In his State of the Union address (and a follow-up yesterday), Dear Leader said we need to fund preschool and all-day kindergarten for low- and some middle-income families so that,
…none of our children start the race of life already behind.
[Quite laughably, he also claimed this wouldn’t increase the deficit.]
I have a counter proposal that won’t cost a penny. In fact, it will improve educational outcomes, and reduce both crime and poverty—all three of which have the additional benefit of trimming federal and state budgets. It’s very simple, really.
Stop subsidizing illegitimacy and single parenting.
Before the creation of the welfare state in the 1960s, marriage rates were higher, and illegitimacy and poverty rates were lower. Then we made it much easier for poor women to bear children without either the financial responsibility for their support or the presence and participation of the father in the children’s upbringing. Guess what happened as a result?
Look at any inner city and you can see. Urban blight is not an accident, but a direct consequence of government policy at the federal and local levels. When you subsidize something you get more of it. Want less? End the subsidy. Economics 101. Duh.
But Democrats understand this already. Truly effective programs to reduce poverty would end their stranglehold on urban politics because they would reduce dependency on the welfare programs on which the Left thrives. Hence the continued subsidization of poverty.
Poor kids don’t need preschool. They need mom and dad under the same roof working together to provide for them. Instead of spending so much effort replacing literature and history with “Lesbian Readings” and “The Sins of Our Founders,” we should be telling our young people, “Don’t want to spend your life poor? Finish school, get married, have children…in that order.”
That will have a much bigger positive impact on their lives and our nation than having them start preschool a year or two earlier.