Illiteracy Statistics
? 42 million American adults can't read at all; 50 million are unable to read at a higher level that is expected of a fourth grader.
? The number of adults that are classified as functionally illiterate increases by about 2.25 million each year.
? 20 percent of high school seniors can be classified as being functionally illiterate at the time they graduate.
Source: National Right to Read Foundation
Where Illiteracy Leads
? 70 percent of prisoners in state and federal systems can be classified as illiterate.
? 85 percent of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate.
? 43 percent of those whose literacy skills are lowest live in poverty.
Source: National Institute for Literacy
Yet, with those disturbing figures, our U.S. Congress, by their action and by their inaction, imports an added 2.5 million legal and illegal immigrants into this country every year. That equals over 200,000 every 30 days. AND THE FOLKS FROM THIRD-WORLD NATIONS HAVE HIGH BIRTH RATES. Their kids overwhelm our schools... subverting education for our own children. The immigrants themselves face daunting challenges as to culture, language and jobs.
In Denver, we suffer 85 languages and a 67 percent Denver Public Schools flunkout rate, as reported by the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in a story "What Happened?" Ironically, the 'Rocky' bankrupted in 2008 because not enough people could read! The same holds true for dozens of cities across our country.
Becoming a nation of dummies in the 21st Century
What happens when somebody cannot read, write or perform simple math?
If they cannot obtain a labor job, they pursue crime, drugs, alcohol, welfare, homelessness and worse. Such uneducated women usually become pregnant and their children become abused, live in poverty and become wards of the state. Over 13.4 million American children live below the poverty line according to Katie Couric in a recent telecast. An astounding 35 million Americans subsist on food stamps.
Massachusetts; A Glaring Example.
What happens when young adult women fail their educational pursuits? Let's use one state to show you the underbelly of what's happening to the United States:
Nearly nine of every 10 teen-agers who gave birth in Massachusetts were unmarried, the highest percentage of out-of-wedlock teen-age births of any state in the nation. According to the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics, 86 percent of the 7,018 mothers under age 20 who gave birth in this state two years ago were not married.
The percentage was higher in Boston, hitting 92 percent. In Springfield, 90 percent of teen-age mothers were unmarried. "It is staggeringly high," said state Health and Human Services Secretary Charles D. Baker Jr. Additionally, it is estimated that 80 percent of unwed teen mothers end up welfare.
The declining quality of the American work force.
In a penetrating article, Jared Taylor, "The Silent Catastrophe" October 12 2009, "One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining quality of the American work force. The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of some two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years- in 2023- and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later.
The greatest increase will be in <http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_hispanic_family_values.html>Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin."
"We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy," <http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0206/p02s01-legn.html>says Irwin Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service. He warns that our increasingly non-white and immigrant workforce threatens not only our standard of living, but the very survival of republican government (the U.S. is a Republic) based on an informed middle class.
"Here are <http://nces.ed.gov/PUBSEARCH/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009064>some of the facts," said Taylor. "In 2007, 93.5 percent of white and 93.1 percent of Asian 18- to 24-year-olds had graduated from high school. The figures for blacks and Hispanics were 88.8 percent and 72.7 percent, meaning that Hispanics were more than four times more likely than whites... and 2.4 times more likely than blacks... to have failed to graduate from high school."
Painfully, as witnessed in Detroit, so many poor people shoplifted from grocery stores and retail merchants that the businesses bankrupted or vacated the inner city. Thus, the poor cannot find a place to buy their groceries... even with food stamps. On a national scale, shoplifters hoist $35 million a day in goods from retail stores. We all pay for that massive theft. Think of the implications of adding 70 million more immigrants (half of whom are illiterate) to our cities across America.
John Wayne said, "Life is tough, but it's even tougher if you're stupid!"
Pictures of sexy women.......a much prettier picture. But the truth is America is fatter and stupider then ever before. Someone has to raise the alarm. Tell a friend.