A case for "jobs stimulus" in the U.S. that subsidizes American consumers and producers of customized education, and American providers of associated online markets
Any jobs plan that becomes law will have bipartisan appeal.
From the January 21, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal:
Republican Scott Brown’s election to a Massachusetts Senate seat Tuesday means that Democrats will have to craft proposals for spurring job creation, new financial regulations and other priorities to win at least some Republican votes.
Happily, recent history suggests that both Democrat and Republican politicians in Washington will be particularly enthusiastic about a jobs plan that features direct benefits for children.
From The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics, a 2007 book by David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley:
The Seventeenth Congressional District [in Texas]…is among the most lopsidedly Republican in the nation. More than 60 percent of the voters are registered Republicans; 64 percent call themselves conservatives and just 12 percent describe themselves as liberals. In 2004, president Bush carried the district with nearly 70 percent of the vote — not an unexpected outcome, especially since Crawford, where the president has his ranch, is located there. But in the race for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that same year, a Democrat named Chet Edwards bucked long odds and won, running 37 percent ahead of the national ticket.
…Edwards’s opponent [was] Texas state legislator Arlene Wohlgemuth…The conservative establishment went all out to get her elected. Three million dollars from the Club for Growth, a GOP fund-raising behemoth, went for attack ads in the three weeks before the election, more than Edwards spent on his entire campaign. Vice president Dick Cheney and Republican strategist Karl Rove came calling. The district was plastered with posters showing Wohlgemuth together with president Bush, standing on the steps of Air Force One and waving to an imaginary crowd.
Wohlgemuth ran a vintage Karl Rove campaign. She went after Edwards as being more liberal than Ted Kennedy…Wohlgemuth’s big selling point was her diehard fiscal conservatism. Her crowning achievement was the 2003 revamping of the state’s health and human services agencies, which saved Texas taxpayers $1 billion. Edwards used political jujitsu to turn this supposed strength into her biggest vulnerability. What undid her were the cuts she’d inflicted on the budget of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, generally known as CHIP — 150,000 youngsters removed from the rolls, half a million denied any dental and eye care, all in the name of lean government. “Children were never my primary concern,” she said. It was a remark she grew to regret.
…As expected, Wohlgemuth had the early lead in the polls. But Chet Edwards’s first TV ad changed everything, because it powerfully illustrated how real people were being hurt by the CHIP cuts. Staring straight into the camera, in a black and white image that’s as evocative as a Walker Evans photo, a woman named Jamie Jones held her daughter Bailey in her lap while she told her story. Jamie was a hardworking woman, widowed when her husband died in a house fire, who worked every day to support her child, but now the state had cut off her daughter’s health care coverage. “I love my daughter more than anything in the world,” she said, “and if she gets sick I don’t know what I’ll do.” The commercial didn’t mention Anne Wohlgemuth by name. There was no need.
…The Jamie Jones ad damaged Wohlgemuth’s credibility and stirred criticism from the press. Wohlgemuth was forced to go on the defensive — instead of bragging about the budget cuts, she tried to minimize their effects — but to no avail.
…According to the exit polls, 11 percent of the voters — enough to swing the election — said that Wohlgemuth’s record on children had made up their minds. A quarter of those who supported Edwards said they were thinking foremost of children. “Wohlgemuth had to justify her vote to cut CHIP, but she couldn’t,” the Dallas Morning News editorialized.
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Children-Friendly Politics
Any jobs plan that becomes law will have bipartisan appeal.
From the January 21, 2010 edition of the Wall Street Journal:
Happily, recent history suggests that both Democrat and Republican politicians in Washington will be particularly enthusiastic about a jobs plan that features direct benefits for children.
From The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics, a 2007 book by David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley: