The Big Answer

To link to this article from your blog or webpage, copy and paste the url below into your blog or homepage.

Newt Gingrich: 'We need to replace the welfare state with an opportunity society'

Newt is right on in some of his attitudes about the future: “By combining the potential of the future with the lessons of the past to enrich the present, I think we can develop a tremendous increase in the opportunities for virtually every American.” He says government cannot solve our problems by itself (e.g., we need much better education, but the government cannot socially engineer this)—especially about the Third Wave. If more taxes and bureaucracies were our answer, he says, the last few decades would have been about the evolution of a prosperous, safe America for all.

But kids having babies and killing each other and dying of AIDS, along with high school graduates getting diplomas when they cannot even read, represent the dismal failure of social engineering, centralized government, and welfare-state policies.

Kids are killing each other

We need to replace the welfare state with an opportunity society. We need decentralization and local action that actualizes the ability of each citizen and each community to become an answer, not a problem. We need core principles and beliefs which unify us. We need civic responsibility, not bureaucratic controls and programs.

Bureaucrat continuing the failed social engineering experiment using our tax money

He wants grassroots movements and renewed civic attitudes in which millions of American become part of the solution, not part of the problem. The experiment of social engineering has failed. We need individuals acting responsibly to make America work right by making families and neighborhoods work right. Amen.

Quit looking to social engineering superheroes and rely on local community efforts