ON POVERTY, OBAMA IS HYPOCRITICAL AND CLUELESS--BARACK OBAMA, MEDIA CRITIC

ON POVERTY, OBAMA IS HYPOCRITICAL AND CLUELESS

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BARACK OBAMA, ECONOMY

I wrote earlier today about President Obama’s appearance at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on poverty at Georgetown, where he singled out Fox News for criticism of its news coverage. He did eventually get around to talking about poverty:

“Those who are doing better and better, more skilled, more educated, – luckier – having greater advantages are withdrawing from the commons,” he said. “Kids start going to private schools….

But wait! President Obama went to a ritzy private school in Honolulu, and his daughters attend Washington’s toniest private school, Sidwell Friends. Was Obama engaging in a rare moment of self-criticism? Of course not. He continued:

…kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks, an anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”

That led fewer people to care about public institutions, Obama explained, leading to government cuts to important public functions – making the nation less equal.

Obama insisted that there needed to be more investments in public schools, public universities, public early child education and public infrastructure, insisting that funding these organizations both “grows our economy and spreads it around.”

Government cuts? What government cuts? Let’s take education, the most important item on Obama’s list. I think pretty much everyone knows that there has been no decline in spending on education; on the contrary. Spending on education has constantly climbed, without any corresponding improvement in quality. This chart comes from the Department of Education. Click to enlarge:

Enrollment has been stagnant, particularly at the elementary and secondary levels, to per-pupil spending has steadily increased. Again, click to enlarge:

The United States spends considerably more per pupil than the average OECD country, more in fact than any country except Switzerland and Norway:

So where is the “disinvestment”? Where is the “anti-government ideology”? Obama’s comments represent rank ignorance; either that or cynical demagoguery. In truth, the cure for poverty is well known: graduate from high school, get a job–any job–and get married. But the real solution doesn’t fit the left’s agenda.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/on-poverty-obama-is-hypocritical-and-clueless.php

BARACK OBAMA, MEDIA CRITIC

POSTED ON MAY 12, 2015 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN BARACK OBAMA, MEDIA

This morning, President Obama participated in the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit at Georgetown, where he discoursed on poverty. Incredibly, Obama seems to think the real problem lies with Fox News:

Obama argued if we are going to end poverty, “We’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”

Huh? If the media stopped reporting on poverty, poverty wouldn’t exist? That isn’t quite it, but Obama’s explanation is incoherent:

“Where you’ve got the middle class and question has been, who are you mad at?” Obama said. “If you’re struggling. If you’re working but don’t seem to be getting ahead and over the last 40 years. Sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or to make folks mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, who don’t want to work, lazy, undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu, they will folks who make me mad. I don’t even know where they find them. They are all like I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone or whatever. That becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up.”

But it is a fact that some poor people don’t want to work. Is Obama suggesting that news organizations should collaborate on covering up this aspect of the poverty problem? Yes, that does seem to be his point. But what good would that do?

“So if we’re going to change how Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that.”

So Obama claims that poverty could be eliminated if only John Boehner and Mitch McConnell would vote differently? What a shame, then, that the Democrats didn’t abolish poverty when they controlled both the House and the Senate! I guess they must have just forgotten to do it; either that, or the Democrats have been watching that dastardly Fox News, too.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/barack-obama-media-critic.php