater significance. With our growing reliance on electronic devices to communicate with others, to transact business, to shop, travel, date, and store the details of our private lives, these devices are becoming our most important personal effects. The ability of government actors to enter our digital space and search our electronic data is a major privacy concern that must be checked by Fourth Amendment standards. As the Supreme Court recently pronounced in Riley v. California, the search of a modern electronic device such as a smartphone or computer is more intrusive to privacy than even “the most exhaustive search of a house.”
What seems most troubling, though, is that the FBI is attempting to override the Fourth Amendment, along with the body of law developed over the years to reign in surveillance powers, through a relatively obscure forum. Instead of seeking congressional authority or judicial clarification, it has sought a major power grab through a procedural rule tweak — a tweak that would do away with jurisdictional limitations and specificity requirements, among other important checks on law enforcement. The request seems objectively — and constitutionally — offensive.
Standardized testing has been driving American education for over a decade, and even as the discussion and debate over the continued role of standardized testing in the long-overdue re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is in full swing, states nationwide are facing yet another round of the time, money, and manpower drain incurred by testing, testing, testing.
And even as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush *casually* decides he will go for that 2016 Oval Office position after all, the state in which he supposedly performed miracles of public education transformation is facing its 2014-15 go-around of testing, testing, testing.
That brings us to a very interesting video on the January 21, 2015, hearings of Florida’s Senate Education PreK-12 Committee regarding Florida’s technological readiness for their state assessments. At minute 31:22, Senator Bill Monford states that the state’s passing a law regarding technology does not mean districts can meet the demands of the law. At minute 33:41, Monford asks Deputy Commissioner of Innovation Ron Nieto whether districts are currently technologically ready for state assessments; Nieto says that he will know have that information in mid-February, but that “based on information that they certified, it appears that they should be ready.”
Monford replies, “If the answer is no, what’s our plan?”
Nieto is silent for seven seconds. He then replies, “We’ll determine that when we get that answer. I don’t have an answer to that, sir.”
At minute 34:10, Senator Don Gaetz begins asking questions. Here is the bomb he drops at minute 35:26:
I represent some rural districts as well as some medium-sized districts, and I asked a couple of superintendents if they would close the door, pull down the blinds, and tell me whether they’re really ready, and they said they weren’t. And I said, “Well, how did you handle that certification you had to sign?” And they said, “Well, we crossed our fingers because we were basically told if we didn’t sign it, we would be held up to ridicule and probably punishment. But we’re really not ready, and we expect there to be problems in the administration of the statewide assessment.”
So, let me return to a question that Senator Monford asked: Do we have any backup, paper-and-pencil backup, or any other kind of backup that we can use if we have a problem that is either systemic in nature or is district-specific in nature, or is specific even to a school? What do we do if we do have a problem of that nature? [Emphasis added.]
Nieto responds that the only pencil-and-paper tests are for special needs students; that technical glitches happen and that that is what the IT folks are for.
At minute 38:34, Gaetz responds:
But you testified a few minutes ago that in some districts, the IT officer is a bus driver. And I like bus drivers, but that was your characterization. So, are you prepared to stick with your contention that then we have people in the districts capable, prepared, skilled, prepared in all ways to deal with problems I described? (Problems included needing to reboot a computer that froze up.) [Emphasis added.]
Nieto replied that he has worked with those rural school districts Gaetz described, and that “people really rally around everybody in the district when it come to this kind of support, and they have never failed to this point” and that he “can’t imagine them backing down now.”
So. The rural districts in which some Florida superintendents admitted signing a paper stating “technological readiness” while knowing that their districts are not ready will somehow “rally around” and produce the “support” necessary to pull off computerized state testing in Florida that begins full force in early March 2015 for grades 8 through 11 in English language arts (ELA) (writing component) and continues in April and May 2015 for grades 5 through 11 in ELA and grades 5 though 8 in math.
Just a reminder that Florida was once the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), but it gave up that role in November 2013 at the urging of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who communicated to the Florida State Board of Education in September 2013 that he wanted Florida out of PARCC.
It’s 2015. Florida is out of PARCC (which continues to dwindle), but that does not mean Florida is out of assessments.
I suspect that Florida is not alone in either having officials bend to top-down bullying to falsify technological readiness for testing or in having questionable assistance with trying to pull off its role in the America-As-Global-Competitive testing farce.
