Head Start's a Non-Starter

The Democrat Party and its allies in the media have coated the Head Start program in a slick veneer that shields it from criticism and protects its funding from the shears of budget cutters.  However, the pre-school scheme deserves greater scrutiny in light of recent studies and investigations.

The program, a leftover from The Great Society, has a 50-year record of fraud, waste and gross mismanagement that has been thoroughly documented.  Head Start has failed miserably to deliver educational advantages to the poor succeeding only in providing free breakfasts.

Yet during the battle over sequester, President Obama warned that 70,000 poor children would be turned away from the program if budget cuts were implemented. Head Start opponents were labeled racists and enemies of the poor for daring to suggest the scheme needed reform, not more funding.

Despite its sorry record, taxpayers have ponied up $170 billion since 1965 when Head Start was originally launched as a six-week program.  As with many "temporary" government schemes, it has been enlarged over the intervening years without regard for the program's obvious deficiencies.

There is ample evidence that Head Start is a sham, failing to provide early childhood development services that could make a difference in a child's progress in school.

A blistering critique of the program was released last year by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency which oversees Head Start.  The study, finished in 2008, was withheld from the public for four years until it was quietly published on the Friday before Christmas of 2012.

The media ignored the explosive report.  The president's mouthpiece, Jay Carney, dodged reporters' questions about the findings. Congressional Democrats buried the HHS report, shoveling platitudes on the program instead of using the findings to dig into its shortcomings.

In its report, the HHS unearthed little evidence that the program generates much of a return for the enormous taxpayer dollars invested in Head Start.  The study found that children enrolled in Head Start gained no lasting advantages by participation in the pre-school program.

The report concluded that "the benefits of access to Head Start at age 4 are largely absent by first grade."  Head Start graduates significantly lagged behind their peers who were not enrolled in the government run program, according to the findings.

The HHS report card isn't even the worst failing grade Head Start has received.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has documented since 2000 waste and blatant cheating at Head Start.  Among its findings, about 76 percent of Head Start students did not meet the program's own financial guidelines geared to serve low-income families.

In addition, the GAO has exposed numerous conspiracies to register "fictitious children" to increase funding to local branches of Head Start.  The agency also has unmasked attempts to enroll children from middle-income families in slots reserved for children in low-income households.

Despite the many recorded examples of gross mismanagement and fraud, Head Start funding keeps soaring.  Obama has indicated he wants to increase annual Head Start funding by another $1 billion. Taxpayers are on the hook for $8 billion in 2013.

When will the mindless waste stop?

Don't expect cowardly politicians of either party to provide the answer.  Reform will only come if taxpayers demand a full accounting of Head Start before Congress spends another nickel on a disgraced scheme that fails poor children and their families.

The "S" Stands For Scam

Democrats in Washington are whispering the dreaded "S" word again.

It was first uttered last month when President Obama urged Congress to approve a $50 billion investment in the nation's aging infrastructure to help stimulate the lethargic economy.  If Republicans didn't learn a lesson with the first stimulus four years ago, then shame on them.

In 2009, President Obama and his Democrat sheep hatched a stimulus scheme that was allegedly designed to rescue the nation from apocalyptic economic disaster.  Many Republicans capitulated and backed the stimulus, fearing they would be blamed if the economic crisis deepened.

However, now there is a preponderance of evidence the $787 billion stimulus was nothing more than a boondoggle.  That explains why the President and the sycophants in his party no longer mention it, even ignoring the law that mandates quarterly public reports.

The president's Council of Economic Advisors is required to issue the reports under Section 1513 of the legislation that created the horribly misnamed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law by Obama on February 17, 2009.

Fourteen quarters have passed since the last last time the council delivered a report in 2011.

In that report, the president's own appointees estimated that it cost $317,000 in stimulus spending to create or save one job.  It marked the fifth consecutive report that inflated the economic cost.  No wonder the council quit issuing reports, particularly in a presidential election year.

The outrageous price tag for a single job wasn't even the most scandalous shortcoming.  Here are just a few facts the servile media has hidden from the public:

• Despite the $787 billion sticker price, the stimulus' actual cost now stands at $831 billion.  Even that figure does not represent the true cost.  The 10-year tab for the stimulus is closer to $2.527 trillion in spending and another $744 billion in costs for interest on the money borrowed to finance the appropriation.  These figures were tabulated by the Congressional Budget Office, which assumed most projects in the stimulus bill would continue to be funded. 
• Obama claimed the stimulus was needed to immediately jump start the economy, yet federal spending trickled out over four years.  A full year after Obama signed the law forty percent of the funds had not been spent.  As of this January 18, the government had allocated $781.48 billion, but in many cases states and cities have held onto the money.  The spending will continue through 2019, a full 10 years after the nation's economic emergency supposedly required an immediate infusion of massive government spending.  
• Obama and Democrats made the case the bloated stimulus primarily supported shovel ready jobs.  In truth, less than 32 percent of the spending was earmarked for loans, grants and contracts that were designed to create or save jobs.  The stimulus contained $290.7 in tax benefits and $241.9 billion in entitlement spending.  The methodologies used to support job creation have been thoroughly discredited because the numbers were based on self-reporting by the beneficiaries of the funding.    

As if these flagrant deficiencies are not enough, the stimulus program has been wracked with fraud, theft and wasteful bungling on a scale that should make the President and Democrats blush with shame.

