With the Republican Presidential nomination race maintaining its highly contested aura, the candidates are searching for ways each can pull ahead. Generally such a highly contested race might spur some candidates to veer more towards the middle, to a more moderate stance in their party to avoid becoming the outlier, the crazy one, and draw more supporters. If we look back at the 2008 Presidential election, there were many independents on the fence about voting for an untested Barack Obama, but when it came down to it, they couldn’t bring themselves to lay down their vote for the gaffe-prone, “rogue,” Sarah Palin, John McCain’s Vice Presidential pick. After the landslide margin of victory for the Democrats in that election, you’d think the Republican Party might have turned down the far Right rhetoric. But it only seemed to get worse after Obama took office. And now here we are one year out from the 2012 election and it seems the crazier the Republican nominee, the better chance they have of winning the nomination.
That’s where Newt Gingrich comes in. Once considered completely out of the race, suddenly the former Speaker of the House finds himself in the lead with a slight edge over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Romney has had his share of problems, mostly his John Kerry-like indecisiveness and “flip-flopping” on key issues. (I use the term ‘flip-flopping’ here loosely. Romney, I feel if elected, would actually move far more the Left of his current positions on certain issues. I believe he’s aware that the GOP has shifted drastically Right since Obama’s election and to simply court the vote, Romney is veering far Right until the nomination.) Gingrich, on the other hand, has simply maintained. He has not had the major flubs that Michelle Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry have had. Also, despite Gingrich’s marital problems, no extra-marital affairs or sexual harassment allegations have sprung up, like nose-diving Herman Cain. What Gingrich has going for him thus far seems to be only that he is the GOP’s self-professed “ideas man.” What exactly has Gingrich come up with lately? Well, this week he once again attacked child labor laws defending a remark he made in mid-November for how ‘truly stupid’ they are. Frankly, if these are the types of ideas a Presidential nominee is going to come up with, I fear the Right is far more out of touch with the American public, and the American economy than most realize.
How exactly putting children to work will help the economy, and more specifically the unemployment rate, is something the prospective nominee does not purport to theorize. But, nonetheless, Gingrich is maintaining his stance on this issue. He believes that ‘poor’ children do not know how to work, that their work ethic is nonexistent because if they are poor, then surely their parents must not work. Gingrich glances over the fact that 15% of the country, 46 million people, are in poverty. The official unemployment rate is just below 9%. That means that 6% of the population works, but is still below the poverty line. That’s not lack of motivation, that’s lack of livable wages in the private sector. But say that Gingrich does somehow manage to rollback child labor laws, and his idea of putting school children to work with janitors in the evenings is implemented. How exactly does this help unemployment? Children are not officially counted in the unemployment rate. So, that would not dent the unemployed. But, if suddenly schools are allowed to hire children for less wages, thus more hands, they could feasibly layoff adults working in the school, which would actually worsen unemployment.
And what exactly does this do for a child? True, I’m sure they’d get valuable experience learning how to clean toilets and clean up kindergartener’s puke, if they aspired to be janitors when they grow up. Children should not be made to work in school. Parents should be raising their children. (Is this big government from Newt Gingrich?) Children should be concentrating on bettering their education, not what cleaning product works best on permanent marker scribbled on school lockers. A better education for the youth of our generation is the only means to a better future. India and China, the two fastest growing economies in the world, have invested billions into their education systems and they are leading the way in graduating math and science students, producing future innovators and entrepreneurs. It’s true that an after-school work program might keep a lot of kids off the streets and it will better prepare them for the future by teaching them needed skills, but it should be a voluntary, unpaid program. It should be like an internship program, or provide extra-credit for students struggling with their grades. Or perhaps it could be used as a reduction in school taxes for those parents whose children join the program. Lower taxes? Every Republican can get onboard with that one.
And speaking of China: until recently the country had very lax child labor laws. Comparatively to the US, they still do. Maybe Mr. Gingrich doesn’t quite remember sweat shops? Maybe Mr. Gingrich doesn’t quite remember our own sordid history with child labor in the fields and factories of the early 1900’s? For someone who’s written so many books, especially on history, I find that hard to believe. Maybe someone needs to remind Mr. Gingrich of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911? The point is this country has already seen it’s more than fair share of needless accidents involving the deaths of workers, especially children who were put into unsafe working conditions. We enacted laws to better safety standards of factory conditions so that workers are not risking their lives to make below poverty rate wages. The funny thing that happened along the way though is that as American labor laws became stricter, the factory owners and “job creators” just took their industries overseas to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, to name a few. Sure enough, however, the same thing that happened here is happening overseas. There have been countless reports of death and injury in Chinese factories where the labor laws were extremely lax. But after some very public, egregious stories of operose workers being hurt, especially poor children from China’s vast countryside coming to the booming cities for work, the country has had little choice but to enact stronger labor laws to protect its people from unsafe American business practices. Why then, in a bit of hyperbole, does Mr. Gingrich wish the United States to rollback our labor laws and become more aligned with Communist China? Isn’t Obama supposed to be the socialist Kenyan, Newt?