It is beyond time to kill the federally-mandated testing beast
As 2015 began the Journal Editorial Report on Fox News was devoted to having its reporters, some of the best there are, speculate on what 2015 holds in terms of who might run for president and what the economy might be. The key word here is “speculate” because even experts know that it is unanticipated events that determine the future and the future is often all about unanticipated events.
How different would the world have been if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated? One can reasonably assume there would not have been the long war in Vietnam because he wanted no part of the conflict there. Few would have predicted that an unknown Governor from Arkansas would emerge to become President as Bill Clinton did. Who would believe we are talking about his wife running for President? That is so bizarre it is mind-boggling.
Most certainly, few would have predicted that an unknown first term Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama, would push aside Hillary Clinton to become the first black American to be nominated for President and to win in 2008. Despite the takeover of the nation’s healthcare system with a series of boldfaced lies, he still won a second term.
Obama now has two more years in which to try to destroy the U.S. economy; particularly its manufacturing and energy sectors. The extent to which he is putting in place the means to do that still remains largely unreported or under-reported in terms of the threat it represents.
The vehicle for the nation’s destruction is the greatest hoax of the modern era, the claim that global warming must be avoided by reducing “greenhouse gas” emissions.
A President who lied to Americans about the Affordable Care Act, telling them they could keep their insurance plans, their doctors, and not have to pay more is surely not going to tell Americans that the planet is now into its 19th year of a cooling cycle with no warming in sight.
To raise the ante of the planetary threat hoax, he has added “climate change” when one would assume even the simple-minded would know humans have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate, nor the ability to initiate or stop any change.
In 2015, the White House is launching a vast propaganda campaign through the many elements of the federal government to reach into the nation’s schools with the climate lies and through other agencies to spread them.
In particular, Obama has been striving to utilize the Environmental Protection Agency to subvert existing environmental laws and, indeed, the Constitution unless Congress or the courts stop an attack that will greatly weaken the business, industrial and energy sectors. It will fundamentally put our lives at risk when there is not enough electricity to power homes and workplaces in various areas of the nation. At the very least, the cost of electricity will, in the President’s own words, “skyrocket.”
Why doesn’t anyone in Congress or the rest of the population wonder why White House policies are closing coal-fired plants that provided fifty percent of our electricity when Obama took office and now have been reduced to forty percent? Did you know that more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned in other nations with two-thirds of them to be built in India and China? We live in a nation that has such huge reserves of coal we export it.
The EPA attack on these plants is so illegal and unethical that one of the nation’s leading liberal attorneys, Laurence H. Tribe, who began teaching about environmental law 45 years ago, went on record to declare the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional.
The plan is a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. Tribe pointed out that a two-decade old Supreme Court precedent forbids the federal government from taking action to commandeer the powers of state governments by leaving them no choice but to implement it.
“The brute fact,” said Tribe “is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.”
As 2014 came to a close, the Obama administration either proposed or imposed more than 1,200 new regulations on the American people.
Alex Newman, writing in the New American, calculated they will add “even more to the already crushing $2 trillion per year cost burden of the federal regulatory machine.” Not surprisingly, “most of the new regulatory schemes involve energy and the environment—139 during a mere two-week period in December, to be precise.”
“In all,” Newman reported, “the Obama administration foisted more than 75,000 pages of regulations on the United States in 2014, costing over $200 billion, on the low end, if new proposed rules are taken into account.” Just one, the EPA’s “coal ash” regulation, “is expected to cost as much as $20 billion, estimates suggest.”
Then add to that the EPA’s “ozone rule” that is estimated to cost “as much as $270 billion per year and put millions of American jobs at risk under the guise of further regulating emissions of the natural gas.” Released the day before Thanksgiving, “Experts also pointed out that the EPA’s own 2007 studies showed no adverse health effects from exposure to even high levels of ozone.”
These are just two examples of the regulatory strangulation of the nation’s economy and energy infrastructure.
This is Obama’s agenda for the remaining two years of his second and thankfully last term in office. Whether you know anything about the science of the climate or have ever even read the Constitution, the sheer disaster of ObamaCare should have told you by now that everything Obama has put in motion has had the single objective of destroying the nation’s economy in every possible way.
The voters have put Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress and their primary responsibility will be to reverse and repeal the damage of Obama’s first six years. The courts will play a role, but this is a job for our elected representatives.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
Happy New Year my fellow Americans. Getting my butt back into the gym is my New Year Resolution. I saw a guy I thought was around my age who looked fantastic, very muscular. He said he was 57; his secret was protein and creatine supplements.
