It’s budget time again. And Democrats are once again taking down and dusting off all their human shields and straw people, in order to convince those Americans, who are still unable to think for themselves, that they will die if the government doesn’t provide them with every form of aid from the day of their birth.

So far we have the Obama administration declaring that at least 70,000 children will die if the Republicans pass their spending cuts. No hyperlink to the authoritative study on how they came up with this number because, well, there is none. But, if children could be endangered in any way due to a cut in a program, could we skip the farm subsidies so that we can still make sure kids don’t die if we can help it? Make a note of that.

Then we have all the women who will be dying of breast cancer because they won’t be able to avail themselves of a mammogram at Planned Parenthood if this organization is defunded. Trouble is, Planned Parenthood doesn’t seem to offer mammograms. Oops.

Nancy Pelosi says the nation will lose 1,000,000 jobs if the Republicans pass their cuts. In Democratic lingo, that’s lost and destroyed, instead of saved and created. But, they use the same math to get their numbers.

Such concern for children and families. Yet, on Wednesday of this week, no concern was shown by the House Democrats when Republicans passed the SOAR Act (H.R. 471), which reauthorizes and expands the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, the hallmark school choice program for low income children in the nation’s capital.

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Kids placed in schools their parents chose for them – not the ones the government chose – graduate at a higher rate and are safer at school.  Who would have guessed?

According to an evaluation released yesterday by the US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has “significantly improved students’ chances of graduating from high school.”  The same study finds that “parents had higher satisfaction and rated schools as safer if their child was offered or used an OSP scholarship.”

With these dramatic success indicators, it must be no surprise that DC OSP is the only federal education program that the Obama Administration is intent on killing.

Dr. Matt Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute reports:

“…students who were randomly selected to receive vouchers had an 82% graduation rate.  That’s 12 percentage points higher than the students who didn’t receive vouchers.  Students who actually used their vouchers had graduation rates that were 21% higher.  Even better, the subgroup of students who received vouchers and came from designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI schools) had graduation rates that were 13 percentage points higher than the same subgroup of students who weren’t offered vouchers–and the effect was 20 percentage points higher for the SINI students who used their vouchers!”

That’s right.  Students who used their voucher to attend a school of their parents’ choice had a 21 percent higher graduation rate than those who were eligible for a voucher but were not offered one in the lottery process.  DC OSP is a federally-funded program that provides scholarships up to $7,500 to low-income families in Washington, DC – a pittance compared to DC Public School spending.

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It is apparently a mystery to a lot political insiders why the Tea Parties have become so popular with so many Americans in state after state across the nation.

Many have simply tried to dismiss the phenomena as the ranting of a relatively small number of angry right-wing zealots. They are dead wrong but one gets the feeling the political class finds this easy dismissal far more comforting than the unsettling truths driving angry and vocal dissatisfaction by people from across the political spectrum.

“Real people” like me resonate in politics right now because of the growing chasm between what the political elites of both parties see as the best course for the nation—and for themselves– and the hopes and fears of the average American man and woman. In China that difference might mean very little to government as we saw in Tiananmen Square but, according to the Founding Fathers, such a division should not even exist here in the United States.

Those who are passionately protesting at Tea Parties and making themselves felt at the polls have rightly detected more than a hint of contempt for the average citizen. If everything were going well such elitist arrogance might be accepted, as it has been in the past. But things are not going well for our nation and more and more people are challenging the performance, ideas and motivations of those who hold themselves out as smarter and better than the rest of us.

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