Word: gingrichs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Until now, it's been all Newt. He lectures; he threatens; he denies; he clarifies. Every word, every musing, every hyperbolic expression is recorded and decoded. Newt Gingrich, the incoming House speaker, has dominated the debate as few politicians ever do. Even Bill Clinton, still conflicted about What It All Means a month after the Republicans' midterm rout, seems almost mute before Newt...
Newt's free ride in the world of big think ends this week. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is issuing its "Progressive Alternative," a more honest and rigorous attempt to address the nation's problems than Gingrich's vacuous bromides...
adoption" -- but not with the cash that might keep mother and child together. Orphanages were not the subject of Gingrich's speech, but they were not a throwaway either. The notion reappeared in the Republican welfare-reform bill (with the inflammatory word orphanages changed to "children's homes"), which is a basis for Gingrich's famous "Contract with America...
Nearly everyone agrees that illegitimacy and teen pregnancy are key elements in poverty's vicious cycle and that the government should try to reduce them. Gingrich's orphanage proposal, however, seems punitive -- not to mention odd, coming from a man who was born to a 16-year-old mother eight months after she left his abusive father. It would violate federal law, which mandates family- based care over institutions, and ignore the public policy consensus -- first expressed by the Teddy Roosevelt White House -- that "no child should be deprived of his family by reason of poverty alone...
...with a foster family costs the public $4,800 a year. The average cost for the child's care in "residential group care," today's closest approximation of an orphanage, is $36,500. If even a quarter of an estimated 1 million children who would be cut loose under Gingrich's plan ended up in orphanages, the additional cost to & the public would be more than $8 billion...