Joe Biden’s policies are bad news for students and parents

 

Joe Biden’s policies are bad news for students and parents. 

The Biden platform is filled with promises to shovel more money toward a broken education system that fails millions of kids — and would shut off programs that give families the freedom to send their kids to better schools.

School choice is one of the most important issues for American families and future generations. Yet on point after point, Biden has made clear he wants to restrict choice and repeal programs that work.
 

- Voucher Programs. Biden says he opposes any plan that lets students pay for private school using the money that would have been spent on their public school — which is called a voucher. He has already promised to end one voucher system in D.C., the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which overwhelmingly benefits Black and Hispanic students.

- Charter Schools. Biden didn’t mince words: “I am not a charter school fan.” Yet charter schools — which are public schools that have the freedom to innovate — have been proven to work, especially for students from low-income communities and urban areas.

- Scholarship Programs. The Biden-Sanders unity platform explicitly opposes the creation of tax credit scholarships, which encourage people to make donations that help kids attend better schools. Once again, these programs work for the neediest students.

- Education Savings Accounts. The Biden-Sanders platform also opposes letting families set up a tax-deductible account to help pay for schooling costs and learning materials. Biden is against giving families even a little control over their kids’ education.

What do Biden’s education policies have in common? They are exactly what teachers unions want. The unions fear any competition which could make them look bad or force larger reforms to the traditional schooling model. 

Biden’s positions are similar in another way, too: They would hurt countless kids who couldn’t get the world-class education they deserve. America deserves better than more of the failing educational status quo.

 Biden’s Disastrous Plan for American Energy

In Pennsylvania this week, Joe Biden asked: “Do I look like a radical socialist?” The better question is whether the socialists who are gaining power in the Democratic Party are exerting a greater influence on Biden’s platform. The answer is clearly yes.

Since Biden was in Pennsylvania to talk about energy policy, it is worth starting there.

 Fracking. Which Joe Biden should Americans believe on fracking: the one who said he would “make sure it’s eliminated” and agreed with the socialist Bernie Sanders that it should be banned, saying “no more”? Or the Biden who now says the opposite?

It is telling that Kamala Harris, his VP pick, favors the total fracking ban that’s part of the Green New Deal. So do the socialist activists who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party. It is hard to see Joe Biden standing up to them, especially since he’s already caved to their demands to move further left.

Green New Deal. Joe Biden avoids saying he supports the Green New Deal demanded by the Democratic Party’s most radical wing. But activists and journalists have spent months pointing out that Biden’s energy plan is the Green New Deal in all but the name.

It’s true: Biden’s $2 trillion plan would raise electricity prices on families, dole out untold billions of dollars in corporate welfare to politically-favored energy companies, and put America back in the Paris Climate Accord — hurting our economy while strengthening adversaries like China. No matter what he calls it, Biden’s energy plan is a raw deal for Americans.

When Joe Biden was vice president to Barack Obama, they enacted some of the most economically harmful energy policies in American history. Four years later, the Democratic Party is even more extreme on energy, and Biden is set to go with the radical flow. The losers will be the millions of Americans who could soon be paying more, losing jobs, and facing blackouts.

What Joe Biden's America Would Look Like In 2021

It is now November 2021, one year after Joe Biden was elected president after a razor-thin election. We have been given a glimpse into the future to see Biden’s America.

Summer 2021 was another scorcher. The rolling brownouts California suffered in 2020 spread throughout the West. Record demand for air conditioning combined with the ongoing closures of coal, nuclear, and even gas-powered electric plants have left millions powerless in these heat waves.

Energy Secretary Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with the support of President Biden, has permanently extended the airlines’ drastic curtailments of flights, first seen during the late pandemic, in keeping with the Green New Deal they both support. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel have shot up to European levels “to discourage internal combustion engine use and to promote jobs in the alternative transportation industry, especially the manufacture of bicycles.”

