President Obama, speaking today in Connecticut, said that we should pass gun control measures for the folks who say "let's make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down":
"This is not about politics," Obama said. "This is about these families, and families all across the country, who are saying, let's make it a little harder for our kids to get gunned down."
In the days leading up to sequestration, President Obama and other administration officials often singled out Head Start as one of the vital programs that would be severely impacted by the automatic spending cuts. Phrases like "70,000 kids get thrown off of Head Start" and "70,000 young children would be kicked off Head Start" were common refrains. On Friday, as the sequester went into effect, President Obama himself said:
The president of the United States tweeted a picture of an 8-year-old's letter pleading for gun control to rally support for the initiatives he rolled out today at the White House.
The White House today released letters from little kids pleading for gun control, just hours before President Obama is to release a comprehensive proposal to limit guns and ammunition. The letters were released to the Associated Press in what appears to be a coordinated effort to help shape the narrative the day of Obama's announcement.
Just before Christmas there was a lot of public concern about America’s declining birthrate, which closed out 2012 at its lowest point since 1920. But in trying to understand why American fertility is on the wane, it’s important to understand that fertility decline is a global phenomenon. Ninety-seven percent of the world’s population lives in countries with declining fertility rates. And as bad as America has it now, things could be worse. We could be Japan.
The New York Times has finally discovered that fiscal cliffs aren’t the only thing that menace the modern nation-state. There’s a demographic cliff, too.
Ross Douthat has gotten himself in trouble for writing about demographics and the latest Pew report on the decline of America’s birth rate. Douthat has the temerity to suggest that having babies is important for public welfare, that Americans aren’t having enough of them, and that the root cause of our birth dearth is a deep cultural transformation:
At an event at the White House for the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program awards program, First Lady Michelle Obama praised arts in children's education by saying, "if it’s good enough for our kids, it’s good enough for all of our kids."
Last week, I spent some time talking about demographics and the latest CDC birth numbers. There were a number of interesting aspects to this data, but the big takeaway was that the percentage of first-child births has hit an all-time low. As I said last week, this suggests that we're slowly bifurcating into a society where we have two classes of adults: parents and non-parents.
The public school teachers are going on strike in Chicago and the first worry of the people who run the city is for the safety of the children—where violence is already sky-high. The political class in Chicago has already failed in its duty to provide for the public safety. Failing to keep the schools open and the teachers happy, is a lesser offense. The strike will be settled and the teachers' union will get more than it deserves but less than it wants while insisting that this is all about the children.
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