As I begin 2015, another year into the battle to save my country, I observe the daily news thinking, “Same old, same old.” President Obama continues to, in essence, give congress and American voters the finger; arrogantly governing unilaterally against the best interest, the will and protection of the American people.
My dear friend Victoria Jackson, former star of SNL, has been deemed a nut case for calling Obama a Muslim and a communist. While I can not confirm whether or not Vickie and other pundits are correct in their assessment, clearly Obama is on a different page than those of us who love freedom and America.
The question which continues to nag millions of Americans is why does this man do what he does? Why Mr President, why?
Why did you bring Ebola to America? Why do you refuse to place a travel ban into America from Ebola riddled countries?
After abdicating your responsibility to enforce immigration law, why did you sued Arizona for enforcing immigration law; leaving Arizonians open to attacks from immigration smugglers and violent Mexican drug cartels?
Why do you block border patrol officers from doing their job? Why did you dis American voters by granting executive amnesty to five million illegals?
Why are you planning to give illegals social security numbers, opening the floodgates for them to claim any number of credits; rewarding them for entering our country illegally with checks written by American taxpayers?
You once admitted that an influx of illegal immigrants will harm “the wages of blue-collar Americans” and “put strains on an already overburdened safety net.” Why then would you implement an open border policy guaranteed to attract the poor from around the world; encouraging them to break our immigration laws and receive taxpayer funded handouts?
Why have you forced schools across America to take in illegal students carrying various diseases?
Why did you refuse to call the shooting at Fort Hood a “terrorist attack” which blocked the victims and their families from receiving their entitled combat benefits? Why did you run to read the Boston bomber his Miranda rights which blocked interrogators from questioning him about other planned attacks on Americans?
Why did you join Al “scumbag” Sharpton and other race profiteers in furthering their insidious divisive hate-generating lie that America’s police target and murder blacks?
Why did you lie to the American people on at least 29 occasions that if they like their health-care plan and their doctor they could keep them?
Why did you attempt to bully the beautiful ministry of Little Sisters of the Poor, a 100 year old order of nuns to violate their faith by forcing them to sign a form supporting abortion services?
Why does your Obama care continue to cause millions to lose health care plans they like and Cancer patients losing their doctors credited with saving their lives?
Why did you deny additional security requests at our consulate in Benghazi which lead to the death of U.S. Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans during a 9/11/2012 terrorist attack? Why did you order the Benghazi Annex security team to “stand down” rather than attempt to rescue our Ambassador?
Why were military assets not deplored to defend our Benghazi consulate and save our Ambassador?
Why did you send Susan Rice on five national TV shows to knowingly lie to the American people, telling them that the Benghazi attack was caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video that was seen by hardly anyone? Why do you persist in claiming that the war on terror is over despite glaring worldwide evidence proving otherwise?
Why did you choose to pass on attending the historic Paris, France rally in which 40 nations came together against Islamic extremism? Why do you refuse to admit that we are at war with radical Islam?
Why did you release five lethal Taliban terrorist leaders and continue to release other terrorists certain to reenter the battlefield to kill more Americans?
Why did you demand that the name of Jesus be covered up on a stage before you spoke? And yet, you passionately defend Islam. Why did you offer a new asylum decree favoring Muslims over Christians?
Why have you forcefully burdened our military with social engineering policies which critics say will undermine good order and discipline for decades?
Why have you launched a war on coal estimated to cost nearly a quarter-million jobs per year and force plants across America to close?
Why do you vow to Veto the Keystone XL oil pipeline bill which will further energy independence and create jobs for thousands of Americans?
Folks, cited in this article is only the tip of the iceberg of Obama’s war on America as founded: his attacks on traditional Americanism and Christian values – his unseemly attempts to divide us along racial lines to silence opposition to his overreaches – his thuggish use of government agencies to bully and intimidate Americans into submission – his encouraging the sin of covetousness/class envy to divide Americans along economic lines – his attempts to addict as many Americans as possible to government dependency and his relentless efforts to diminish the worldwide influence of the United States of America.
Who are you Mr President? Why are you always on the wrong side of what is best for America and her people? What is your ultimate goal?
Many of us are scratching our heads, asking;…why Mr President, why?
The Government of the United States of America is not in the business of generating its own wealth to run day to day operations. Without our hard earned federal tax dollars going into the Treasury, our government would not be able to function.
The US Tax Code has become such a complex and convoluted mess of social engineering the IRS is having problems doing its most basic function – collecting taxes.