The Ferguson effect, where law enforcement pulls back in the wake of hostility, lawsuits, and violent crime increases, and seen in 2020 in certain cities such as Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and Minneapolis, has extended to hundreds of major cities. Attorney General Lori Lightfoot, former mayor of Chicago, has called for a blue-ribbon commission on how to best spend the mandatory 30% diversion of police funds to social service agencies that the Democratic U.S. House and Senate mandated. Although Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he did not support defunding the police, he never denounced violence and rioting in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. This was seen as a green light by progressives in Congress to divert money from law enforcement nationally, or else state and local governments would lose federal funding.

Because Biden has been making fewer and fewer public appearances, his ability to impose his will on Congress has diminished. Rumors have circulated, but his advisers remain tight-lipped about his medical and mental condition.

The economy has never recovered from what was hoped to be a temporary pullback during the pandemic. Even liberal experts agree with conservatives that the reversal of President Trump's tax cuts by the new Congress did serious damage to economic investment and job growth. The difference between the two camps, though, is that liberal economists see a benefit to the lower standards of living. According to Treasury Secretary Elizabeth Warren, “When everyone’s income goes down, as long as the income of those who are wealthier go down more, the result is more equality.”

Identity politics has expanded. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was chosen by Biden because she checked three boxes as a progressive woman of color, was designated by him as the czar in charge of “remedying historical grievances.” The 1619 Project, claiming that America was founded to promote slavery and first pushed by the New York Times, has been adopted as mandatory reading by the majority of public school districts in the country. This was after a guidance letter went out from her office to school districts nationwide, telling them to incorporate the 1619 Project or face liability exposure on civil rights grounds. The fact that the 1619 Project is opposed by liberal and conservative historians alike, and also ignores the abolition movement, are not considered significant by the Biden administration.

In foreign affairs, Biden has attempted to resurrect the Obama-era agreement with Iran to keep it from developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Reversing all the Trump sanctions as a unilateral peace gesture to the regime did not work — Iran has ramped up its 20,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges, which mostly had been in storage prior to the election.

National security adviser Adam Schiff has stated publicly that “Iran must curtail its nuclear efforts or face the consequences.” But when pressed, he could not say what those consequences would be. He said he hoped that discussions with the European Union, Russia, and China about how to deal with the Iranian crisis would find common ground for the first time.

The new Democratic Congress has cut funding to the Department of Defense under pressure from the newly empowered progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been reacting to the painful cuts by triaging their defense priorities. Adversaries have shown signs of challenging U.S. interests abroad to exploit new weaknesses in American forces.

The one bright spot in Biden’s America over the last 12 months has been in healthcare. When the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed led to a vaccine in record time, Americans, for the most part, decided they were tired of seclusion and took the vaccine. Even Democratic governors lifted Coronavirus restrictions, employees went back to work, schools and universities reopened for the spring semester, sports teams played in front of fans, and the atmosphere of fear went away. Defeating the pandemic is now acknowledged by pundits on both ends of the spectrum as Trump’s finest hour. The vaccine came out two weeks after the November election.

 

Some Black Lives Matter, but not all!

The reality is that homicides in major cities are not race neutral. 136,000 Americans are shot each year—over one million in the past decade and. 36,000 killed. The shooters were most likely black as well. This is a devastating plague acutely affecting black communities across the country.

The killings continue even as the country faces a Coronavirus pandemic that prompted the governor to place states on a stay-at-home lock-down. No one is to go out unless it is for essentials such as groceries and prescription medications. However, the killings did not stop and are rising rapidly. Again, it is mostly black victims.

When the big city Mayor’s got tough on “bad guys with guns,” homicides in went down. It is likely that most of those detained were black. In these reductions in homicides, the people who benefited most also were African Americans who lost fewer sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers to senseless street violence. More black people lived. However, the mantra has been about cops killing innocent black men.

