Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today.
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Biden announces slate of gun control actions, claims 'public health crisis' – - There is no gun violence epidemic in the sense it's being used by gun control advocates. They use that phrase every single year. Even though there were acute increases in 2020, it was related to numerous acute changes in social conditions related to violence. We're still far, far safer from gun crime and gun homicide today than in the early 1990s. Heritage expert: Amy Swearer
9 Things You Need to Know About Biden’s ‘Infrastructure’ Spending Plan – The plan relies on the word “infrastructure” to seem moderate and uncontroversial. Yet, of the $2.25 trillion in total spending, between $90 billion and $100 billion (or less than 5%) would go toward traditional road infrastructure projects. This is revealing, since roads and bridges are what most people think about when they hear “infrastructure.” Such a bait-and-switch promotional tactic is recycled from the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 package, which contained less than 10% health spending. Instead, that package was more concerned with bailouts for left-leaning groups such as labor unions and big state governments. Heritage expert: David Ditch
No, Teacher-Training Programs Don’t Ignore Issues of Race – Are schools of education, in fact, turning a blind eye to issues of race and diversity? In a word: No. At the top-ranked education schools, 48 percent of faculty characterize diversity and race as a research interest or area of study, and 25 percent characterize it as their primary area of study. At the colleges of education that produce the most teachers each year, those numbers fall to 40 percent and 17 percent, respectively — a smidge lower, but still plenty high enough to render DiAngelo’s contention laughable. Indeed, at the nation’s most influential schools of education, scholarship on race, diversity, and equity is a significant focus for nearly half of all faculty training teachers and conducting education research, and it is the primary interest for perhaps one out of every five professors. The larger issue, we found, is not a failure to discuss race but that between one-quarter and one-third of professors who focus on race and diversity describe their work as steeped in the troubling tenets of critical theory. Heritage expert: Lindsey Burke