WHEN YOU MAKE A 1% INCOME DOING PART-TIME WORK, IT'S A HELL OF A LOT EASIER TO RAISE A SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILD
When you read this...
Campaigning in Ohio on Saturday, Rick Santorum displayed his culture-warrior side in full force....
Santorum recalled his prominent role in the 1990s debates over the controversial procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion. He lambasted the president's health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, "because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."
"That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country," Santorum said.
...read it while keeping this in mind:
Rick Santorum grew wealthy over his four years working as a corporate consultant and media commentator after leaving the Senate in 2006, his newly released federal tax returns show. He made more than $3.6 million and drove an Audi luxury sedan....
The former Pennsylvania senator's tax returns, released Wednesday night, show that his annual adjusted gross income surged from nearly $660,000 in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2009 before slipping to $923,000 in 2010....
His 2010 tax returns show he made more than $550,000 in media and consulting fees -- paid to him through a corporation he set up, Excelsior LLC. The previous year, Santorum made more than $820,000 in fees, also paid through the same firm....
Santorum can sneer at the "elites," but I'd say, oh, about 99% of America is less "elite" than he is. He can argue that every women in America should just suck it up and bring every pregnancy to term, regardless of the ability to cover the out-of-pocket costs, and perhaps to do the backbreaking work of caring for a very sick child with extraordinary needs -- but it's easy for him to say that when his household pulls down a million bucks a year even though neither parent has to deal with the time constraints of a real job.
Yes, I know: when he was in the Senate his income was merely in the low six figures. Well, that would be a king's ransom for most Americans, particularly the rural cultural conservatives who've backed Santorum in the past in Pennsylvania, and who back him now in the GOP primaries.
Also keep Santorum's wealth in mind when he's attacking public schools and singing the praises of homeschooling:
At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the government's role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their children.
The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose "when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools."
Hey, Rick: Why don't you try working multiple sub-$10-an-hour, zero-benefits jobs, and then tell me how swell it is to try to homeschool your kids -- especially whenthey need to be prepared for an information economy rather than a 19th-century agrarian economy. Give it a shot and let me know how it works out for you. Sell the Audi first -- and don't keep the profits.
I am home-schooling my grand-children simply because assholes like Santorum already have too much influence over the public school system. I want - and i can give - my grand-children an Information Age education, not a third century before common (pig) era education.
ReplyDeleteOf course as a Retired College Professor, Master of Science and Gnostic I am in a unique position to do so.
I do wish this asshole would visit The High Desert - I'd bust him one in the mouth, and if he turns the other cheek, I'd bust him one again. Dog-shit.
When it came time for my 2 kids to enter school, I mulled over the options and the general function of what we call education in this country. I concluded that they should go to public school (economics helped dictate that choice, too), for 2 main reasons. (1) I think most any child essentially teaches her/himself anyway, once the basic material & a learning context is made available by whomever, and it seemed to me that I could best help as a backup resource/support/catalyst. (2) My children were going to have to grow up, and eventually get along without me, within the larger society, so learning how to deal (and hopefully empathize) with a wide variety of other children as well as adults besides me was something important that I felt could best be accomplished via public school. Obviously, reasonable minds can differ on the issue.
ReplyDeleteSantorum got himself into political hot water as a Senator when, while living in Virginia, he tried to rip off a school district in PA by having it pay him large sums to home school his kids. Even after his deception was exposed and the school district cut him off, Santorum doubled down and fought to retain the tax dollars.
ReplyDeleteNo wonder he thinks home schooling is a great thing. Parents could make a decent income playing the Santorum game.
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ReplyDeleteGreetings little libby fisters, lube experts, and public school shillmeisters.
ReplyDeleteIn all fairness, a couple of handy notes are in order.
Homeschooling outperforms ALL public schools on all generally accepted methods of testing. And if the morons with "certification" in the frowsy public schools really knew their stuff, you'd have no worries about "agrarian" this or that, or moving the little darlings into a post-industrial, "information age" mode of thinking.
Alas, as companies the nation over are bitterly complaining about the vapid dolts and impudent brats who're the products of mass production, "all hands on the spinning wheels", industrialist-oriented, 19th-century, one-size-fits-all edu-macation and spend billions on retraining for merely getting the kids to use simple machinery and manuals, I'd say that you've got a little more work to do on making your case that homeschoolers are nutso.
