Schooling Obama on Education: Young Americans Seek Answers to Broken Promises

By Celia Bigelow on December 09, 2011

President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas called for higher taxes on the rich and an increase of investment—not for businesses, —but in national education.

“It starts by making education a national mission – a national mission. Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don't have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn't be laying off good teachers right now – we should be hiring them. We shouldn't be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. We shouldn't be making it harder to afford college – we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn't rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.”

This should be a concern for young people who feel obligated to achieve a higher education, but are not finding jobs available. President Obama’s solution for investing in a national education is not going to cut it—we need serious economic reform.

The fact of the matter is that youth unemployment is the highest in the nation of any major demographic—resting at 17.4 percent. It is now expected for young people to achieve a higher education in order to have a chance of gaining a job.

Jobs are not being created. The unemployment rate for the country is around 8.6% percent and the workforce is continuing to shrink. A main reason why young people are struggling to find jobs is because older, unemployed people with more experience are willing to take lesser paid jobs—the jobs usually taken by the youth.

Thanks to this poor job market, Time reports that 85 percent of last year’s college graduates had to move back in with their parents. Not only are they stuck at home, they’re stuck with no way to pay their massive student loans.

Younger people have been taken by the hand of big government and ushered into high education with government-provided loans at artificially low interest rates. This type of fiscally unsound economic policy is exactly what led to the housing bubble.

Accumulated student debt is over $1 trillion dollars and the average debt held by each student is $26,300. The future for young people is uncertain and rightfully so—to pay off these massive debts, young people need income. With no jobs and student loans left unpaid, young people will be indebted to big government.

President Obama is convinced: Investing in national education will create a well-educated workforce that will magically solve America’s economic woes on its own. This is faulty rhetoric and unprecedented logic—education does not create jobs singlehandedly. Education is important, but entrepreneurship, innovation, and sound free-market policies give businesses more freedom and outlets to create jobs.

For example, the 1920s serve as a decade of excellence that Washington should reflect on. Rather than investing solely in education, big government economic policies were replaced with market-friendly conditions that created jobs and lead to a booming economy.

I want to highlight a key fact about this decade—when free-market policies were implemented, America experienced an incredible inflection of patent grants. Innovators were in abundance and the amount of new product markets skyrocketed. New ideas flourished and jobs followed—the unemployment rate fell from 6.7 percent to 3.2 percent.

Our economy demands innovation, not just education. So President Obama is wrong—education alone certainly is not what makes an economy flourish. Freedom, innovation, and acting upon ideas are what move the economy and cause it to grow. This is not happening under the current policies.

Many of our current devices today were created by men and women with little academic background. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, dropped out of Harvard University to start his own software company. The company successfully became one of the leading software providers and Gates ranks consistently among the world’s wealthiest people.

Articles/Opinions On the President

Article from the Wall Street Journal - by Eddie Sessions:
Posted September 29, 2011  (from R. Reichert)

"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.

In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals and he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.

Now, nearly a full 2 years into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain .

The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.

Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted, "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an alQaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual's life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America!

********************

Letter to the Editor - Charlotte Sun - September 20, 2011: