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filkertomOnce again, you can tell the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of a Republican presidential candidate, especially Newt Gingrich, with a simple clue -- his or her lips are moving:
I'm not gonna dissect this too deeply, because it's not very deep. It is, however, appalling.
Newt starts from the premise that poor people are all unemployed, lazy crooks. Frankly, in this political atmosphere, I'm surprised he didn't call them "shiftless" and "uppity", just so the very very slow among his chosen constituency couldn't possibly miss it.
Yeah, let's take kids with no help and no hope -- their families have trouble getting jobs because the jobs aren't there and, after all, they're committing the heinous crimes of being not-rich and possibly not-white so we don't expect them to work anyway, the lazy bastids -- and let's assume the kids are all crooks as well. But we can fix that. After a full day of school, let's take away their down time, their homework time, their social time, and have them clean their own schools (not incidentally through a process which at best circumnavigates union contracts and unemploys people who already have families). Let's let 'em play with dangerous chemicals and equipment far too big or unwieldy for them. Oh, hey, that's a new industry -- My Little Cleaning Stuff!
Let's break 'em with work, and let them know where their place in our society really is.
Some would say it is necessary, again in today's political climate, to counter this argument.
No, it's not.
It's wrong. It's all wrong. On a moral and ethical level, as an economic plan -- even as a tiny part of one, as a way of looking at people, as a way of solving problems... it's simply all wrong.
Newt Gingrich believes he is a man of ideas. And he is. Problem is, they're ideas dealt with a very long time ago, by Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair.
If you think child labor laws are "stupid", if you want to work kids the way they used to be worked in the 19th century, if you simply assume that poor people are lazy and incapable of holding a job and criminals and suggest policy from there... you not only do not deserve to be a candidate for any elected office in these United States, you need to take some serious time to look at where the hell your life went so very wrong.
ETA: Added a link to the "truly stupid" remark, in which indicated kids should start working at the age of nine.
Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of “I do this and you give me cash,” unless it’s illegal.Gingrich also repeated his notion that child labor laws are "truly stupid" (last week, he suggested that schools fire most of their cleaning staff and pay a starter wage to kids to clean their own schools).
I'm not gonna dissect this too deeply, because it's not very deep. It is, however, appalling.
Newt starts from the premise that poor people are all unemployed, lazy crooks. Frankly, in this political atmosphere, I'm surprised he didn't call them "shiftless" and "uppity", just so the very very slow among his chosen constituency couldn't possibly miss it.
Yeah, let's take kids with no help and no hope -- their families have trouble getting jobs because the jobs aren't there and, after all, they're committing the heinous crimes of being not-rich and possibly not-white so we don't expect them to work anyway, the lazy bastids -- and let's assume the kids are all crooks as well. But we can fix that. After a full day of school, let's take away their down time, their homework time, their social time, and have them clean their own schools (not incidentally through a process which at best circumnavigates union contracts and unemploys people who already have families). Let's let 'em play with dangerous chemicals and equipment far too big or unwieldy for them. Oh, hey, that's a new industry -- My Little Cleaning Stuff!
Let's break 'em with work, and let them know where their place in our society really is.
Some would say it is necessary, again in today's political climate, to counter this argument.
No, it's not.
It's wrong. It's all wrong. On a moral and ethical level, as an economic plan -- even as a tiny part of one, as a way of looking at people, as a way of solving problems... it's simply all wrong.
Newt Gingrich believes he is a man of ideas. And he is. Problem is, they're ideas dealt with a very long time ago, by Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair.
If you think child labor laws are "stupid", if you want to work kids the way they used to be worked in the 19th century, if you simply assume that poor people are lazy and incapable of holding a job and criminals and suggest policy from there... you not only do not deserve to be a candidate for any elected office in these United States, you need to take some serious time to look at where the hell your life went so very wrong.
ETA: Added a link to the "truly stupid" remark, in which indicated kids should start working at the age of nine.
