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Posts Tagged ‘opportunity’
December 10th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
How the GOP Can Win Asian Voters

The Los Angeles Times has a fairly one-sided story reporting on the GOP’s nascent attempt to recapture Asian voters ahead of the 2014 elections.

According to the Times writer, while Asians would seem like natural Republican voters since when compared to other groups they are “wealthier and better educated than the general population and have a long tradition of entrepreneurship,” their support for government intervention and loose immigration laws has swung them towards Democrats.

The solution, implies the article, is for Republicans to become more like Democrats.

For obvious reasons I won’t address that argument. Instead, I’ll propose an alternative.

Rather than compete with Democrats over who can give away the most goodies, why not change the frame to who can remove the most obstacles to success?

It’s an open secret that elite universities impose caps on the number of Asian students they will enroll, despite the fact that Asians make up 28 percent of National Merit Finalists even though they are only 5 percent of the population.

For proof, consider the fact that over the last ten years the percentage of Asian students has plateaued at each Ivy League school suspiciously at 16 percent, while enrollment at universities using race neutral admissions procedures – e.g. UC Berkeley, UCLA and Cal Tech – boast percentages around 40 percent, in step with the Asian community’s population increase over time.

Last year, an Asian student shut out of Harvard and Princeton filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. If the findings go public, elite higher education could be exposed to some embarrassing revelations.

All this to say that Republicans – and conservatives in particular – could use the well documented discrimination against Asians in university admissions as a way to reach out to a voting bloc with a message of opportunity for hard work.

Republicans talk a lot about meritocracy and the Opportunity Society. This would be a good issue to make it real.

Let the other party tie its success to parceling out caps and quotas. Republicans can win by helping individuals help themselves.

December 5th, 2012 at 8:40 am
Text of Paul Ryan’s Speech to Jack Kemp Foundation

Greta Van Susteren has the transcript of Rep. Paul Ryan’s keynote address to the Jack Kemp Foundation last night.  For fans of Kemp and his notion of The American Idea (i.e. broad-based economic growth, equal opportunity, and cultural renewal), Ryan’s speech is an inspiring formulation of Kemp’s program for the 21st century.  An excerpt:

Americans are a compassionate people. And there’s a consensus in this country about our obligations to the most vulnerable. Those obligations are beyond dispute. The real debate is how best we can meet them. It’s whether they are better met by private groups or by government – by voluntary action or by government action.

And I would add that it’s about finding the most cost-effective way to meet those obligations so that they are financially sustainable.  This is critically important for at least three reasons.  First, it means that promises made to today’s beneficiaries can be kept.  Second, it means that tomorrow’s taxpayers won’t be left with the short end of the stick, being made to pay more than they receive in benefits.  And third, it frees up money; both in the federal budget for other worthy spending, and as a greater share of income retained by taxpayers.  Long-term federal entitlements are the real social contracts in our nation, and Americans owe it to ourselves – through our elected representatives – to reform the entitlement system to ensure its stability and fundamental fairness.

November 30th, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Texas’ Ted Cruz in the Mix for 2016?

Politico excerpts some of an intriguing speech by U.S. Senator-Elect Ted Cruz (R-TX) to a conservative audience last night in Washington, D.C.:

While the 41-year-old Cuban-American warned that Republicans need not abandon their principles in order to rebound electorally, he did suggest the party should retool its rhetoric on economic and cultural issues.

“We need to embrace what I call ‘Opportunity Conservatism.’ We need to conceptualize, we need to articulate conservative domestic policy with a laser focus on opportunity, on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder,” he said.

While he conceded the party’s harsh tone on immigration was undoubtedly a factor, Cruz cited Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” comment as the main reason the president performed so well with Hispanics.

“I think far more important was 47 percent. … Republicans nationally, the story we conveyed was that 47 percent are stuck in a static world. We don’t have to worry about you, what that clip famously said. I cannot think of an idea more antithetic to the American principle,” Cruz said.

“We embraced in that comment, and in the narrative we made to this country, the Democrat notion that there is a fixed and static pie. … The rich are the rich, the poor are the poor, and all that matters is redistributing from one to the other. The essence of the conservative message should be we want a dynamic nation where anybody with nothing can achieve anything,” he added to cheers from the audience. “We did an incredibly poor job at articulating the message of opportunity.”

If Cruz jumps into the 2016 presidential contest with other possibilities like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Paul Ryan, the GOP – and the conservative movement that animates it – will be better for it.

November 26th, 2012 at 6:30 pm
A Sooner State Win for School Choice

Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation shows the depths sunk to by opponents of school choice:

Last Tuesday, Oklahoma’s special-needs students received a pre-Thanksgiving win. The state’s Supreme Court ruled that two school districts that had challenged the legality of the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship Program—a voucher program for special-needs students—were out of line in bringing the lawsuit.

The school districts had challenged the scholarship program on the basis that it violated the state’s Blaine Amendment by allowing scholarship money to be used at religious schools. Other opponents of school choice programs have time and again brought similar claims to the courts.

Eric Baxter of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said that the Supreme Court’s decision in this case “is a great victory for both religious freedom and the disabled.”

“Let’s hope the school districts drop their paranoia that allowing disabled kids to go to a private religious school of their choice somehow creates an official state church for Oklahoma,” said Baxter. “The message from the Supreme Court today is unequivocal: These school districts should stop spending taxpayer dollars suing their most vulnerable students and focus on what they are supposed to be doing—teaching kids.”

Here, here!

No one seriously thinks that allowing a college freshman to spend taxpayer money on tuition at a religious university violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.  The same holds true when a high school senior attends a sectarian primary or secondary school.  That school choice opponents would try to deny disabled children the same freedom of choice available to able-bodied adults shows how badly the public sector wants to maintain its monopoly on students.

October 26th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
Obama and America’s Historic Poverty Rate

Byron York says when it comes to talking about America’s historically high poverty rate, “Barack Obama ignores the issue when it comes time to campaign. A sky-high poverty rate doesn’t fit his theme that things are getting better. So he doesn’t talk about it.”

“But the problem is still there. According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate has gone from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent in 2010 to 15.0 percent in 2011. The last time it was higher than 15.1 percent was in 1965, when the nation’s anti-poverty programs were just taking effect.”

For all his pretensions about being the next FDR, it looks like President Obama’s tenure could signal the death knell for LBJ’s expensive and failed Great Society.

October 10th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Paul Ryan’s Opportunity Society

On yesterday’s Meet the Press, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) demonstrated how to reframe quickly just about any debate on taxes or the economy into one that favors free markets and opportunities for everyone:

“I don’t worry about people who are already rich. I worry about getting people to become successful,” Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Removing those barriers so that people who have never seen success before can actually become successful. … This redistribution idea of pinning people against each other does not work. It’s divisive, and it hardly gives us the kind of attitude we want for businesses to take risks so we can succeed in the future.”

Conservatives need more of this kind of rhetoric from leading politicians.  Let’s hope the eventual GOP nominee lifts Ryan’s lines to give an inspirational lift to what will surely be a withering attack on the failed Obama economy.