For a larger view click on the chart. Courtesy of Family Security Matters.
The Problem
Our legislators have learned they can control people and corporations behavior by way of the tax code. The Corporations have learned they can lobby legislators to make favorable changes in the tax code for their personal benefit. Legislators can be bought off for pennies on the dollar to make favorable tax code changes no one will ever report on. After all – taxes and accounting theory do not sell newspapers or burn up the blogosphere.
On the people side of the equation, our legislators can control large voting blocks of people by giving tax credits, exemptions, and in some cases unearned tax refunds assuring a large segment of the voting public will vote for one party or the other.
Our Legislators get rich by forcing Corporations to make all the right political donations in order to get the tax code provisions needed to stay competitive.
Our Legislators use the tax code to pay off segments the population to vote for or against a (D) or and (R) helping ensure a long and profitable career for our elected officials.
Solution
Listen to anyone who is serious about overhauling our current tax code. These individuals understand our US Tax Code is the oil that keeps the engine of America running smoothly.
Any legislator who fights the overhaul of the US Tax Code has become corrupted by the system and lost sight of what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights for, we the people.
Kelly Phillips Erb, Contributor Forbes Magazine, exposes the symptoms of systemic problems hampering the IRS. I encourage you all to follow the work of Kelly Phillips Erb.
By Kelly Phillips Erb
Posted: 13 Jan 2015 05:17 PM PST
“With a week to go before tax season opens, taxpayers were already bracing for a potentially “miserable” filing season. It turns out that it could live up to the hype.
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Koskinen has advised employees that the budget cuts will result in reduced services to taxpayers. In an email to employees sent earlier today, Commissioner Koskinen advised that “realistically we have no choice but to do less with less.”
What does that mean for taxpayers?
Quite frankly, none of this information is earth-shattering. I think many of us – tax professionals and taxpayers alike – have been hoping for the best but bracing for the worst this tax season. It looks like we’re getting the latter.
Tax season is still slated to open on January 20, 2015 (those pesky rumors suggesting the date has been pushed out further are just that: rumors). For the latest word on the 2015 tax season, keep checking back.”
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Family Security Matters.
Food has always been political. Throughout history, armies have razed crops and demographics have shifted in response to hunger. Political correctness now drives the civics of food with bountiful nations attempting to dictate what people can eat and how much. Why? For their own good.
The public debate revolves around whether a particular food choice is healthy or not. The real debate is, “Who should choose: you or someone else?” The defense of food freedom needs to turn on the right of people to express themselves through dietary choices that reflect not only their preferences but also their judgment. Food is self-expression as much as music or literature is. If the government can control the flavors of life you choose to swallow, then it can control everything else.
Poe’s law comes alive
Poe’s law is an Internet adage. It says that without knowing the intent of an online poster, it is impossible to distinguish someone who is expressing an extreme position from someone else who is satirizing that extreme position. A recent news story blurs the line between parody and reality.
The parody goes by various names, including “Ordering a Pizza from Big Brother” and “Ordering a Pizza in 2015.” The gist: a pizza parlor with access to all of your personal information refuses to accept an order that is contraindicated by your finances, medical condition, or some other characteristic. The reality is expressed by a December 8 headline in the Telegraph that read, “The vending machine of the future is here, and it knows who you are.”
The Luce X2 Touch TV is the first commercial vending machine to use facial recognition technology to store data and interact with customers. The vending machines offer advantages to both buyers and sellers. A buyer could voluntarily store his preferences, and the machine could regularly restock those items. A seller could replace expensive employees and stores with machines. But the Telegraph points to possible disadvantages. Luce X2 “could refuse to vend a certain product based on a shopper’s age, medical record or dietary requirements.” Candy might be refused to the obese, sodas to schoolchildren. Since Luce X2 uses data-sharing cloud technology, going to another machine might not provide the anonymity that allows access.
The prospect of social control via vending machine sounds paranoid to some. But food regulations have become so intrusive and unreasonable as to become self-parodies. Michelle Obama’s unpopular school-lunch program has children across America tossing trays full of untouched food into extremely well-nourished wastebaskets. Recent menu-labeling laws require food vendors — from restaurants to theater popcorn stands — to provide information on calorie contents that next to no one will read. But the requirement does make fast food more expensive and so discourages its consumption, which may be the laws’ real purpose.
Even as food regulation verges on the absurd, many acquiesce on health grounds. Framing the issue as medical gives the government a strong advantage.
