Sunday, May 10, 2009

Ideas for a Republican Resurgence: Understanding the True Roots of Poverty

The wealthy, of course, have a lot of financial cushions to protect themselves from irresponsible decisions. The rest of us, however, need to be careful and cautious if we are going to thrive and leave some wealth behind for our children and grandchildren. In my view, neither "redistribution" or "trickle down" is going to reduce poverty caused by bad decisions among poor and middle class individuals.

If Republicans are going to regain power, they are going to need to do it by pursuing ideas that are realistic, will pay-off, and which Democrats cannot afford to endorse because it harms their political base. Accordingly, the issue of school choice is ideal for Republicans because the public schools are a disaster and Democrats cannot embrace real reform because of their ties to the teacher unions. Just because McCain lost doesn't mean that he was wrong to suggest school choice was the Civil Rights issue of our century.

Another hot idea is to fight any attempts to rollback welfare reform and efforts to encourage single motherhood. Ann Coulter has some great stuff in her new book, Guilty, that documents the damage done by single mothers. Attacking single motherhood makes the case that our economic prosperity will advance through changes in behavior at the personal level. Our heros ought to be married couples that adopt, couples that stay together for the sake of the children, and folks that repair their marriages as they become clean and sober. Whenever, Obama tries to lean on the single motherhood issue...he gets blow-back from Rev. Jackson...who fathered an out-of-wedlock child with his mistress.

Finally, I'm 100% against any effort to blame the U.S. for poverty in developing nations. These countries tolerate child labor and don't enforce compulsory schoolng. We can dump all the money we want on them, but we won't see any change in prosperity until they clean up their own behavior. Stopping child labor is one of the keys to becoming a civilized society...we should insist on this now as a precondition for any aid we provide overseas.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am very tired of the US being blamed for everything that is wrong in the world, and tired of liberal Americans accepting that blame. We can't provide everything for everyone - we can't even provide it for ourselves.

Anonymous said...

I agree. I like to think of the Republican party as a healthy diet and a healthy body. As we humans (and all other animals) have been gifted with various organs, each specifically designed to participate in the overall health of the system, and each, when left to operate as an entity that has symbiotic relationships with other organs, so Society depends on the individual....each gifted with certain God-Given talents and each, when left to operate on it's own, provide the various institutions of the system with health in it's purest form and in it's entirety. The body even has been blessed with it's own security force, antibodies, which when functioning as planned can defend it from foreign and internal attacks. It is only when a group of cells want to exist and procreate within the body without being assigned any contributing function, but cells which seek to convince the body that they too are worthy of some of its nutrients and call on its own blood supply to continue to flourish....until it overwhelms the body with its insatiable demands...that the Republic begins to defeat itself. This group of cells, a Cancer, soon expands among the institutions and throughout the entire body because the immune mechanisms have been instructed not to attack cells that resemble there own selves...until the problem is recognised as a malignancy. It is only when society refuses to recognise these cells that they continue as "freeloaders" whose continued expansion without contribution threatens and finally destroys the entire body. I like to call my comparison theories "The Body Politic".
Tom Lunsford- Conservative

Mo said...

Great post. I'd also like to see some contrast between the two major parties. In reality, I don't see a lot of difference between them.

Anonymous said...

When we do dump money into poor countries most of it goes to the wrong places. I think the Republicans need to take a solid step back to the right and not be "Liberal Lite"

I have been a Republican in the past and may be again but not the way the party is going now. Nice post, I saw the link on Twitter.

Carlos Diego Córdoba (PhD) said...

In general there is thought that the root of all the evils is the economy and is not like that.
My criterion is that this root must be in the lack of equality in the eyes of the law, and in the fact that - I speak for the experience in Argentina - the Judicial Power, be in hands of a few judicial bureaucrats, ready to say amen to the power of shift.
I follow you in Twitter where I do a synthesis of my blog where I analyze the inefficiency of that one and the crises that it generates

Anonymous said...

I am not sure attacking single motherhood is as productive as you may think. I think it may be more productive to attack single PARENTHOOD if you are going to attack anything. Why? What if someone is a single mother because they chose not to have an abortion, by attacking them, you are placing an disproportionate amount of blame on one of the two people who created that child, and laying the blame on someone who upheld and ideal of the Republican Party platform, being pro-life in thier actions.

I think positive messages will prevail over "attacking" any one group specifically anyway. If I was on the fence as a single mother, (which I am not, I am definitively off of the fence) would I feel like the party cared about me? No - the party should care about ALL Americans, it should just seek constructive solutions actually geared to help in a permanent way, not a continuance of bandaid solutions. That shows a concern FOR those INDIVIDUAL people, and the Republican Party is not for solutions only for other Republicans, its leadership for all citizens.

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