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“We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don’t cry”

Posted by KATHY KATTENBURG in Economy, Education, Health, Politics, Society.
Sep 6th, 2009 | Comments

If you’re looking for holes in our national security, try San Antonio, Texas. Or Asheville, North Carolina:

In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.

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JeffersonDavis

Kat,

If you were trying to make a point, you lost me.

Homeless children getting an education. Great! May God bless them.

What link do you provide to holes in national security?

superdestroyer

What national security policy do you propose to keep people from making bad decisions. Single mothers are at a much greater risk for becoming homeless and having other economic problems. Are you proposing a program to decrease the number of single mothers or are you proposing that married couples who have much better risk management and forward time thinking skills should pay much higher taxes so that single mothers can go through life without having to worry about their life choices.

Workhorse

Perhaps she meant the topic to be more about domestic security. The current, and likely escalating economic chaos is destabilizing a sense of security on the domestic front, which in turn causes great difficulty for families and their children. This has been true of every economic down turn, this one is just much larger than most in the last 30+ years. What is the solution? Focus on allowing the economy to grow so the private sector starts creating jobs again.

kathykattenburg

Thank you, Workhorse. At least one person here has basic critical thinking skills.

superdestroyer

Workhorse, then is the argument that single motherhood, having children before 18, and having children with multiple men are bad for domestic security. If the left is going to concern itself with economic chaos, then when is the left going to control illegal immigraiton and encourage job growth instead of government growth.

Another way to look at how the U.S. has changed is that the birthrate collapse during the great depression but during the recession of 1980 or the current recession the birthrate and especially the birth rate among the poor has not gone down.

Workhorse

I don't have the answers to those questions. I do know improving economic security to people should be our government's priority, and that can only be sustainably accomplished by the private sector. Policies that will improve the ability of private sector job creation should be supported. Policies that will harm private sector job creation should be as a minimum postponed. If we really want to help families and children, that is how we should measure any initiatives and bills put forth by our government at this time.

Leonidas

Maybe if the government didn't drive companies out of the competitive market with ridiculous tax policies Charity Crowell's parents might not have lost their jobs, and been able to have kept their home. You know one thing that "evil corporate america" does? It provides jobs so that some little girls aren't homeless.

The best thing we can do for national security in this area is lower the corporate tax rates and get rid of the Worldwide taxation scheme we use in favor of a territorial one. If you want to give further tax breaks for companies that keep a certain percentage of their jobs inside the US borders that is fine too, of course then some little girl in another country might go homeless because her country is now at a disadvantage instead of ours, but thats a problem for her government.

Of course whats actually being done now by our government is the reverse:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134478.html

DLS

OK, so it's time to engage in childish equivocation, and lament a lack of cradle-to-grave entitlement security blanket. [sigh] This actually was predictable.

Back in the 1990s I laughed at the slimy "Health Security" low appeal to emotion and thought about the most degenerate kind of future -- a Cabinet-level Department of Human Needs, with a Bureau of Health Security and a Bureau of Income Security within that department. What a nice, warm bwankee.

DLS

"get rid of the Worldwide taxation scheme we use in favor of a territorial one"

One of the more sinister, but predictable, things Geithner has said (admitted) is that in addition to going after the Swiss (and no doubt, other tax havens), that he wants to work with the Europeans and go to a global economic regulation scheme. Ah, that regulatory as well as tax "harmonization" that makes escape from the oppression impractical or impossible. Isn't it just like such people to want it?

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