The Don-Ron Battle for the GOP, Don’t over-hire, gov and other commentary
From the right: The Don-Ron Battle for the GOP
Florida’s legislative session, which began this week, will “presumably mark a lengthy overture” to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign and set up a “defining struggle for the future” of the Republican Party, contends The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. DeSantis “is building a record” that represents “one of the most systematically comprehensive attempts in living memory to give practical expression to an evolving political philosophy.” And where he offers “an agenda,” ex-prez and GOP nominee wannabe Donald Trump offers “a story” — “a melodrama that pits dark powerful forces against the people’s hero.” So don’t expect a battle over policy or even personalities, but one that pits a “plan rooted in real-world execution” against “a tale floating on a cloud of fiction.”
Conservative: Behind Black Homeownership Gap
“After cresting at nearly 50 percent of households before 2008,” black homeownership “is now about 44 percent, substantially behind other groups,” reports City Journal’s Steven Malanga. This has sparked “new efforts” to make up the gap “by housing advocates and government regulators.” But the gap “was smaller in 1960, before the passage of antidiscrimination laws.” Why has it grown? Possibly because “marriage as a factor in homeownership remains enormously significant” and today “fewer than one-third of black adults have spouses.” For blacks, “the married homeownership rate has hovered recently around 64 percent, not so far from the rates for other groups.” Yet “marriage and family” are no longer “a legitimate part of policy discussion.” Instead, “the relentless message” of equity efforts is that all “fault lies with a racist American society,” so “the substantial success of the black married family” is “swept aside.”
Ed beat: Upside of Falling College Enrollments
Declining college enrollments, notes Reason’s Emma Camp, “may actually be a good thing.” They send “the message that four-year colleges need to lower their inflated prices” and suggest that students likely to drop out might no longer be enrolling in the first place and thus avoiding debt. In 2020, only 26% of kids who took the ACT test met its “College Readiness Benchmarks,” which correlate with success in freshman courses. Yet 60% were enrolled in college anyway the next year. The unprepared students were “at high risk of dropping out.” Indeed, between 2019 and 2020, 24.1% of full-time, first-time undergrads did quit, with “thousands” in debt and “no degree to show for it.”
NY gov’t watchdog: Don’t Over-Hire, Gov
Public-employee unions are pressing Gov. Hochul and the Legislature “to undertake a massive hiring binge,” groans the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin, and she’s “pledged to ‘rebuild’ the state workforce” despite evidence that agencies can get by “with considerably fewer people.” In fact, New York’s leaders “don’t have a good sense” of how many employees they actually need, because they don’t “appear to meaningfully measure” what agencies accomplish. New York “dabbled with performance measurements in the early 1980s but backed away from them a decade later.” Beware, Albany: “Charging ahead with thousands of hires when the state can’t justify its current employment levels would be a mistake.”
Democratic mom: My Party Is Shunning Parents
When Virginia Democrats “kicked me out” of their Zoom meeting on education, fumes Asra Q. Nomani at Fox News, it echoed “the utter failure of the Democratic National Committee” to include “the millions of parents” — many of them immigrant, minority parents like her — “who refuse its lockstep agenda with the country’s two teachers’ unions.” A lifelong Democrat and a Muslim single mother from India who’s had “differences” with the ex-teachers’ union leader running the meeting, Nomani warns that “the arrogance, political corruption and myopia” of Democratic officials regarding parents “portends bad news” for the party in 2024 and “good news for Republican candidates,” who “have embraced a winning agenda item” in education. Indeed, GOPers “will win the White House if they continue to translate their platforms” into “legislative answers restoring parents’ rights in America.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