Food is much more than a health matter
The State uses two basic arguments to justify the micromanagement of what people eat. First, laws are necessary to force people to make healthy choices. This argument assumes that politically motivated bureaucrats know what is best for people better than they do themselves. Second, people’s unhealthy choices make them tax burdens on the socialized medical system. Having “relieved” or deprived people of the responsibility for their own medical maintenance, the State uses their dependence as an excuse to impose social control. It is important to counter both arguments, but doing so often ignores an equally essential point.
Food is not merely a matter of health or sustaining life. It is one of the main ways people express themselves in terms of culture, ethnicity, religion, psychology, family history, and pure preference. Food choices are personal; they define our identity as surely as choices in attire or music do.
Food is an integral aspect of transmitting culture and ethnicity. From Hungarian goulash to Italian sausage, from Indian curries to falafels, food expresses a family’s rich heritage. Recipes and cooking techniques are passed down from one generation to the next in an act that preserves the family bond; it preserves the culture itself.
Food is also a cultural ambassador through which diverse groups appreciate each other’s ethnicity. People who would never listen to Chinese music are able to mention dozens of their favorite Chinese dishes. A man who would never learn Spanish might cook pescado a la talla with the same ingredients a woman is using in Acapulco. A couple will return from visiting Germany and rave about its spaetzle and knackwurst. This cultural appreciation occurs naturally, without tax funding or government-mandated tolerance. Indeed, laws interrupt people’s appreciation of other cuisines.
Food can be a moral choice, as vegetarians and vegans know. It can be a part of religious doctrine, as any Orthodox Jew will tell you. It is a matter of ritual, as those who carve a turkey each Christmas or children who gather Halloween candy will gladly acknowledge. Food can even be a political statement, as those who prefer raw milk will attest.
As a psychological matter, food has been called “love.” A mother makes her son’s favorite meal or a cake to celebrate his birthday. A lover proposes marriage over a romantic dinner and a good wine. Women recover from a broken heart by emptying containers of ice cream. When a neighbor expresses sympathy for a death in someone’s family, she brings over a homemade casserole. At the funeral, there is a spread of food. At festivals, it is featured; for the Super Bowl, it is strategically placed between the couch and the TV.
Digestif
The diversity of plentiful food that every grocery store boasts should be a cause of pride, because it demonstrates not only financial prosperity, but also cultural richness. It showcases the range of choices in our affluent society.
Never mind that subsidies, taxes, and regulations already distort what we find at the supermarket and how much we pay for it. When government tries to dictate what we may eat or the manner in which we eat, it is tampering with our heritage, our ethnicity, our psychology, and our religious or political choices. The ability to control the food you put in your mouth is as fundamental a right as to control the words that come out of it.
The government’s increasing interference in food choice is often viewed as benevolent, because it is discussed in terms of health benefits. Food regulation is anything but benevolent. The government is not only trying to define who and what you are; it is, at the same time, trying to convince you that the denial of freedom is “for your own good.” If you are what you eat, then food laws are an attempt to control your identity.
Contributing editor Wendy McElroy (wendy@wendymcelroy.com) is an author, editor of ifeminists.com, and Research Fellow at The Independent Institute (independent.org).
As January 2014 arrived with a blast of cold air ominously dubbed the “polar vortex”, the White House released a video in which the Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, Dr. John Holdren, managed to get on both sides of it, declaring the “extreme cold” to be “a pattern that we expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.” How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality, but that is of little concern to Dr. Holdren and, indeed, the entire global warming—now called climate change–hoax.
Earlier, in November 2013, the White House made Dr. Holdren available to social media saying he would answer “any questions that you have about climate change…” As noted by Jim Lakely, Communications Director of The Heartland Institute, the invitation welcomed questions “but only if they conform to the notion that human activity is causing a climate crisis, and restricting human activity by government direction can ‘fight it.’” The answers would have to wait “because the White House social media experts are having a hard time sifting through the wreckage of their ill-conceived campaign and finding the very few that conform to Holdren’s alarmist point of view.”
Sadly, in addition to the United Nations where the hoax originated and any number of world leaders including our President and Secretary of State, Pope Francis has announced that he too believes the Earth is warming. Someone should tell him that it has been in a natural cooling cycle going on twenty years at this point!
Dr. John Holdren
Of course, such facts mean nothing to Dr. Holdren and even less to the President. That is why we are likely to not only hear more about climate change from him, but also discover that the White House intends the last two years of Obama’s term in office to be an all-out effort to impose restrictions and find reasons to throw money at the hoax. Dr. Holdren was no doubt a major contributor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy initiative announced on December 3rd.