Indeed, no force in the powers of heaven, hell and earth combined would have me DARE send my kids to the gladiator-in-training mode public schools.
And yes, homeschooling IS affordable on something less than a Santorum (or anything similar) type income. It's just that it's not congruent with the lifestyle of some libs, who'd just as soon make sure the little brats are seen in the morning and late afternoon but not heard much before then.
Nonetheless, millions of rather average-heeled, sensible shoe type parents now homeschool their kids. This may very well be much to the chagrin of the NEA. But that's in the category of what dear old dad used to call Tough Shit.
As we can see from the Walker success in smashing bureaucratic bloat in WI (and let's hope the trend follows this spark in igniting other such initiatives nationwide), the assholes and thugs of the so-called "public sector" are the ones putting states in the red and need some nips and tucks and nail trims hither and yonder.
You have a blessed day, alleged Mollusks of Modernity.
--W
Continuing the fun slam on your skullduggery on this topic:
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, the legal issue here is not getting "paid" by a state to homeschool. That does NOT happen, with the only possible exceptions being legal cases still pending where some homeschooling parents want access to certain facilities and perhaps sports venues.
The (not unfair) claim here being that as taxpayer, you DO pay for at least some of your portion of whatever the public schools have to offer.
Rather, the issue in Santorum's case, per the legalism in county and state records on conflicting claims of residency, is that the state paid for a Charter CYBER school (remote learning, yes, but still NEA mandated materials), which is not really the same thing as homeschooling in the common use and understanding of the word.
It might be 100% "cyber", but as a charter school technically it IS a public school funded by the state, and that (up til now with the investigation pending) is how the states generally treat the issue.
Santorum made use of that legality.
After all, is someone under the serious impression he paid no taxes to the state at all?? Oh well.
IF in point of fact and legality Santorum is in the wrong here, the issue revolves around the tax to "which state?" issue for what was essentially a PUBLIC school--NOT upon his claims on homeschooling being a superior mode of teaching to the public schools.
Generally, it is far superior. Even when administered by average parents bereft of any of the recent but largely ineffective "certification" craze, which even assaults hairdressers and dog walkers.
http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000002/00000214.asp
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122912779960403217.html
Don't like it? Dog shits indeed, as some doofus opined above. But that's life.
Learn to clean your toes.
As one commenter placed the matter in response to some ignorant pus packet named Dick Cavett:
"Mr. Cavett has just demonstrated that such ill-informed and bigoted positions are not the exclusive domain of the far-right. Mr. Cavett devotes over half of his editorial on a diatribe against homeschooling that is as ill-informed as Mr. Santorum’s beliefs about climate change.
Had Mr. Cavett even attempted the slightest amount of research on homeschooling, he would have found homeschooled students routinely out-perform their public schooled counterparts. As a result, most colleges today embrace homeschooled applicants. Some even go out of their way to find them. And why wouldn’t they, considering that a 2010 study published in the Journal of College Admissions determined that homeschoolers:
• Had a higher average ACT/SAT score (26.5 vs. 25 on the ACT)
• Had a higher freshman GPA (3.37 vs. 3.08)
• Had a higher graduation rate (66.7% vs. 57.5%)
• Had a higher average GPA at graduation (3.41 vs. 3.11)
If you understand the problems facing public schools today, the above results are not surprising. What do our public schools need? They need lower student-to-teacher ratios, more individualized attention for students, and more parent involvement in their children’s education. Isn’t that exactly what homeschooling provides?
Homeschooling is not and should not be for everyone. But it can work, and work very well."
As far as the balonous, horseshit mantra that seems to be about the only thing people like Cavett and the NEA types can fall back on--"socialization"--that long ago became yet another busted myth.
This time, the evidence hails from one of your dandy liberal SciAm types, evolutionary biologist, and (probable) atheist at that:
http://www.hslda.org/highschool/Best_Socialization.pdf
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122912779960403217.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000002/00000214.asp
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/02/pittsburgh_post-gazette_revives_phony_santorum_scandal.html
ReplyDeleteThe phony part that actually WAS dog shit and hype.
Gosh, I SO hate liars....