Glenn Grothman: Taxcutter as Deadbeat Dad.

Hi folks,

In an opinion piece for the Journal-Sentinel last week, Glenn complains that funding 4 year old kindergartens is a bad way to improve educational performance.

From the Journal-Sentinel: "Be leery of government 'helping' your children"
Glenn begins this way,

The most important function of a society is raising its children. And with American high school students doing poorly on international tests, it's tempting to accept any new suggestion to improve our educational system.

I'm startled, frankly, that Glenn believes society should have any hand at all in raising children, but, now that he's said it in print, I'm more hopeful.

American high school kids are performing horribly on international tests. Glenn finally looked at the reports showing -- ready? -- that by the 12th grade, US students only outscore "Cyprus, Lithuania and South Africa in math."

This scares the hell out of me, but Glenn doesn't seem too worried about it. He's repeatedly slashed away at the kind of responsible funding for education that would have invested in our economic future by keeping our kids competitive with the rest of the industrially developed world.

Even more glaring is this comment at the end about working mothers:

It is easy to forget that, while most mothers with preschool children now work, only a minority of them work full time and leave their children with strangers. For the rest of our lifetimes, the left will continually say that the more the government cares for the children, the better off the children will be. I doubt that the founders of this country would have believed that.

Funny he should mention The Founders of this county. My particular favorite had a comment about this:

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” Thomas Jefferson, 9/28/1820

We do that by making sure each child gets a great education. We have to educate each child as if they might become President -- or a State Senator. Because, they might.

Otherwise we'll get the leaders we deserve.

Period.

While it's obvious that throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it, cutting off most of its funding doesn't fix it either. Glenn's entire life, etched boldly on his vanity license plates, is about cutting off funding to 'wasteful' programs like -- apparently -- education.

That's why this "opinion" piece was soaked through with enough hypocrisy to give me a migraine.

Look:

• You can't slash the number of employees in your business to save money and then complain that service isn't as good as it should be.
• You can't cut the number of doctors in a hospital to save money and then complain that the care isn't as good as it should be.
• And you cannot cut school system funding and then complain that they are doing a bad job.

But here's what else I know:

1) Slashing funding to the high schools, whether in MPS or elsewhere, punishes children who don't deserve to be punished. You don't make students smarter by stuffing more students into a classroom. Trying to punish the teachers who refuse to vote for him, only hurts the children.

And

2) Slashing funding to students you are obligated to help, is equivalent to abandoning your family.

Thinking like this makes Glenn the deadbeat dad of tax cutter, refusing to keep up child support.


hiho
Mpeterson