This “Climate Action Plan” called the “Climate Education and Literacy Initiative” is primarily directed at spreading the hoax in the nation’s classrooms and via various government entities as the National Park Service so they can preach it to the 270 million people who visit the nation’s 401 parks each year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will sponsor five regional workshops for educators and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, along with the American Geosciences Institute and the National Center for Science Education will launch four videos likely to be shown in schools.
Joining the White House will be the Alliance for Climate Education, the American Meteorological Society, the Earth Day Network, Green Schools Alliance, and others. It adds up to a massive climate change propaganda campaign, largely paid for with taxpayer funding.
The “science” that will be put forward will be as unremittingly bogus as we have been hearing and reading since the late 1980s when the global warming hoax was launched.
When Dr. Holdren faced a 2009 confirmation hearing, he moved away from his early doomsday views on climate change, population growth, and the possibilities of nuclear war. Though warned by William Yeatman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute that Dr. Holdren had “a 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices” that made him “unfit to serve as the White House Science Advisor”, the committee voted unanimously to confirm him. They should have read some of his published views.
Regrettably Congress generally goes along with the climate change hoax. Dr. Holdren noted that “Global change research (did) well in the 2013 budget. One can look at that as a reaffirmation of our commitment to addressing the climate change challenge. There’s $2.6 billion in the budget for the United States Global Change Research Program.”
Let me repeat that. $2.6 BILLION devoted to “research” on global warming or climate change. One must assume it is devoted to finding ways for mankind to cope with the non-existent global warming or the threat of a climate change about which mankind can do nothing. It is comparable to saying that humans can get the Sun to increase or decrease its radiation.
In June 2014, Ron Arnold, the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and Washington Examiner columnist, noted that Dr. Holdren has long held the view that the U.S. should “de-develop” its “over-developed” economy.
That likely explains the Obama administration’s attack on the use of coal, particularly in utilities that use it to generate electricity. In the six years since the policy has been pursued by the EPA, coal-fired utilities have been reduced from providing fifty percent of the nation’s electricity to forty percent. Less energy means less investment in new business and industrial manufacturing, less jobs, and less safety for all of us who depend on electricity in countless ways.
Arnold reported that “Holdren wrote his de-development manifesto with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the scaremongering authors of the Sierra Club book, ‘The Population Bomb.’” Aside from the fact that every prediction in the book has since proven to be wrong, but it was clear then and now that Dr. Holdren is no fan of the human population of the planet. Like most deeply committed environmentalists, it is an article of faith that the planet’s problems are all the result of human activity, including its weather.
In December 2014, Dr. Holdren expressed the view that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions should be reduced to “close to zero”, adding “That will not be easy.” This reflected the deal President Obama agreed to with China, but carbon dioxide plays no discernable role whatever in “global warming” (which isn’t happening) and is, in fact, a gas essential to all life on Earth, but particularly for all vegetation that is dependent on it for growth.
Dr. Holdren’s continued presence as the chief Science Advisor to the President encourages Obama to repeat all the tired claims and falsehoods of global warming and climate change. It is obscene that his administration devotes billions of dollars and countless hours to spreading a hoax that is an offense to the alleged “science” it cites.
The North and South Poles are not melting. The polar bear population is growing. The seas are not dramatically rising. Et cetera!
One can only hope that a Republican-controlled Congress will do what it can to significantly reduce the money being wasted and reverse the EPA war on coal and the utilities that use it to produce the energy the nation requires.
For now, Dr. Holdren will continue to use his influence in ways that confound and refute the known facts of climate science. How does it feel to be the enemy of an environment that Dr. Holdren and others regard as more important than human life?
© Alan Caruba, 2015
President Obama’s year-end press conference last Friday was another missed opportunity (in a long list) to bridge the growing political divide in America.
If you pay careful attention to the words Mr. Obama uses and the context in which he uses them, you will notice a consistent and troubling pattern. Mr. Obama rarely uses any data or evidence when he talks about the economy and taxes and he carefully and deliberately uses terms that are impossible to define. He does this because he is employing a marketing technique in an attempt to sell Americans on his failed economic policies.
