by Alicia Becerril

Although my family had humble, working class beginnings, securing an education was a theme that my parents valued and supported.  My mom grew up in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and my dad grew up in Aparo, Michoacán.  My father left school after the third grade.  At the age of 14, he traveled to Mexico City to find work. At 19, he went to Chicago to work as a Bracero with the railroad.  He returned to Aparo but could find no work.  He made the decision to return to the U.S., but first devoted three months to learning English, listening to records! He became self-educated, moved to Sacramento and found work at the railroad.

As an infant, my mother lost her mom.  While allowing her own children to continue in school, her step-mother took my mother out of school after the fourth grade.  Thereafter, in a modern day revival of a well-known fairy tale, she was forced to sew pants all day.  She met her first husband, married, and had three children.  Tragically, her husband died in an accident.

Because she had no way of supporting her children, she pleaded with an orphanage to take them so they would not starve.  During the day, she sewed clothes and sold them at a stand.  She visited her children on the weekends.  After two years, a distant cousin visited and was concerned about her living conditions.  She invited her and the kids to live in Sacramento.   My mom found work at the almond factory.   Shortly thereafter, she met my father.  They married and had five more children.

My father started working at a cabinet store as a cleaner and eventually became a cabinet maker.  Continuing his reliance on self education, he took correspondence courses to earn his high school equivalence and general contractor license.  He was intent on having a better life for his children.  He built the house we later lived in.

My mom often told us about the importance of an education.  If we had homework or wanted to read, we could skip having to do dishes and other housework.  There was never a better incentive to do my homework and learn!

I went on to become an elementary school teacher, and later, through further education and discipline, a lawyer and judge.  My brothers and sisters each used their education to go onto different careers.  David is a physician. Linda was a court reporter. Mary Ellen was a nurse.  Joe worked as a jet technician.  Eva, Terri, and Victor worked as computer operators.  It gave us a chance for a better life.  More than 25 years of higher education affirmed and supported by parents who did not have the opportunity to go beyond grade school.

Today, education is under great stress.  We are in the midst of a pandemic, and much of our economy has shut down to slow the spread of Covid-19.  In the fall, it is proposed that Bay Area children will be able to access learning only through online classes.  What about the children and parents who have no computers at home?  What about the children who have less than adequate skills in using the online programs?  How are parents who really need jobs going to be able to work if they must stay at home with their school age children?  What are we dictating to our families?

The continued closure of the schools will lead to a growing learning gap for kids.  Our Latino community cannot afford to fall further behind.  As a former teacher familiar with this research, it is fundamental that children learn best in a classroom.  They also are given the opportunity to socialize with other kids, have free school meals, physical activity, and other services, not the least of which is a dedicated and concerned teacher.

It is clear that continued absence from school, inevitably falling behind, will limit the life chances of children for many years to come and further deepen social inequities  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges that schools play an important role in providing critical services.  Lack of person-to-person teaching could lead to wider disparities across income levels and ethnic groups and cause long term effects on children’s educational outcomes, health and the economic wellbeing of families and communities.

Additionally, pediatricians are increasingly concerned by the continued absence of millions of children from schools.   In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization devoted to protecting children’s health, strongly recommend that students be physically present at school and also issued guidelines to open up schools safely.

Given the evidence showing that children rarely develop severe symptoms of COVID-19, we need to find a way to ensure that our children get the opportunity for a better life.  Going back to school could mean the difference between surviving and thriving.

Will students or parents benefit from school closures? No.  But we know they will be hurt, now and in the future.

I urge the Governor, parents, school administrators, teachers, and other professionals to work together to solve this dilemma and bring back classroom learning in a safe and responsible manner.  We owe it to our children to offer them the stepping stones to a better life.

(Alicia Becerril, a lawyer, a SF Board of Supervisor, and a judge, is a former El Reportero writer.

by Veronique de Rugy

There’s no doubt that this pandemic-induced recession is hitting states hard. But that’s no reason to bail them out, especially when many failed to prepare for emergencies, which are inevitable.

States today are dealing with a huge mess because of a sudden and steep reduction in their revenues while their pandemic spending is going up. But lost in the lamenting about the states’ misfortunes is the fact that politicians in these states spent the last decade bloating their budgets rather that cutting spending to be better prepared for crises.

Stories abound about the sorry condition of state and local government finances. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal explains, “State and local governments from Georgia to California are cutting money for schools, universities and other services as the coronavirus-induced recession wreaks havoc on their finances,” and, “Governments have cut 1.5 million jobs since March, mostly in education, and more reductions are likely barring a quick economic recovery.”

Yes, recessions are difficult. Millions of employees in the private sector have recently lost their jobs. In fact, traditionally, private sector employees are hit harder by recessions than state and local government employees are. Business owners, too, understand that recessions are terrible for one’s bottom line. Millions of them have watched as their livelihoods were pulverized in the span of a few weeks. Yet these business owners, after being allowed to delay their tax payments for a few months, are still on the hook for paying the salaries of government workers.

What’s more, these stories about state and local governments being hit hard rarely explain that politicians in those states failed to responsibly budget for crises. Such rainy-day budgeting should not have been that difficult, given that the country was experiencing an unprecedented decade of economic growth when rivers of revenue poured into state and local coffers. More revenue makes it easier to beef up rainy-day funds, which then helps fill in budget gaps. While some states have learned their lessons from the last recession, most states did not.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards reports: “After a decade of economic growth, (some states) have saved little or nothing. Illinois and Kansas have completely empty cupboards, while Pennsylvania and New Jersey have rainy day funds of just 1 percent of their budgets. The largest funds are in energy producing states, which build war chests to handle the strong cyclical ups and downs in their economies.” If states never learn from their mistakes, why should we now feel sorry for them?

