You have a very good heart; I can tell how caring you are by your writing. However, it’s still NEVER the role of the federal government to take my tax money at gun point and give it to others. If your state wants to do that, that’s fine. It’s up to you whether you want to live in such a state or not. I believe it should be left to charities and churches as it always was until the 1930’s (the first 150+ years of our nation’s existence).
With a lot of these kids, the only reason they’re even surviving to the age where they’d start going to Head Start is because of all the government programs that have been subsidizing their parents, both before and after they had children. People graduate from high school (if they graduate) with at least a $100,000 debt to society JUST for their public school education (and it’s closer to $250,000 in many areas). Then they start popping out babies and stick them in the public schools 5 years later.
I’m not in favor of ANY of the government programs, but we have to get rid of them in the right order. All the housing, food stamps, “job training”, Medicaid, etc, that’s enabling these people to even think for a second that they can afford to have a child, has got to go FIRST. We can’t subsidize everything except the children’s education, because they’ll go right on breeding them, and then the children grow up with no clue what to do except breed some more.
People who aren’t even fully supporting themselves need to get a loud, tough message that having children is absolutely 100% out of the question. Instead, when some teenager shows up at a hospital in labor, to get her free medical care for the delivery, she gets a free epidural too! Hey, we wouldn’t want it to *hurt*. And she knows in advance from her friends that she’ll get this, and she knows the housing subsidy and food stamps and AFDC/WIC will follow quickly. We’re sending the message loud and clear to go ahead and have babies, regardless of your ability to support them. From the “conservative” end of the spectrum, the only modification to the message is “Make sure you get a piece of paper from the government saying you’re ‘married’ first”. Once they’re born, we might as well pay to start getting them out of the house a few hours a day, before their brains are too hopelessly atrophied to be educable, or we’ll just end up paying more later on, to house them in prison. But we need to focus a lot more on preventing from them being born to parents who aren’t equipped to support them, financially or logistically.