For example, President Obama uses terms such as “fair share” when talking about taxes without discussing what exactly that means. What is a “fair share?” Is there a number he can provide us to assist us in managing our finances? Does the fact that the top 5% of earners in the country pay the overwhelming majority of taxes not constitute a fair share? Is there evidence that his tax rate number actually generates growth and tax revenue? He avoids all of these “complexities” because he isn’t really interested in growth. He is interested in control of your money and, when you are ideologically committed to state control of a free economy, you use slick marketing to separate people from their hard-earned money.
Here’s another example: did you ever notice that when President Obama discusses the economy and growth he always talks about them in terms of what he will “allow” and “not allow?” “Allow?” What kind of country have we morphed into when Americans’ economic prosperity and security are held hostage to the ideology of one man? We are not a monarchy, yet, sadly, the administration is lording over the transformation of a once free economy into a state-controlled, economic monster. In this new economy, friends and donors to the politically-connected class move directly to the front of the line for government approved “credit” in the form of taxpayer subsidies and they write their own regulations to ensure that their competitors are buried in red tape.
These regulations are enacted to bankrupt ideological enemies of the President and his crony faux capitalist friends (i.e. coal, derivatives markets, the petroleum industry), with zero regard for the millions of lives negatively impacted by the administration’s ongoing assault on economic liberty.
These regulations double down on economic destruction by bankrupting small businesses not connected to the political cocktail-party-class who are unable to handle the massive legal fees needed to comply with the thousands of pages of red tape: regulatory measures slapped on their backs as they are trying to get up from the near knockout punch the recession delivered to them.
Finally, I need to address a counter argument, which many of the President’s supporters are using in a bait-and-switch tactic. It goes something like this, “The President is doing a great job! The stock market is up, fuel costs are down, and the economy is adding jobs.” While these statements are factually correct, they completely ignore the role of the President’s policy initiatives.
First, the stock market is up in spite of the President’s policies, and here’s the evidence. American businesses are doing quite well everywhere else but here. Much of their bottom line growth is coming from overseas sales and the cutbacks on expenses such as labor. In other words, many of these companies, due to our corporate tax rate, which is the highest in the industrialized world, are leaving us in order to stay profitable in a globally competitive market. If we refuse to fix this problem both outsourcing and off-shoring will continue and American employees will suffer.
In that sense, Obama is the Outsourcer-in-Chief.
Second, fuel costs are down because petroleum extraction technology has enabled us to tap into our, once-hidden, wealth of oil and gas. We are floating on petroleum wealth here in the United States and this is driving down fuel prices. But, and this is crucial, this is happening on PRIVATE land, not PUBLIC land. The President is actively standing in the way of us responsibly developing a limited subset of public land, and the hidden wealth underneath. That the President takes credit for the decrease in gas prices, despite his numerous attempts to block bipartisan energy development plans (i.e. Keystone, ANWAR, continental-shelf exploration), is utterly outrageous. If he would just get out of the way, gas prices would likely be dramatically lower, and stay that way permanently.
Third, although we are adding jobs, we are doing this slowly at the SLOWEST rate of any economic recovery in modern times. In the eight years of both the Reagan and Clinton administrations, they were both in office while the economy created over 15 million jobs. For President Obama to leave office with the same results, the economy would have to generate 10 million MORE JOBS in his final two years alone.
Mr. Obama’s state controlled “capitalism” model is an abysmal failure that has only succeeded in increasing the paper wealth of America’s crony faux capitalists. Surely, many of you remember the real economic recoveries of the Reagan and Clinton years when you and your neighbor both had smiles on your faces. The only people smiling now are the jokers who made big investments in expensive Washington D.C. cocktail parties to cater to the elected oligarchs who get to pick who wins and, tragically, who loses in our new, government controlled “free-market.”
EDITORS NOTE:
Dan Bongino is the bestselling author of the book Life Inside the Bubble and was the 2012 and 2014 Republican nominee for the United States Senate and 6th congressional district in Maryland. He is a contributor at Conservative Review, a radio host and a frequent guest media-commentator on political issues and security matters.
I received a very disturbing letter and call to action from a mentor, friend, American warrior, and Executive Vice President of the Family Research Council, Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin.
LTG Boykin is a founding member of America’s elite Delta Force. Today LTG Boykin still fights, and for all the right causes, such as that of Army Chaplain CPT Joseph Lawhorn. CPT Lawhorn is just another victim of the secular humanist policy influence led by Mikey Weinstein against the Judeo-Christian faith heritage in our military. Weinstein has advocated for Christians in the military to be punished for professing their faith.
