In a recent letter from President Obama’s bureaucrats at the Department of Education and Department of Justice, public schools across the United States were presented with what many consider a threat:
Comply with the federal government’s current views on transgendered students and most recent rules, regulations, and policies on that subject—which might include some boys using the girls’ locker rooms—or lose federal funding.
But I don’t see this as a threat. I see it as an offer, a gift of sorts from Mr. Obama. I think we ought to accept it!
THE RIDICULOUS CYCLE OF FEDERAL FUNDING
Let’s be clear: When President Obama says he is going to withhold funding for schools, that means he’s going to withhold YOUR money. From YOU. And YOUR school.
After all, where does the federal government get the money it distributes to states and various school districts? Answer: From taxpayers in states and various school districts.
When one steps back and thinks about it, the whole scheme is rather ridiculous:
1. We send OUR money to Washington DC in the form of taxes.
2. We beg to get OUR money back.
3. When and if our money is returned, it has all kinds of regulations, restrictions, ridiculous demands, and other strings that politicians and government bureaucrats have attached.
We’ve been caught in this terrible cycle, this vortex of federal funding and regulations, for decades. Ending it requires nothing less than stepping out of the cycle and bringing it to a halt.
Everyone knows that in an unhealthy, abusive co-dependent personal relationship, someone has to stop abusing the other if there’s to be any chance of ending the abuse.
Likewise, if there’s to be any chance of ending the unhealthy, abusive co-dependent federal funding-regulatory relationship with the American people, either citizens have to stop sending so much money to government, or government has to stop returning so much of it as subsidies.
The American people are reluctant to do the former, each scared of getting in trouble by acting alone. Fortunately, however, President Obama just offered to do the latter.
NEVER LET A PRESIDENTIAL THREAT GO TO WASTE
President Obama is very liberal, very progressive. He’s a socialist as that term is understood by students of political and economic theory. He loves to spend other people’s money on things for which there is little or no market demand.
Yet—yet!—this very liberal, very progressive, socialist President of the United States just offered to reduce by withholding federal government spending on education.
How often does a politician offer to cut government spending on ANYTHING? For ANY REASON?
Yet—yet!—non-liberals, non-progressives, and non-socialists across the United States don’t seem to understand the opportunity they’ve just been presented. Instead, they keep chattering about boys going into girls’ bathrooms. Or the fact that this move by the President is overreach on the part of the federal government.
Sure it’s overreach. The federal government has been overreaching beyond its Constitutional bounds for the last century. Routinely. Is this news to anyone?
Regarding boys going into girls’ bathrooms, why wring our hands and worry about it? Why not simply build and maintain exactly the kinds of bathrooms people in various communities want in their schools, AND cut the strings of federal funding, federal subsidies, and federal regulations AT THE SAME TIME?
That, after all, is the deal President Obama has offered: Maintain traditional bathrooms and locker rooms, and the cycle of federal funding comes to a screeching halt.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Federal funding/subsidies and the government regulations that get attached are the biggest problems for American schools. Hands down.
For decades, federal government spending on education has been skyrocketing, going up, up, up. And up. Yet learning in our schools has been either flat or, in some cases, falling over that same period of time.
Government subsidies have increased the prices of everything related to education, while the centers of control over education have been moved farther and farther away from students, teachers, parents, and the actual schools that unite them.
So why not take up President Obama on his offer? Let him withhold federal funding for American schools while those schools decide for themselves where students go pee and poop.
Will there be outrage at the federal government for holding onto the money of citizens and not sending it to the schools where citizens send their kids? Sure there will be.
Maybe that’ll be enough to cause citizens to stop sending their money to the federal government and then begging to get it back with regulations, restrictions, and ridiculous demands attached? Maybe that could be the beginning of an end to the terrible cycle we’ve yet been unable to stop?
