I have long argued that the cure for what ails our kids is to fix the public schools. High cost and poor outcomes aside, the rise in physical and mental health issues in kids is directly attributable to the ideological capture of public education.
The schools made kids sick by forcing them to wear masks. Pharmaceutical interventions they never needed, which (ironically) made them more likely to become will, were forced upon them. Schools undermined their mental health during the pandemic with fearmongering and isolation. They complicate what should be a joyous time of life with environmental scare tactics and a cultural obsession with making everyone question their human nature. The fiber of the universe itself may have put them in the wrong body.
Most or all of those could be resolved if they would just shut up. Teach math, reading, and science without ideology, and the next generation will become more stable and capable, productive, and less likely to strain or drain the people and the state—a problem that is reaching epidemic proportions in Woke Britain.
Analysis by BCG of people’s routes into long-term sickness found that students were now one of the biggest contributors. In 2021-22, 63,392 people went straight from being economically inactive because they were studying to being inactive through long-term sickness, up from 36,866 in 2019-20. Once people flowing the other way are subtracted, students pushed up inactivity numbers by 42,300 net, up from 12,700 in 2019-20.
The other factor, especially in Britain, is the existence of the safety net itself. If you build it, they will come. A great example of what to do instead is how New Hampshire handles unemployment. You can’t live on it. That’s deliberate. With the exception of abuses during the pandemic when the government unemployed many and the feds funded the injustice, a Granite Stater needs to find a job if they lost one. So, they do. Sometimes, two of them. And given that the politicians have treated the economy like a rental car, that’s probably not enough, but economies change.
When the government breaks things, getting them out of the way allows the free markets and people to fix them. When it comes to the kids, the same rule applies, but you still have generations of young adults who have been mind-f***ed by the state at taxpayer expense and are likely to be a continued burden if you let them.
There are now a record 2.8 million people off work due to long-term sickness (in Britain), up 700,000 since Covid-19, with the cost of sickness benefits due to reach £64 billion by the end of the parliament, up £30 billion on before the pandemic.
They are looking for ways to cut those costs. Still, until they identify the why and exercise the political will to remove the incentives to do nothing (not all of them are likely in genuine need), the problem will only worsen. They make them crazy, then give them an out. Those are the root causes. Free-riding illegal “migrants” isn’t setting a good example either.
Stop making crazy ad then paying them to do nothing. It might hurt a bit at first, but everyone will be better off in the belong run when you run out of other people’s money, and services people actually need can’t be funded either.
