Our Platform for Outlining Colorado’s Future

Website that agree http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/02/repealing-the-davis-bacon-act-would-save-taxpayers-$10-9-billion Reasons to agree : We are broke . Suspending the DBA means hiring five workers at market rates instead of hiring four workers at a 22 percent premium. If we have a limited amount of money, it is better to employ more construction workers than to pay a lot to the few that kiss up to their union bosses. We do have a limited amount of money. We can no longer pretend that we have an unlimited amount of money. We may want to give really high wages to give to everyone, but we shouldn't make rules that require the federal government to overpay their workers.  If Congress is not willing to reduce construction spending, suspending the DBA would make each public construction dollar go 9.9 percent further. This would create more bridges and buildings at the same cost to taxpayers. It would also employ 155,000 more construction workers.  The Davis–Bacon Act ...

  Reasons to agree : We are broke.  Federal jobs have typically had better benefits, but they did not make as much as private sector jobs. Even people who work for the government should acknowledge that our country is going to have a bad future, if our best and brightest work for the government.   With projections of huge federal deficits for years to come, policymakers should scour the budget looking for places to cut spending The OWS protest should look to government with anger at their compensation more so than looking at CEOs.  During the last decade, compensation of federal employees rose much faster than compensation of private-sector employees. The average federal civilian worker now earns twice as much in wages and benefits as the average worker in the U.S. private sector. A recent job-to-job comparison found that federal workers earned higher wages than did private-sector workers in four-fifths of the occupations examined. It is unfair to ask taxpa...

  Q: If one of your daughters asked you, "Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?" What would you say? A: What I believe is that God created the universe, and that the 6 days in the Bible may not be 6 days as we understand it. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth, that is fundamentally true. Now whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible, that I don't presume to know. But one last point--I do believe in evolution. I don't think that is incompatible with Christian faith. Just as I don't think science generally is incompatible with Christian faith. There are those who suggest that if you have a scientific bent of mind, then somehow you should reject religion. And I fundamentally disagree with that. In fact, the more I learn about the world, the more I know about science, the more I'm amazed about the mystery of this planet and this universe. And it strength...

Reasons  to agree: People hate smart kids. Americans are way over-fascinated with calling smart people nerds, and geeks. This is not done so much in other cultures. Background: "I try to avoid an either/or approach to solving the problems of this country. There are questions of individual responsibility and questions of societal responsibility to be dealt with. The best example is an education. I'm going to insist that we've got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and  get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve ." ~ Meet The Press, NBC News Jul 25, 2004

Reasons  to agree: We should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior .  " Teachers are extraordinarily frustrated about how their performance is assessed. And not just their own performance, but the school's performance generally. So they're teaching to the tests all the time. What I have said is that we should be able to get buy-in from teachers in terms of how to measure progress. Every teacher I think wants to succeed. And if we give them a pathway to professional development, where we're creating master teachers, they are helping with apprenticeships for young new teachers, they are involved in a variety of other activities, that are really adding value to the schools, then we should be able to give them more money for it. But we should only do it if the teachers themselves have some buy-in in terms of how they're measured. They can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they ge...

Reasons  to agree: Those students in Education departments across the country have had worse ACT, and SAT grades than other college departments. They even have worse grades than Criminal Justice departments (cops). It is sad that cops can know math, geography, history, and science, better than those that we put in charge of teaching our children. We need higher standards for teachers, if we are going to pay them more. I'm not saying every teacher is stupid. If you are a teacher, and you are offended, than you prove my point. You are stupid. The facts are the facts, and if you get mad because of the facts, than you are stupid. I'm from Idaho. I'm not offended when you say bad things about people from Idaho, in general, because I know that you are not talking about me specifically. Of course their are a lot of very smart people who are teachers. I thought about going into teaching. My father, whom I love and respect very much is a teacher. My mother in law is also a very go...

Reasons  to agree: "In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity--it is a prerequisite. And yet, we have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish. This is a prescription for economic decline.   So tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country. That's why we will provide the support necessary for all young Americans to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in th...

Reasons  to agree: "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college." ~ Barack Obama, fund-raiser in Harlem, NY, Nov. 29, 2007. "Simply untrue, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There may be a case for arguing, as some Obama supporters have done, that the total number of black prisoners is slightly higher than the total number of black students. But I can only fact check the comparison the candidate actually made, which was between young black men in prison and in college. Rather than acknowledge the error, the Obama campaign declined to provide statistical support." Source: GovWatch on 2008 Pinocchio Awards for Biggest Fib of 2007 Jan 1, 2008. As GovWatch points out, there are more black men in prison (age 18 to 100 years old) than there are "young    black men" in college. However Obama said there were more young black men in prison than in college, which is f...

Reasons  to agree: "How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child? How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?" "Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities." "But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--i...

Reasons  to agree: "One of Obama's most poignant missed opportunities was in not using the historic $787 million stimulus package to reorder state and local government's spending priorities. As states and cities continue to spend ceaselessly and without results on education and healthcare, they're crowding out investments in the physical infrastructure that the private sector needs to rebuild the economy. "In the stimulus, of the more than $200 billion that went directly to states and cities, nearly 70% went to education and healthcare spending. Only 24% went to infrastructure spending. "But the states and cities in the most trouble already spend way too much on education and healthcare, pushing taxes up and sending private industry away. They don't spend nearly enough on infrastructure, which attracts the private sector and builds the real economy. "As David Walker, former comptroller general of the US, said at the Regional Plan Association'...

Reasons to agree Romney doesn't smoke. Romney doesn't drink. Ann Romney says Mitt has never raised his voice. People vote for candidates who are like them. They don't want their candidates to be too good, to smart, too handsome, too competent. They want them to suffer, because we live in an Opera world where we love to bask in each other's misery. If you don't have misery for the public to bask in, they don't care about you. That don't want to watch smart people who have overcome their life's problems, because that will make them feel bad about themselves. Reasons to disagree "Too perfect" for what? It doesn't even make any sense. Romney doesn't smoke? Barak is the only person who does smoke? Are your really saying Romney not smoking makes him too perfect? Are you stupid? Romney doesn't drink? I bet brown back doesn't drink either? What is the big deal? Did the founding father's say you have to drink in order to be pre...