But as you can see in this below letter of admonition, CPT Lawhorn’s commander at Ft. Benning, Col David G. Fivecoat issued the Army Chaplain a letter of concern for speaking of his faith –a letter that will go into CPT Lawhorn’s personnel file that has adverse consequences for selection for promotion. Why in God’s name would Col Fivecoat be concerned about an Army Chaplain speaking of his faith during suicide prevention training?
Ladies and gents, please join in and sign the petition to have this letter removed and perhaps a letter of reprimand should be placed in Col Fivecoat’s personnel file. Thus incident is appalling and we should all be outraged over the persecution of Christian faith in our military. Scroll down to read the letter.
December 17, 2014
Dear Friend,
This cannot stand. When a military chaplain cannot openly speak about his faith, military disarmament has reached a level that no budget cuts could ever produce.
On November 20th, Capt. Joseph Lawhorn, U.S. Army Chaplain at Fort Benning, participated in a mandatory suicide awareness and prevention briefing in which he gave a presentation describing resources – both spiritual and secular – that were available for handling such grave mental health situations. He went further and discussed his personal struggles with depression, describing the spiritual and religious steps that helped him during those dark times in his life.
As a result of the chaplain’s discussion of his faith, he was called into his brigade commander’s office on Thanksgiving Day. There Col. David G. Fivecoat issued Chaplain Lawhorn a Letter of Concern that is to remain in his personnel file for the duration of his stay at Fort Benning. This type of letter can be devastating for career military personnel and would likely prohibit further professional advancement of Chaplain Lawhorn.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on AllenBWest.com. The featured image is courtesy of Voice of the Persecuted.
On Wednesday, December 3, 2014, the Florida Department of Education released the 2013-14 Preliminary District Educator Evaluation Results report on its Performance Evaluation website.
As explained by the FLDOE press release:
“Evaluation results are assigned by districts to teachers, non-classroom personnel and school administrators, based on the district’s approved evaluation system. During the first week of August, DOE provided each school district with student growth results. The districts then applied locally established cut points, which were combined with Instructional Practice Score data, and incorporated student learning growth data from local assessments where appropriate, resulting in each individual’s annual evaluation.”
A message for this story from Education Commissioner Pam Stewart:
“I want to thank all of the dedicated teachers and administrators around the state who are helping prepare Florida’s students for successful futures. Evaluations are just one of the many tools we have to analyze teacher performance, and I’m proud that the majority of our teachers scored so well. There’s no doubt that some of our school districts still need improvement and we should not have any failing schools. This is why we’re continuing to examine many factors that affect student outcomes, including our assessments.”
Educator Evaluations
Also on the Performance Evaluation website, one can archive the finalized educator evaluation reports from the previous two school years to compare and contrast the results.
As one can see, the number of Highly Effective teachers increased dramatically over the past three years: 22.6% for the 2011-12 school year; 32.4% for the 2012-13 school year; and 42.4% thus far for the 2013-14 school year (subject to revision due to school district collective bargaining; some district data may be from last year’s values and cut scores).
The report for the 2013-14 school year will be revised in January and March 2015.
From personal knowledge, and as explained by an FLDOE spokeswoman, the VAM data is interpreted differently by each school district, and cutoff scores for ratings are negotiated by school districts and their unions per collective bargaining- hence the disparity of ratings between school districts.
For some reason, Miami-Dade County Public Schools and UTD did not come to an agreement yet on cutoff scores, but I got my VAM score though a public records request.
If you are a teacher and want to know your VAM score, and thus your final numerical score, and your school district did not release it yet, put in a public records request with your school district. It is public information and they had it since August.
VAM Scores and Data
For the most part, only teachers who actually teach Reading and Math have VAM scores- depending on the school district.
Many do not take stock in VAM, or believe in, it as only 35% of teachers actually teach Reading or Math and 65% of teachers are given these scores though they teach neither subject. After all, the FLDOE develops it and the raw data means nothing at a precursory glance as it is up to the school district to interpret it.
An explanation from the email addressed to me from the FLDOE:
“Florida’s value-added models (VAM) are used to measure the contribution of a teacher or school on student learning. They do this by measuring the difference in student performance on a statewide assessment from one year to the next, and then accounting for other factors that show impact on the learning process. The factors are specific student, classroom and school characteristics that are shown to impact student learning.
The amount of the teacher’s contribution to student learning is provided through a value-added score. The value-added score reflects the average amount of learning growth of the teacher’s students above or below the expected learning growth of similar students in the state, using the factors accounted for in the model.
A few things to remember according to the FLDOE:
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Jacksonville.com.