Coming up short
Ican’t overemphasize the importance of checking out the claims made by politicians, yours or mine. And we must remember these guys are not there to inform us but to get our vote.
Listen to what they have to say but don’t believe a word of it until you have thoroughly checked it out. How? If you have a computer or access to one, you’re in business.
Although he lost the 2016 election by almost three million popular votes, Donald Trump won the electoral votes of the highly-gerrymandered Southern states by playing to their racial prejudices. He also rekindled the anti-immigrant fears in Midwestern bluecollar areas. He convinced them their jobs, their communities and their families were endangered by alien immigrant hordes hell-bent on taking over.
But FBI arrest and incarceration records do not support these fears. Arrest records for violent crimes such as murder, assault and rape in California and Texas, the states with the highest nonwhite immigrant populations, indicate that Hispanic males commit crimes at only about half the rate of native-born Caucasians.
We’ve been had.
In the last year of Obama’s first term, economic growth and private sector job creation turned positive and never looked back. But Trump brazenly took credit for the progress begun under Obama four years before he took office. In 2009 Barack Obama inherited from George W. Bush the worst economy since the Great Depression and turned it around in the last year of his first administration. That was four years before Donald Trump took office. My question is why didn’t somebody challenge Trump on those false claims?
Trump also warned of growing international tensions, especially with China and Russia, again suggesting it was the
Democrat’s fault. But the facts are that today we are living in the safest period ever in world history. There hasn’t been an armed conflict between major world powers in 75 years, an all-time record. While this is probably due as much to fears of mutual nuclear annihilation if a war were to start, peace is peace any way we can achieve it.
But there is one area in which we embarrassingly trail the rest of the world, but President Trump seems reluctant to even mention it: our shameful K-12 public education results, particularly in math, science, reading and problem-solving skills. In almost four years of disconnected rantings Trump has never once mentioned this glaring shortcoming that threatens to hold us back in both our domestic and international undertakings.
In today’s globalized economy our young people will be competing with Asian kids who are already a few points ahead of them on average IQ scores. And now they will also be better educated, particularly in the critical skills areas. Many Asian nations spend much more money, effort and commitment to teaching critical skills than we do. On the other hand, these nations spend little or nothing on varsity athletics, one of our biggest single school expenses. But at the same time they maintain consistently higher overall physical fitness standards than ours. This is probably due to their fuller participation in individual sports.
To maintain our rather increasingly precarious position as world leader we must wake up to some unpleasant realities and immediately commit to corrective action. Otherwise, we must accept the fact of permanent second-place status on the world stage. The ball is in our court.