Newt’s been pretty good in these debates. Last night he turned transcendent:
If he’d been this guy since September, where would he be now?
I can’t recall ever seeing a standing ovation at a debate.
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“Own the job”? Does that make any sense to you, liberals? Engendering dependency is failure. Promoting self-sufficiency is success—for the individual, for his/her neighborhood, for the United States.
I support the idea of a leg up to those who need it. I just don’t want it to be a prosthetic, permanently attached!
I don’t generally get along w/ Newt on many things, but his stance on work ethic I do actually agree with. People don’t value their jobs like they should. And it’s not just the lower income workers, even white collar workers and executives can be found to take their jobs for granted. Having been laid off myself in the last year, and busted my butt to try and keep that job leading up to the lay off… I definitely agree people need to take their jobs more seriously.
One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is lack of motivation. Those who haven’t had a job for an extended period of time are now accustomed to living off of welfare and thus they probably lack any reason to change as they know it’s there. I don’t know the system very well, as I was fortunate enough to be unemployed for such a short period of time that I was never eligible for unemployment benefits, but I would hope that there are some sort of checks in place that ensure people are actually seeking a job and staying out of trouble while claiming these benefits. And there should probably be some sort of limit on how long a person can claim said benefits.
The one part of the video that I hesitated to support was so many stories of kids working. I’m all for kids learning young, even younger than 12 years old, the value of money and how to manage it. But I believe it treads on some lines to encourage kids to hold actual jobs, at least some moral and cultural lines, which I tend to try and respect. He risks walking a fine line of teaching kids to value their jobs and money versus violating child labor laws that were put into place to prevent taking advantage of young children for unskilled labor (ie. the Nike shoe factory scandals from a decade or two ago). If a younger person wants to work in such a manner as Newt described, I’m all for it, but we need to be sure there’s plenty of oversight in making sure no one’s being taken advantage of.
The last thing that really ripped me about that video was the moderator trying to make Newt out to be a racist. Playing the race card these days is, in my opinion, almost impossible without being a hypocrite. I often find that the actual racist in the conversation is the one calling the other person a racist. To take statements that refer to families that are on welfare and how they should get a job and say that’s racist against blacks… is in itself racist. I live in AL where there are plenty of people of all races on welfare. It’s not unusual for the lunch conversation at work to shift into politics, and many of my fairly conservative co-workers will not hesitate to harp on those on welfare in a similar manner to Newt. But never once do any of them single out anyone based on race, religion, etc. You could say they’re equal opportunity in their rants against people on welfare. It’s my belief that racism, in its most pure definition, doesn’t really exist any more where most thing it does. Yes, there are going to be some extremist who still hate people for the color of their skin, but they’re just a small ignorant minority. What we today perceive as racism, is, in my opinion, actually a conflict of sociocultural beliefs.
As an example, if you see some upper middle class caucasian woman sneer at a young african american male wearing an “urban” outfit… she’s probably sneering at the guy’s pants hanging down around his knees… not the color of his skin. The guy who sits in the cube next to me at work (in real life) is african american, but is one of the sharpest dressed guys I know. I’m pretty sure he’d get a flirtatious smile out of the same lady that sneered at the urban outfit. It’s a cultural conflict at best these days, not an actual racial problem. That is until someone makes it a racial problem by calling said social conflict racism, but as I said before, that person is the only racist in that equation.
Tahm, you’re all over the real “racism” problem in this country right now. The greatest thing Gingrich did here was leave the bait to rot on the hook, and speak to thinking, reasonable people in his answer.