Between recessions, states should reduce their financial exposure in anticipation of the next crisis and learn to operate with fewer employees. In particular, they should reform their public employees’ benefits — a great source a fiscal woes. But most of them have done no such thing, especially the ones that needed it the most. Illinois, for instance, shelters its public employees from reductions in benefits while the private sector endures higher taxes and cuts in services.

With few exceptions, states used their boom-time revenue — cash extracted from the private sector — to increase spending and employ more people. Edwards highlights that: “Spending grew during the 2000s, hit $2.4 trillion in 2009 and flat-lined for a few years, then began growing again to reach $3.1 trillion by 2019…. Real spending spiked in 2009 and then dipped a bit below the pre-recession level. Spending then began growing again and eclipsed the 2009 peak by 2016.”

This outcome is good only in a world where investments made by politicians spending other people’s money earn higher returns than those made by investors spending their own money. Not likely.

And let’s not forget that state and local governments have already received aid from the federal government to the tune of $150 billion for a Coronavirus Relief Fund, $30 billion for an Education Stabilization Fund, $45 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund, $25 billion for public transit systems, an increase in the federal government’s share of Medicaid spending and more.

The call for sympathy for state and local governments’ financial hardship is usually followed by a plea to bail them out. While a few states, such as Florida, were relatively fiscally responsible and better prepared to handle this pandemic, many others weren’t. Why should the responsible states bail out the irresponsible ones? If these big spenders want a bailout, they should go only to their taxpayers.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

by Ron Paul

For months, the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media kept a morbid Covid-19 “death count” on their front pages and at the top of their news broadcasts. The coronavirus outbreak was all about the number of dead. The narrative was intended to boost governors like Cuomo in New York and Whitmer in Michigan, who turned their states authoritarian under the false notion that destroying people’s jobs, freedom, and lives would somehow keep a virus from doing what viruses always do: spread through a population until eventually losing strength and dying out.

The “death count” was always the headline.

But then all of a sudden early in June the mainstream media did a George Orwell and lectured us that it is all about “cases” and has always been all about “cases.” Death, and especially infection fatality rate, were irrelevant. Why? Because from the peak in April, deaths had decreased by 90 percent and were continuing to crash. That was not terrifying enough so the media pretended this good news did not exist.

With massive increases in testing, the “case” numbers climbed. This is not rocket science: the more people you test the more “cases” you discover.

Unfortunately our mainstream media is only interested in pushing the “party line.” So the good news that millions more have been exposed while the fatality rate continues to decline — meaning the virus is getting weaker — is buried under hysterical false reporting of “new cases.”

Unfortunately many governors, including our own here in Texas, are incapable of resisting the endless lies of the mainstream media. They are putting Americans again through the nightmare of forced business closures, mandated face masks, and restrictions of Constitutional liberties based on false propaganda.

In Texas the “second wave” propaganda has gotten so bad that the leaders of the four major hospitals in Houston took the extraordinary step late last week of holding a joint press conference to clarify that the scare stories of Houston hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases are simply untrue. Dr. Marc Boom of Houston Methodist said the reporting on hospital capacity is misleading. He said, “quite frankly, we’re concerned that there is a level of alarm in the community that is unwarranted right now.”

In fact, there has been much reporting that the “spike” in Texas cases is not due to a resurgence of the virus but to hospital practices of Covid-testing every patient coming in for any procedure at all. If it’s a positive, well that counts as a “Covid hospitalization.” Why would hospitals be so dishonest in their diagnoses? Billions of appropriated Federal dollars are being funneled to facilities based on the number of “Covid cases” they can produce. As I’ve always said, if you subsidize something you get more of it. And that’s why we are getting more Covid cases.

Let’s go back to the original measurements used to scare Americans into giving up their Constitutional liberties: the daily death numbers. Even though we know hospitals have falsely attributed countless deaths to “Covid-19” that were deaths WITH instead of FROM the virus, we are seeing actual deaths steadily declining over the past month and a half. Declining deaths are not a great way to push the “second wave” propaganda, so the media and politicians have moved the goal posts and decided that only “cases” are important. It’s another big lie.

Resist propaganda and defend your liberty. That is the only way we’ll get through this.

(Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and is reprinted here with permission).

by Walter E. Williams

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.

Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.

For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world’s mightiest military.

Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world’s richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.

The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.

The issue that confronts us is how these gains can be extended to about one-quarter of the black population for whom they have proven elusive. The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the constitutional guarantees as everyone else. Now we do. While no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community.

A major problem is that some public and private policies reward dependency and irresponsibility. Chief among these policies is the welfare state that has fostered a 75 percent rate of out of wedlock births and decimated the black family that had survived Jim Crow and racism. Keep in mind that in 1940 the black illegitimacy rate was 11 percent and most black children were raised in two-parent families. Most poverty, about 25 percent, is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among husband-and-wife black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades.

Black people can be thankful that double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not a part of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. If there were, then there would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world’s most successful civil rights movement.

From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington’s Dunbar High School often outscored white students as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass (Baltimore), Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), McDonogh 35 (New Orleans) and others operated at a similar level of excellence.

Self-destructive behavior that has become acceptable, particularly that in predominantly black schools, is nothing less than a gross betrayal of a struggle, paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations, to make possible today’s educational opportunities that are being routinely squandered. I guarantee that blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us would not have believed such a betrayal possible.

Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights.

After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon,” which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.