Biden visits future Dem voters in York, PA

Yet another reason to homeschool: Notorious liberal liars will never be able to interrupt your school day to brainwash your kids with their leftist propaganda. Progressives know, better than most parents, that they've got to get to them when they're young. Enter Joe "Don't Screw Around With Me" Biden, delivering his Class Envy 101 lecture to York, PA fourth graders:

Here in this school, your school, you've had a lot of teachers who used to work here, but because there's no money for them in the city, they're not working. And so what happens is, when that occurs, each of the teachers that stays have more kids to teach. And they don't get to spend as much time with you as they did when your classes were smaller. We think the federal government in Washington, D.C., should say to the cities and states, look, we're going to give you some money so that you can hire back all those people. And the way we're going to do it, we're going to ask people who have a lot of money to pay just a little bit more in taxes.

(By the way, what self-respecting fourth-grader wants to spend more time with his teachers?) I hope the kids were as tuned-out to Biden's unctuous pitch as they appeared, because the odds are slim that dear teacher (who has trained them well in the art of the drone, if the beginning of the video is any indication) will explain, after the sage giver-of-gifts has zoomed away in his thirty-car motorcade, why the York school district has no money, or why soaking -- er, asking -- the rich to throw more dollars at them will never, ever, ever make their schools better.

Mark Steyn learned his arithmetic (which is more than you can say for the average graduate of the York City School district, but more on that later):

No problem, says the vice president. We're going to "ask" people who have "a lot of money" to "pay just a little bit more" in taxes.

Where are these people? Evidently, not in York, Pennsylvania. But they're out there somewhere. Who has "a lot of money"? According to President Obama, if your combined household income is over $250,000 a year you have "a lot of money." Back in March, my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson pointed out that, in order to balance the budget of the United States, you would have to increase the taxes of people earning more than $250,000 a year by $500,000 a year.

OK, OK, maybe that $250K definition of "bloated plutocrat" is a bit off. After all, the quarter-mil-a-year category includes not only bankers and other mustache-twirling robber barons, but also at least 50 school superintendents in the state of New York and many other mustache-twirling selfless public servants.

So how about people earning a million dollars a year? That's "a lot of money" by anybody's definition. As Kevin Williamson also pointed out, to balance the budget of the United States on the backs of millionaires you would have to increase the taxes of those earning more than $1 million a year by $6 million a year.

Read the whole thing. Our bureaucrat-heavy schools are collapsing under their own weight and the kids are the ones getting crushed.

Seeing these poor kids sitting passively in their government classroom learning to mindlessly swallow the wonders of entitlement and class envy is positively nauseating. What's being done to them in the name of "education" is a crime. If you doubt that, take a look at the York City School District's numbers, courtesy of its Wikipedia page:

11th Grade Reading

• 2010 – 31% on grade level, In Pennsylvania, 67% of 11th graders on grade level.^[14]
• 2009 – 35%, State – 65%^[15]
• 2008 – 32%, State – 65%^[16]

11th Grade Math

• 2010 – 27% on grade level, In Pennsylvania, 59% of 11th graders on grade level.
• 2009 – 24.8%, State – 56%^[17]
• 2008 – 32%, State – 55%^[18]

11th Grade Science:

• 2010 – 10% on grade level. State: 39% of 11th graders were on grade level.
• 2009 – 9.6%, State – 40%
• 2008 – 8%, State – 39%^[19]

How is a marginal decrease in class size going to turn that around? (Of course, if the district really wanted to hire more teachers it could slash a few bureaucrat jobs. But then what would even be the point of having a school district?)

Overall:

In 2009, the academic achievement of the students of School DIstrict of York City was in the 1st percentile among 500 Pennsylvania School Districts. Scale – (0–99; 100 is state best)^[6]

So most of the kids are poor readers and can't do much math. This is how liberalism perpetuates itself.

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