We should be leading the nation in the quality of our schools and the health of our kids, not in teen pregnancy and juvenile incarceration. Middle class parents should be able to send their kids to public schools that will prepare them to compete in the 21st century global economy, and people who work hard but are still struggling to make ends meet, or are losing their jobs in these tough economic times, should know that their kids will have the ability to see a doctor and get the kind of education that will help them fulfill their God-given potential.

We should be investing in successful, healthy, well-educated children not paying for failure. We shouldn’t be spending our tax dollars on remedial education for kids when we could have spent a fraction of those dollars preventing the problems in the first place by making sure all of our children have a running start by the time they reach kindergarten. We shouldn’t be spending our tax dollars building new detention centers and prison cells for teenagers when, if we had intervened early, could have spent a fraction of those dollars building new college classrooms. And we shouldn’t be spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on costly procedures to try to save sick infants when we could have prevented them from being born early and ill had we invested a fraction of that money in preventive care for unborn children. Investing in our children is not just the right thing to do. It’s also the fiscally responsible thing to do.