Numerous reports issued by inspector generals, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other federal agencies have documented the defects.  The latest is a scathing audit performed by the inspector general for the Department of Energy.

In a January 28 report, the inspector uncovered funds designated for just a handful of smart grid projects involved fraud of $12.3 million. "It's safe to assume there's similar levels of mismanagement throughout the entire $4.5 billion" allocated for smart grid activities, the inspector general wrote.

No longer can anyone credibly claim the stimulus saved anything. Unless you count the job held by President Obama.

Government stimulus of the economy was a bad idea in 2009.  The passage of time offers ample evidence that it is an even worse idea than originally imagined.

Democrats' Shocking Voter Legislation

With sequestration occupying the nation's attention, Democrats quietly have advanced a bill that would require all colleges that receive federal funds to actively register students to vote.  The measure would effectively turn universities into voter outreach agencies for the Democrat Party.

The bill, co-sponsored by seven liberal Democrats in the House and Senate, is called the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013.  It was introduced on January 23 and has been assigned to committee.  Chief sponsors include Sen. Kristen Gillibrand of New York and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

In a news release, the co-sponsors claim the legislation was designed to "bring our antiquated voter registration system into the 21st century" by taking advantage of "existing technology" to increase "accessibility, accountability and integrity" in the election process.

Those noble sounding words are nothing more than a smokescreen. The legislation is aimed at producing more registered Democrat voters.

Buried in section 1301, the legislation vows to treat "universities as voter registration agencies."  When a student enrolls in a course of study at a college, he or she will be given a voter registration form and urged to complete the information under the prying eyes of liberal university administrators.

This provision is never mentioned in the news releases issued by the seven Democrats.  The media has not bothered to read the actual legislation, so the college registration plan has never been exposed. But that arrangement is not the only egregious scheme in the legislation.

Here are some of the other current voting laws the legislation would change:

• The bill restores voting rights to people with criminal records, previously precluded from voting in federal elections.
• The legislation would allow same-day voter registration for persons who showed up at polling places on election day.
• The act would require states to facilitate online voter registration as a means of frustrating state laws which require a valid photo identification to guard against election fraud.
• The law would require automatic registration of people who may have been registered at one time but no longer are registered.  The state is required to notify the voter of the registration.

According to the bill's authors, their legislation's ultimate goal is to increase voter participation, particularly among minorities.  However, minority voting has already risen to record levels in presidential elections under the current voter laws.  

The non-partisan Pew Research organization has released a study showing that more African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans voted in the 2012 presidential election than at any time in the nation's history.  So what problem is the legislation designed to address?

The inconvenient truth is the legislation doesn't empower voters.  The proposed law gives power to Democrats to manipulate voter registration to their benefit.  It is patently unfair and deserves an early death in committee.  

Festering Sequester Fiction

After months of fear-mongering, scapegoating and brow-beating, President Obama finally has been convicted of deceit by his own words on the automatic budget cuts mandated by the sequestration.

In announcing his failure to strike a deal with Congress, the president told the White House press corps the following: "We will get through this.  This is not going to be an apocalypse."  Those words directly contradict what Obama has been saying in a series of orchestrated press appearances using first responders, military families and others as props.

On all those occasions, the president and his administration lackeys painted a doomsday scenario.  Children would go hungry.  Airline safety would be imperiled.  The economy would collapse.  Schools would furlough teachers.  The military would be gutted.  And on and on.

But Obama's biggest whopper was alleging the sequester was a Republican idea.  He repeatedly claimed the sequester was "not something I proposed."  As it turns out, that too was a falsehood.

His house of lies crumbled when a few news outlets, most notably The Washington Post, decided to lift the protective veil the media had used to shield the thin-skinned Obama from criticism.  As the facts dribbled out, Obama blamed the messengers instead of accepting responsibility for his dishonesty.

Here is the truth about sequestration, undoubtedly the worst example of a gobbledygook word ever coined by politicians:  

• The sequestration suggestion came directly from the White House.  It was the president's negotiating team that first raised the idea.  It was then championed by Obama. Yet he denied that fact until The Washington Post's Bob Woodward exposed the lie.  Obama is also the person who suggested half the cuts be cleaved from the defense budget, but he continues to moan about massive furloughs and cutbacks in the defense industry as if he is blameless.
• The $85 billion in budget cuts are a tiny percentage of the nation's overall annual spending. It represents a mere two percent of the $3.54 trillion 2012 federal budget. How can such a minuscule percentage of government spending have such massive repercussions?  Answer: it doesn't.    
• Republicans in the Senate offered a proposal that would give the president and his administration time to reallocate the mandated cuts to protect critical services.  Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats defeated the measure.  Obviously, the president's goal is to extract maximum pain from the sequester for political gain. He has no interest in mitigating the impact of reductions.         

Finding $85 billion to slice from the bloated federal budget should be a no-brainer.  In just the past two years, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified more than 1,362 duplicate federal programs that waste $364.5 billion annually. Why not start there to trim the budget?

Obama would rather engage in cheap theatrics, playing to his legion of uniformed disciples.  His partisanship and political pugilism suit his ends.  However, most Americans outside the Washington Beltway are growing weary of his lack of leadership and his cavalier attitude towards the truth.