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Kids Today Need More (Not Less) Responsibility

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Daniel Lattier | July 15, 2016

My wife and I are among the only 28% of parents today who make their children do chores. And, like many children when forced to do undesirable work, ours do their fair share of complaining and dawdling.

In these moments, the reminder we frequently give them is this: “It’s not your job to play.”

Perhaps to some this sounds harsh. After all, the idea that they have a special mandate for play and “free time” is exactly what our current society communicates to children. From the moment they first exit the womb, America’s youth are surrounded by a constantly updated slew of toys and devices for entertainment. They very quickly learn that adults primarily require that they play and do what they want, which these days usually means screen time. The average child now spends over six hours in front of a screen each day.

Even now in school—which most of history deemed a very “un-fun” place—it’s expected that teachers will make the curriculum appropriately engaging and that plenty of activities (read: useless assemblies and fairs) and time for socialization will be provided.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/kids-today-need-more-not-less-responsibility

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Obama’s economy: The fierce debate

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By Peter Schroeder and Jordan Fabian – 02/10/16 06:00 AM EST

Seven years after President Obama’s inauguration, the debate about whether he saved the economy or held back its recovery is in full swing.

Obama has been taking a final-year victory lap, touting a national unemployment rate that has fallen to 4.9 percent as the latest sign of success for his economic stewardship.

Yet critics in Obama’s orbit, including Democratic congressmen and a former member of his Cabinet, suggest more could have been done if Obama had worked harder with lawmakers and members of his administration.

Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.) — one of two Democrats still in office out of the 11 who voted against the stimulus
legislation — said the White House made zero effort to bring him, or other centrist Democrats, on board in the fight over the stimulus.

“They just wrote us off, I think,” he said. “I can’t even tell you who in the administration is supposed to be lobbying me.”

It’s a criticism of Obama that has remained steady for his entire presidency: He doesn’t work well with others, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, who disagree with him.

“This is very much a my-way-or-the-highway White House, and this is a president who would rather win the argument than get something done,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, head of the American Action Forum and the top economic adviser to Obama’s Republican opponent in 2008, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

Obama allies say such criticism is unfair and blame Republicans for failing to work with Obama since day one.

“There’s no question that had Congress enacted the president’s economic proposals, the economy would be in a stronger position today,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who was a top economic adviser to Obama.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/economy/268856-obamas-economy-the-fierce-debate

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The Epidemic of Officially Discouraged Workers

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ByRobert McGarveyFollow|09/04/15 – 09:55 AM EDT

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Unemployment numbers out of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are a cause for celebration on both sides of the political aisle and that is, because the current rate reported today for the August Jobs Reportis 5.1%, a huge improvement over the 10% notched in October 2009. Just one problem: that number is so misleading it just about counts as a lie.

You have just quit looking for work because it’s pointless? Officially you do not count as unemployed. Ditto for if you’ve taken a part-time job, however wretched, just to put a few bucks in your pocket. You are not unemployed,

The real numbers may be twice as high. Maybe one in ten of us is unemployed or we have just plain given up on the idea of a fulltime job. The BLS acknowledges this in a different tally that it calls U-6.  By its count, 11.3% of us have given up on the dream of a good full-time job. Those workers, in BLS parlance, are “discouraged.” Some have given up looking for fulltime work. Others work part-time because that’s all they can get.

Some states do especially poorly. In West Virginia 13% count as discouraged. In Arizona, 13.8% of the potential workforce is not even close to where it wants to be. Nevada is a stomach churning 15.2%, the nation’s biggest clump of dissatisfied workers and the discouraged unemployed.

Polling company Gallup, by the way, says the BLS discouraged workers numbers are low. It claims that 14.7% of us – that’s one in seven – is underemployed

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Readers Worries about kids future

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Readers Worries about kids future 

This country has undergone a seismic shift in its values in recent years. Our two main parties pretty much followed the same principals of self-reliance and hard work. One was just a little more to the left of the other, but nevertheless, the entrenched sense of American entrepreneurship shone through. Because of the fairly narrow gap in philosophies, common ground was fairly do-able in a divided Government. These last few years have seen a very dangerous move to increase support on the left by enhancing and pushing programs that encourage people to work less and even not at all, through hand-outs and a tax system where almost half the population pays no income tax. Now call me crazy, but even I would vote for the party that absolved me from paying income tax. Add to that, years of sending cryptic signals to people south of the border that we aren’t all that serious in preventing your border crossing, and it’s no wonder we are seeing droves flooding in. We no longer have a diligent media in this country. We have a media business model that caters to segments of society. The majortiy of these segments are to the left, and we therefore have a media that mostly acts as a cheerleader for this President.

I’m not sure if it’s even possible to get the psyche of this country back to where it used to be. I am truly worried about the future of my kids, and if this woman gets elected, I think 4-8 more years of this current way of thinking will be catastrophic.