The Special Olympics and What’s Wrong with our Country

The Special Olympics was in the news lately, because the Department of Education wanted to cut funding for it.

Apparently, the Department of Education has been a major funder of the Special Olympics.  The Department wanted to end funding for it, because the Special Olympics is a private organization that receives huge amounts of private donations, and the Department wanted to cut federal spending.  But people complained, and the money was restored. 

Our federal government is $22 trillion in debt, and we as a nation expect that every worthwhile cause, every human problem, every human need, must be addressed with money from the government. 

Our country was founded on the principles of human liberty, unalienable rights.  The government existed to secure those rights.  As a consequence, the federal government was small, only concerned about things like defense, coinage, and the Post Office.

With great liberty comes great responsibility, so we had the moral code of the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  All from the Bible.

But that was all ruled to be religious, and we can’t have that, so now we have secularism.  So instead of loving your neighbor, we are told just don’t hate him.  Tolerate him, or ignore him.

Now we can’t spend enough money to protect our people from each other or themselves.  We say we don’t want socialism, but we want our government to do everything for us.  We can no longer take care of ourselves.

banning bump stocks and trucks

A nationwide ban on bump stocks has finally gone into effect.  Bump stocks were used in the 2017 mass shooting that killed 57 people.   The White House was asked if the ban applied to criminals and the black market.  A spokesman said: The law is the law.  We have no doubt but that they will comply.

In other news, France has finally banned all trucks from its country after a truck was used to kill 87 people two years ago.  There had been protests from several retail organizations saying that trucks had beneficial uses, but the French Parliament said that the safety of its people was its highest priority.

In related news, a number of Mideast and African countries have joined together in a rare act of solidarity to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and possession of fertilizer, a primary ingredient in the making of bombs, which kill hundreds if not thousands of people a year.  When asked how they will grow their crops, they replied: We must think of the safety of our people first. 

Beware of the graduated income tax (in Illinois) - a letter sent to the paper

The news media are flush with an advertisement promoting the graduated tax in Illinois.  And the main point of the ad is that 97% of the people will not be affected by it. 

Now the Tribune has a big article about a “poll shows support for Pritzker’s income tax.”  I hope the Tribune follows up with an editorial explaining to its readers the problems lurking below the surface here.

1)         Pritzker wants people to vote for something that doesn’t affect them.  He wants people to vote for something that affects OTHER people.  Pritzker calls this a fair tax, but I don’t think it’s fair to have people totally unaffected by something vote for that same something for other people.

2)         Once this graduated tax system is in place, it will be very easy to adjust tax rates and income levels in the future for everybody.  When everybody pays the same rate, politicians are accountable to everybody.  When everybody can pay a different rate, politicians are accountable to almost nobody, because the groups adversely affected will almost always be a smaller proportion of the population. 

THE answer to the DREAMER question: a letter to the newspaper

The whole DREAMER question should be easy to resolve and in a bipartisan manner (Senators introduce bill to give Dreamers path to citizenship, March 27). 

Give legal status with a path to citizenship in exchange for securing the border.

What does securing the border mean?  Democrats don’t want a wall.  Fine.  Give them 3 months to secure the border.  Six month? 

A secure border would mean that we no longer have a problem with people trying to cross our southern border.  Some may parachute over or be stuffed in the back of a truck, but we have no more night videos of lines of people crossing over or hordes massing and climbing our fences.

If the Democrats can’t secure the border their way, then we build the wall.  Full funding.  When the wall is completed and the border is secure, then dreamers can have full legal recognition and a path to citizenship.

smoking and voting in Illinois - a letter to the newspaper

Newspapers not only report the news, but they also help create news, like the editorial (March 15) that pushes to have the age raised in Illinois for people to be able to buy tobacco products.  It will save lives and help keep people off the harmful habit of smoking. 

This is all fine.  I have no problem with that. 

I do have a problem that nobody who advocates for raising the age for buying tobacco, alcohol, and guns sees a problem with 18 year olds being able to vote in our elections.

 

The idea behind raising the age for tobacco, alcohol, and guns is that someone under the age of 21 is too immature, too much governed by emotions rather than reason, or just doesn’t know enough to make wise decisions about their personal lives and behavior.  Yet we deem them mature enough, reasonable enough, and wise enough to make decisions for the sake of our country.

Nobody sees a problem here?

So What Exactly Does Gender Equity Look Like?

Gender equity is one of those phrases that sounds good in the abstract, but like a lot of rules, there also seem to be some exceptions that a general rule won’t allow.

For example, if there is to be no discrimination on the basis of sex, then what do we do with women’s sports, women’s colleges, sororities. women’s professional groups, women’s locker rooms and bathrooms.  This is why the ERA didn’t pass.  There were too many questions about what this would look like in the future.

There is one issue about gender equity, to which I believe we need to give more thought.

Only women can have children.  Whether you believe God made it that way or it is the product of mindless evolution, this is what we have.  On average, every woman needs to have 2.1 children for a society to maintain itself

You may say there are too many people in the world, so we can use a smaller population.  The problem is that a lower birth rate only gives you a greater number of older people who need to be supported and fewer people to do that.

In the past, this was a major reason why immigration was considered so important: to provide workers who would pay into the system.  But now we have family immigration, where immigrants can bring in their entire families, so frankly it no longer helps the demographics. 

In the name of equality, we as a society have denigrated motherhood.  Not openly but in many quiet subtle ways. Having a career is more important than having a family.

A friend posted this on her Facebook page: “Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. . . .  When you are old, nothing else you’ve done will have mattered as much.”

Rent Control: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I have been surprised by the push for rent control that I have been reading about in the papers.  I’m old enough to remember that this was tried before on a large scale back in the 70s, though I didn’t pay as much attention to it as I would today.

I do know that it didn’t work out well.  You want to control the income of landlords, but will you also control their taxes and maintenance costs?  What will probably happen is that you will see a mass conversion of rental apartments into condos. 

People become landlords to make money.  If you make that more difficult, they will adapt.  And you will end up with fewer apartments to rent.  And people will still be displaced.