We Have It Within Our Power To Change The Destructive Path We're On

 "There's clearly been an effort to bring down the standards for our students in Virginia to stop celebrating excellence.  And this is counter to everything we believe." - Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin speaking about eighteen Virginia high schools (see table below that includes the number 1 high school in the nation), apparently working in tandem targeting Asian-American students, by withholding National Merit Awards presented to the top 3% of scorers on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) - an award that is an honor acknowledgement of merit that can help students in the top 1% of scorers compete for scholarships & college admissions. 

School officials said that the awards & scholarships were withheld to avoid hurting the feelings of those who failed to get them, citing their program of "equal outcomes for every student, without exception."  This relentless pursuit of Progressives' idea of equity went as far as hiring an "equity consultant" for $450,000 in the Fairfax County School District.  

The Virginia Attorney General is conducting an investigation.

Progressives have come to substitute the word "equity" for "equality" as if the two are identical - they are not.  Progressives' idea is that there are systemic inequalities in the world & that social equity is achieved when everyone under whatever circumstance they find themselves is given whatever they need to reach an equal outcome with anyone else.  In short, a tilted playing field.  The Founders argued that government exists to protect man’s natural equality and natural rights. The Progressives countered that government exists to achieve equality for individuals, particularly economically like the student loan forgiveness program that transfers the student's debt from people who incurred it to those who don't owe it. 

Equity is the quality of being fair & impartial & of course the Progressives' idea of equity is exactly the opposite of this.  When Progressives talk about equity they are speaking of "equality of outcomes" & this viewpoint not only will hurt the country - it already has.

Last fall, following the equity for equality progressive substitution, Ivy League & other highly thought of big name schools sought to protect their names & reputations a little longer by deciding not to provide data for U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.  Led by Yale & Stanford more than a dozen other law schools followed suit.  

This in turn quickly led to Harvard's Medical School withdrawing their cooperation with the magazine's medical school rankings, which was followed by medical schools @ Stanford, Columbia, Penn, & Mount Sinai.

Rankings like USNWR's, & grading of colleges by ACTA, can only louse up the good thing some schools have going for themselves.  Don't compete for excellence - just let things roll along as the non-participating schools rest on their laurels & perceived reputation.      

The above examples of the Virginia high schools & the college law & medical schools intentionally hindering the brightest students' development will continue the dumbing down of the entire society that thinks there are more than two sexes, that men have babies, & that you need to state your preferred pronouns when being introduced to someone or enlist in the Army.

Our enemies around the world concentrate on overtaking America economically & militarily while our schools produce a society, many of whose members are tied up in preferred pronouns & can't get a responsible job despite employers' multiple openings per unemployed worker.  See graphic below.

The link between lack of education achievement & unemployable people becomes clearer every day.  Employers have the openings but can't find qualified people to fill them no matter how many people are out of work.

This deterioration of education in America, as documented in the Virginia high schools above, is also a growing problem in the professions.

There was already a looming shortage of doctors forecast before the 2010 enactment of ObamaCare with its projections of adding another 30 million people into the insured ranks.  The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a primary care shortage of up to 55,000 doctors within the next decade & up to 124,000 physicians by 2034 derived from an estimated 268,000 retirements & possibly only 15,000 new doctors coming in each year.

It is estimated that more than 64 million people in the U.S, live in an area that is short of doctors, nurses, & other health & human service professionals.  Retiring doctors give their practices to hospitals or large group-team practices with young inexperienced doctors in exchange for being able to walk away from the practice with no further liability.

This doesn't look like it will get better any time soon with proper medical training being an expensive time-consuming process being offered by a limited number of medical schools with just so many seats - such schools not keeping up with the demand for physicians.  Doctors then are being burnt out with less autonomy as they are controlled by insurance companies.

The solution is to return the medical profession to the excellence when it was the most prestigious field for a young person to go into by removing all of these hindrances & red tape encountered when trying to help patients.

But it is not the shortage of doctors that surprises me since I have repeatedly written about that since the early days of ObamaCare.

I was very surprised to see little more than a homemade sign "Pharmacists Wanted '' when I entered a local Rite Aid drug store last summer.  Come to find out the major pharmacy chains have severe personnel shortage problems too.

And it all started during the Covid-19 pandemic with fewer people attending pharmacy schools - a trend that is expected to continue.  According to the Pharmacy College Application Service the number of pharmacy-school applicants dropped by more than a third from its peak a decade ago resulting in pharmacies reducing hours or even closing stores on weekends because of staff shortages.

