Ron Fournier of National Journal is following Eric Cantor around as the House Majority Leader terrifies DC’s infants (“Eric Cantor grabs a plastic dinosaur from the pile of toys in front of 1-year-old Mekhi Scott, taps the beast on the table and growls, ‘RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!’”) and fact-finds for a big speech intended to compel the Republican Party to reform. Unfortunately, if Fournier’s report is correct, Cantor’s recommendation will be to remain unwaveringly the party of small government by… championing a mixed-up agenda to further regulate and privatize American education:
Cantor visited the school for more than an hour to gather information for a speech Tuesday that his aides are billing as an important shift of tone for the Republican Party. The speech will attempt to cast the House GOP’s traditionally conservative policy agenda in terms that appeal to parents, explaining why school vouchers, tax breaks, repealing the health care law, and other Republican standards would “make life work better.”….
In his speech Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, Cantor plans to ask Congress to require universities to warn students when their academic majors lack employment opportunities; to repeal the tax on medical devices, a provision of Obama’s health care overhaul; and to shift spending from political sciences to “hard” sciences such as cancer research.
More central planning, more commodification; if I didn’t know any better I’d think Representative Cantor was a crypto-New Dealer! Thank you, thank you; I’m here all week.
But, in seriousness, you can look at Cantor’s proposals here, thin as they are, and see quite clearly the predicament of the GOP’s hard-right. For them the rhetoric of small government is extremely important. It supplies the patina of high-minded political theorizing that movement conservatism needs if it’s to be understood as anything more than a vehicle for the identity politics grievances of wealthy and aged white guys. Gotta keep that Tenther torch alight.
Easier said than done, though, when your big ideas consist of sticking it to pointy-egghead liberal arts majors (emphasis on liberal), forcing service providers to disclose information they’d otherwise keep hidden, and cutting taxes for businesses. Not all of these are bad ideas, mind you; but the inclusion of redirecting science funding (which I’m going to assume has to do with public education) is a half-assed attempt to position Republicans as in favor of educational investment while at the same time furthering the mistaken idea that we have no choice but to follow the extremely successful George Osborne model.
The new Republican Party, everybody!
Fournier’s article was terrible. It contained little if any new information, and no new analysis. If you have any interest in politics, you’ve heard his story line before. The GOP is working on its image! Demography! Yawn!Report
HULK’S POLICY PLATFORM “MAKE LIFE WORK BETTER.” HULK SMASH.Report
make life work better
Huh? I can understand “make life better”. And I can understand “make work better”.
Make life work better? Maybe there’s a hyphen missing.Report
Duh, of course we need more STEM majors. Flying killer robots don’t design themselves.
(yet.)Report
All my STEM nephews and nieces can’t find work except from the Gummint. (Five of em with engineering degrees.) I’m not at all persuaded that we need more STEM majors out there. Anecdotally, acourse.
Tho the one who has a rocket science degree would like nothing more than to design exactly those types of robots.Report
I heard a rumor that the great depression meant that the best and brightest couldn’t find jobs anywhere *BUT* in the government… which meant that by the time the 50’s rolled around, they had established jobs with established roles in established positions and, hey, bird in the hand, right? (Especially with all of the trouble they saw around them as they aged… that’ll teach anybody to be pretty conservative job-wise.)
As such, folks in the 50’s and 60’s grew up with the best and brightest working in government jobs around them.
Of course, after a while, the best and brightest learned that they could make a *LOT* of money in the private sector rather than in the public… and, as such, the public sector didn’t have the best and brightest applicants to anywhere near the same degree as it used to and that resulted in a regression to the mean.
And it makes you wonder about what pathologies would be introduced into the system if there is much truth to this theory.Report
Maybe if we didn’t have libertarian and conservative skinflints who weren’t willing to pay better, we could attract the best and brightest back into government jobs, eh?Report
We could also just raise taxes on the private sector until they pay less than the government.
Then we could use that money to pay for public parks!Report
Right. I had an STEM major (Biology, with focus on molecular biology) for my bachelor’s and had no luck whatsoever finding work, so I went back to university for an MA.
Finding work isn’t as simply as choosing one of a given selection of majors.Report
Heh. I did an STEM major for my undergrad (cell and molecular biology with a minor in biophysics), found that I was sick of lab work, never wanted to enter a lab again and am now doing my MA in philosophy.Report
Not all SYEM degrees are created equal, of course. And there are never any guarantees, but there are more good bets within STEM than elsewhere. The bigger issue with it is that some people just aren’t meant for it, so it’s a partial solution at best.Report
If you were doing web-related stuff in college during the social media boomlet, you were golden. Other than that, you needed to find an employer who valued talent and hard work and was willing to train you in….
Sorry, I’ll try to be serious. Other than that, you were as screwed as any English major.Report
I don’t really agree with that. Or maybe my home region actually rewards hard work? There is a tangible difference between STEM majors and liberal arts majors where I come from. Depending perhaps on the STEM major. But heck, even the physics major got a job at a chemical plant before he went on to get his MS and PhD. The LAST majors are doing okay, too, but not as okay.Report
LAST?Report
Autocorrect will never stop baffling me.Report
As Will points out, STEM covers a vast variety of fields and degrees (from a BS in math/physics/chemistry/biology, with poor employment potential, to higher degrees, or CS/engineering degrees, with quite good employment potential).
My technique to see if there’s a shortage is to see if there’s a widespread increase in salaries for a given field – that’s the market’s gold standard. Those are few and far between, from everything that I’ve heard.Report
STEM jobs are currently the ones on the fast track for outsourcing. We just spent 2 decades importing, educating and then shipping home a few million kids to India and other East Asian countries, what did you think was going to happen once they were all trying to figure out what to do with their degrees at home?Report
some cool stuff, one hopes.Report
I for one await the day when our killer robot overlords can not only design themselves but can make the kill/no kill decision on their own. and then the they can found Killco. and lobby for gov subsides for killing the people american will not Kill.
but at least that will drive sales of drone safe burqas.Report
you know I would buy the Lighter and Softer sales pitch if they could make republicans in the states shut up for even 5 minutes. but i dont see that happening anytime soon.Report
“you know I would buy the Lighter and Softer sales pitch if they could make republicans in the states shut up for even 5 minutes. but i dont see that happening anytime soon.”
What’s frightening is that I know most of those guys are the bushest of bush-league politicians, but they’re still profesional politicians, which means that they have some filters on their mouths. So we still aren’t hearing all that they actually believe.Report
Everytime I read stuff like this I yearn for the comming Great Collapse….Report