Nine years ago, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich demonstrated his legendary outside-the-box thinking by floating an idea to give families in poverty a tax credit to by a laptop computer.
“Maybe that’s expensive, maybe we can’t do it, but [we should send] . . . any signal that we can send to the poorest Americans that says, ‘We’re going into a twenty-first-century, third-wave information age, and so are you, and we want to carry you with us.'”
It was vintage Gingrich. He didn’t want to offer resources to low-income families for health care, housing, or education, but he wanted them to have laptops. The suggestion was widely panned and quickly forgotten.
But, as David Sirota noticed yesterday, bizarre thinking like this has a way of sticking around.
Instead of reversing massive cuts to housing and job training he has proposed, the President apparently thinks the way to help the homeless is to set up a website for them.
Here’s an excerpt from the Dept. of Labor press release today:
WASHINGTON — The Department of Labor (DOL) today launched a Web site to help America’s homeless find jobs through mainstream as well as targeted training, education and placement services and to provide a vital link to government-wide resources. “This Web page furthers the Administration’s commitment to helping the homeless, including homeless veterans,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.
If Bush administration officials want us to stop making fun of them, they’ll have to stop doing dumb things.
Does the Dept. of Labor initiative come with a coupon for Internet cafes? And come to think of it, how will the homeless learn of this new website? Maybe Chao could email them the press release?