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ITEM #1
Who’s failing minority children?
As progressive politicians and their government allies do all they can to dodge accountability for their widespread, systemic failures, Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joecks continues to do yeoman’s work in exposing them.
In his latest piece, he takes a close look at the Clark County education establishment’s performance in preparing Nevada’s kids for success. And what he finds is simply stunning. Here’s Joecks:
“Last school year, only 20 percent of Clark County students tested proficient in English Language Arts. In math, it was 11.5 percent. Those results are from the Smarter Balance Assessments, which Nevada’s third- through eighth-graders are supposed to take yearly. They didn’t have to take the test during the 2019-20 school year because of the pandemic.
“The results are even worse for Black and Hispanic students. Just 10.2 percent of African American kids tested proficient in English. In math, that number is a jaw-dropping 3.9 percent. For Hispanic students, the numbers are 15.7 percent in English and 7.4 percent in math.
“This failure is widespread. There were 22,200 African American students in third through eighth grade last year. More than 140 schools enrolled at least 50 Black students in those grades. Just 21 schools had 20 or more African American students test proficient in English. In math, only three schools met that criteria. Three.”
And yet, we’ll continue to hear endless lecturing about how it’s conservatives — not the progressives who actually run our education system — who are holding minorities back.
The solution to our educational woes, as Joecks himself points out, is school choice. Parents and children deserve a way out of the failing public system, and the resulting competition and accountability would improve student achievement across the board. Instead, the district’s leaders spent the past summer obsessively harping on the need to enact an “anti-racism” policy.
In light of that, we’ll close this section with Joecks’ opening, which hits the nail on the head: “In another context, how the Clark County School District fails minority students would be considered evidence of racism.”
ITEM #2
Tax truths...
The left is notorious for never allowing the facts to get in the way of a good narrative. And so it is with their constant wailing about the need for the wealthy to pay their “fair share.”
The narrative is that affluent Americans are somehow avoiding their moral obligations when it comes to paying sufficient taxes.
The facts? We’re glad you asked … because in a recent piece for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, Senior Policy Fellow Ron Knecht — a former Nevada state Controller and higher education Regent — provides some eye-opening answers in the form of data from the Tax Foundation:
“The top one percent of earners (those earning more than $540,009 adjusted gross income) paid 33.2 percent of total taxes in 2001, but that rose to 40.1 percent, its highest level this century, in 2018. The proportion paid by folks between one percent and ten percent of income earners rose slightly. However, all folks below that top ten percent paid less of the total than the top decile each of those 17 years. In fact, the amount paid by the bottom half of income earners (earning less than $43,614) declined most: from 4.9 percent to 2.9 percent.
“The tax share paid by the top one percent of earners, 40.1 percent, exceeded greatly the share paid by the bottom 90 percent combined, 28.6 percent. And the top one percent paid a 25.4 percent average income tax rate, while the bottom 50 percent paid one-seventh that rate, 3.4 percent. Across the scale, as income increases, the tax rate paid increases substantially.”
There’s a whole lot more useful information in Knecht’s piece. And if you want to be well-equipped to push back against your left-wing relatives’ talking points on this issue over Thanksgiving dinner this year — and you just know it’s coming, don’t you? — we urge you to read it in full, here.
ITEM #3
Confusing, and confused...
If President Biden doesn’t seem to know how to stop creating new problems, it’s because he’s utterly clueless about the direct link between his misguided policies and the natural consequences they bring about.
That’s the takeaway from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled, “The confusing Mr. Biden.” Reviewing a recent CNN town hall, the editors run through a number of issues where it’s clear the President “doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.”
From his blaming high gas prices on insufficient investments in renewable energy, to pinning the supply-chain problem on employers allegedly stiffing their workers, the President’s performance made it painfully clear he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most critical challenges facing our country today.
As the editorial put it: “White House handlers shield President Biden from the press as much as possible, and Thursday’s town hall on CNN shows why.”
The only problem: Those handlers can’t shield the American people from the devastating impact of the President’s agenda.
ITEM #4
Life imitates art...
And speaking of the disastrous Biden agenda, while there have been countless columns written on the subject, we wanted to give credit to Monica Crowley for taking one of the more creative approaches.
Referencing the popular 2003 film “How to lose a guy in 10 days,” Crowley, in a piece for Fox News, analyzes how Biden “seemingly has adapted that screenplay into ‘How to Lose a Country in 10 Months.’”
While Crowley’s take may be a bit on the light-hearted side, the examples she provides are deadly serious. To wit:
"Prior to the pandemic, the economy under President Trump was firing on all cylinders, with growth strong, wages up and unemployment at or near historic lows for every demographic group. When the pandemic hit, Trump oversaw the execution of $4 trillion in economic relief, and when he left office, he handed Biden the fastest economic recovery on record.
"Biden has chosen to squander that robust recovery by pushing multitrillion-dollar spending sprees, racking up unprecedented debt, threatening higher taxes on most Americans and paying people more to stay home than work. Inflation, a hidden, regressive tax that disproportionately hurts the poor, working and middle classes, is at a 13-year high, with prices on everything from groceries to gas skyrocketing and heading higher."
For the rest of the ugly story, click here.
ITEM #5
‘Fake outrage,’ you say?
The Federalist’s Kelsey Bolar informs us that “[o]ver the weekend, former President Barack Obama dismissed conservative media and Virginia parents as peddling ‘fake outrage’ over recent scandals involving the state’s public schools,” and quotes the former President as saying, “We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media’s pedals to juice their ratings.”
Bolar then notes:
“Obama’s remarks come on the heels of a string of controversies involving Virginia public schools: A high school freshman allegedly sodomized in the school bathroom by a ‘skirt-wearing male student’ in a ‘gender fluid’ bathroom. A subsequent cover-up by the school board, whose superintendent lied about the incident while the board was trying to pass a new transgender policy. The transferring of the suspect to another school, where he allegedly committed a second sexual assault less than five months later. Child porn and pedophilia in public school libraries. Shocking Alexandria school violence.”
Yeah … who could possibly find reason for genuine “outrage” in any of that?
NOTABLE QUOTE
“All Biden administration policies can be understood not in the traditional sense of ‘success’ but in the radical context of remaking the country into an American-style socialist tyranny, atop which the leftist ruling class will sit forever.” ― Monica Crowley
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