In the past months, we have had highly destructive riots under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Each was started by the death of a black person at the hands of officer(s). Details in most, factual details are still coming out. Yet, in every case, the commencement of rioting and destruction started immediately.

For most people, it is difficult to balance the outrage of “death by police” with the daily black-on-black homicides that occur daily. This is the conversation we need to have. The riots have only destroyed. They have not produced any closure of the gap of needed understanding and change.

How To Build Another Booming Economy

 Conservative policies are best for working families. Ambassador Haley made that clear in her RNC speech on Monday: “Before Communist China gave us COVID-19, we were breaking economic records left and right.”

Before the pandemic hit, the last four years saw a strong economy across the board. Historic tax cuts, record red tape slashing, and unleashing American energy — the combination of common-sense policies created an economy that worked for everyone.
 

- Jobs. The national unemployment rate hit a 50-year low. Women’s unemployment hit a 67-year low. For Hispanics and African Americans, unemployment reached their lowest levels in history. People of all backgrounds were climbing the ladder of opportunity.

- Wages. Workers of all kinds saw their incomes rise at the fastest rate in a decade. Lower-income workers saw the largest wage gains, with paychecks for the bottom 10% growing more than twice as fast as they did in Obama’s second term.

- Tax relief. The tax cuts of 2017 put more money in the pockets of hard-working Americans. Some of the biggest relief went to low- and middle-income families — those earning between $25,000 and $100,000. Millions got bonuses and wage hikes, too.

- Stocks. The markets hit record highs, creating trillions of dollars in new wealth for retirees, pension plan holders, and middle-class families that scraped together the money to invest.

The economic boom was felt in every corner of America. Manufacturers made new investments, the nation’s small businesses saw record optimism, and more. Families and workers have seen remarkable benefits, making communities and the country better off.

On Monday, Amb. Haley said: “The pandemic has set us back, but not for long.” Conservative policies brought the economy back before. They can bring it back again.

Political Correctness Has Morphed Into -- Cancel Culture.

 

What started with political correctness has morphed into something else -- cancel culture.   FIRST: First cancel culture went after the 1st Amendment. If someone said something or did something that offended them, they came after that person’s job and their family.  THEN: They went after our history. Statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were torn down. Monuments to abolitionists were defaced. Even a statue of Abraham Lincoln, paid for by freed slaves and praised by Frederick Douglass, needed armed guards to prevent its destruction.    NOW: They're going after our culture. There’s a screaming 1% that’s trying to shout down the other 99% of us. A loud few are trying to force their views on the rest of society, telling us how to live and think.   Cancel culture is out of control — and frankly — it's un-American.   You and I know that our society is built on the values of free speech and mutual respect.  But cancel culture rejects both.  In place of free speech, it demands conformity.  Instead of mutual respect, it tears people down.    It would rather SILENCE, than speak — and would rather DESTROY than discuss.    Nikki Haley

A Vote For Democrats is like poisoning the Economy!

 California’s Tax Grab 

Joe Biden isn’t the only one with plans to raise taxes. So is the People’s Republic of California. Not only are state lawmakers considering higher taxes on current residents, they also want to tax people who’ve already left the state. The backdrop to the California tax proposal is a massive $54 billion deficit. Yet rather than cut spending or end giveaways to liberal interest groups, California’s powerful government unions have demanded higher taxes. The current proposal is targeted at the wealthy and would apply to virtually all assets they hold everywhere, even outside of California. Worse, people who left the state within the last 10 years would still be forced to fork over money. The bill’s liberal backers say it’s all about attacking the rich, but every Californian would get hurt in the end. Higher taxes drive away job creators and can raise less money than intended, leading to calls for even higher taxes on even more people — all without solving the underlying spending problem. Since California is often where the worst ideas get their start, this terrible tax hike needs to fail. → Read more: California wealth tax could become first of its kind in US under new proposal (San Francisco Chronicle) → Read more: Before proposing a new wealth tax, maybe California should actually try studying it first (Yahoo)