The median annual pay for pharmacists in 2021 was nearly $129,000 meaning by definition half the pharmacists you see filling prescriptions make over $129,000 per year.

This has created an overworked condition that is ripe for mistakes.  I witnessed a madhouse @ a local Walmart pharmacy the winter before last when there was only one pharmacist on duty giving Covid vaccine shots, trying to fill orders, & explain how to take medications to customers.  The pharmacist looked disheveled, bewildered, & spinning around like being blown out of a cyclone not knowing where to turn next.  I left.

Next up in the troubled professions is accounting where a shortage of accountants is forcing small & mid sized firms to hire overseas accountants even when the U.S. income tax filing season gets in full swing.  Imagine what this says - foreigners in Bengaluru, India or South Africa know how to complete an American income tax return but Americans don't.

Education starts the downhill accounting profession slide with a 9% decline in U.S. students who received a bachelor's degree in accounting (57,500 degrees in 2012 to 52,500 degrees in 2019) with the downward trend continuing the past two years.  As I expected to find in researching this post, fewer people are sitting for the four part CPA examination.  Evidently working the fields in the hot Arizona sun is not the only job Americans won't or can't do.

This lower number of degreed accountants is not sufficient to replace the more than 300,000 U.S. accountants & auditors who left their employment the past two years.  

The accounting profession involves a lot of pressure & hard work with 70 to 80 hour workweeks common each spring during income tax season & four times a year meeting audit deadlines for business financial reports.

Just like pharmacies have reduced their hours many accounting firms have stopped performing external audits because of qualified staff shortages.

I have wondered for years why anyone would want to join the police force, border patrol, or military the way people in those professions have been treated under the criminal or enemy first, victim last or not @ all mindset.

I know army veterans who went through very selective competitive processes to become policemen 20 years ago - the NYPD had 20 applicants for every open position.  Now there is a 1,700 officer shortage.  Chicago is losing two officers for each one it graduates from the police academy & San Jose has seen a two thirds drop in applications to the police force the last three years.  Source - Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

As the abuse of these police professionals became more & more absurd the hiring standards naturally were lowered.

For instance, four of the five Memphis policemen who were fired & charged with murder in the beating & subsequent death of Tyre Nichols had been reprimanded or suspended earlier in their work on the force for failure to report when they used physical force, failure to report a domestic dispute, or for damages to a squad car.  

One of the four officers cited above was hired after the department loosened its education requirements.  The man had worked as a Shelby County corrections officer - he had been sued for allegedly beating a jail inmate (the case was dismissed on a technicality) so on-the-job violence was on his resume.

In fact the Memphis police chief herself, who had created the elite Scorpion unit that the five accused officers belonged to, had originally been demoted from major to lieutenant before being fired from the Atlanta police force for attempting to cover up a case involving the husband of another officer.  The Atlanta Civil Service Board reinstated her.

The above four examples of shortages - doctors, pharmacists, accountants, & policemen - show important jobs that affect our lives that are just not being done the way they should be.  

These shortages, & the above examples of why we have them from the Virginia high schools & college law & medical schools, are indicative of the destructive path we are on.

A path where we worry about transgender bathrooms but not sanctuary cities; where thugs are honored as heroes while policemen or citizens who bring them to justice are vilified - Officer Darren Wilson in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri & citizen Jose Alba defending himself in a NYC bodega by stabbing ex-con Austin Simon who attacked Alba over a bag of chips Simon's girlfriend had not been able to pay for with her defunct benefits card; & where illegal immigrants can commit murder after being deported six times but still gain sanctuary in major cities - Kate Steinle dying in her father's arms after being shot in San Francisco.

We continue to worry after AOC told us the world will end in 2030 due to climate change if we don't adopt impractical, expensive, & cost ineffective measures of the Green New Deal but aren't concerned @ all that the Medicare Part A Hospital Trust Fund will run out of money by 2028 & that the Social Security Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2032. 

We allow trained Marxists to infiltrate our schools @ every level from kindergarten through graduate school to undermine & overturn our country by teaching radical political ideology that emphasizes Critical Race Theory & the malicious deliberate historical errors, misstatements, & falsehoods of the 1619 Project & Black Lives Matter - all of which sees literally everything through the lens of race so that young children come to regard their parents as racists who are beyond redemption. 

The forces against America have never been greater.

The only good part is that we have it within our power to change it.