Saturday Morning with The Usual Suspects

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 9:17 am, May 30, 2009 | Comments Off

Saturday finds me perched at my desk, making the usual morning slog through the usual sites.  The Daily Beast is, as usual, an intriguing look at how a certain soi dissant class of cultural arbiters view the world.

Guest-commentating today is Alma Powell, Colin’s better half and the head of the America’s Promise Alliance, a neat little moniker described with the simultaneously chilling and vague sobriquet, “the nation’s largest partnership alliance committed to improving the lives of young people”.

The Alliance improves the lives of young people through such efforts as advocating for mandatory volunteerism, usually of the sort that is so beneficial to people of a certain rank in years – say Mrs. Powell’s age.

Today, Alma is in a tiff over the high school drop out rate.  Yes, yes, the life of someone with a 10th grade education is tragic to behold.  But Alma, ever the good little collectivist, really wants to let us know about the societal costs.

You see, “simply cutting the dropout rate in half would generate an additional $45 billion in federal tax revenues and cost savings”.  Wow.  Let’s break this down.

Is anyone else just a little bothered that Alma and her Alliance think more money for the government is the number one benefit of a reduced drop-out rate?

Or that she is presuming one hell of a counterfactual?  To get her number, we need to believe that cutting the total drop-outs for one year from 1.2 million to 600,000 means every one of those saved kids goes on to earn a four year degree, get a white collar job, pay taxes in one of the top brackets, and swallow up no money in aid and entitlement programs.

She confidently voices, in the ‘Everyone knows that…’ style of argument, that highschool drop outs are much more likely to be imprisoned, rely on welfare, be uninsured, etc.  Her unwritten conclusion is that all this is because they never finished highschool and that getting them to that magic diploma stage would be the end of all these other maladies.  But what if there is a common underlying cause? Perhaps one that goes untreated because even naming it offends the dainty sensibilities of the politically correct?

Of course she presents no evidence for why she makes these conclusions.  Her little article is the sort of tepid rah-rah mush that the Care-and-Share brigade feels so good about.  Her smug avowal that, “this problem is solvable and we know where to focus our efforts” aside, far more capable people have been confounded at the depressing intractability of social woes.

And even that ignores the cost of whatever hackneyed plan she and her pals concoct.  Cut the high school drop-out rate in half?  Impressive.  Now, just Who-the-Hell is going to pay for this?

Unless, perchance, she uses the slave labor of adolescents  serving their sentence of mandatory volunteerism.  In which case she will have set an eyewatering new high mark in the delicate progressive art of exploiting the victim to ‘solve’ the problem.

Except, even then, there is the inconvenient truth of the ‘opportunity cost’ – something the American Left is happily blind to when considering the cost of forcing people who have plans for their own lives to sideline those dreams and serve another man’s ambition.

Keeping children in school long enough to give them basic life skills is not a matter of petting their egos and throwing other people’s money at the problem.  Rather, this kind of blather – targeted at the affluent, post-grad set who do things like spend Saturday morning reading The Daily Beast – is likely doing more harm than help once you consider that assuaging leftist guilt is not, in fact, the proper end of all social policy.

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