The state of Indiana just signed into law something so radical, so controversial, so earth-shatteringly provocative that Democrats are calling it “state-codified moral judgment.” Ready? Here it is: graduate high school, get a full-time job, and get married before you have kids. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Senate Enrolled Act 88 requires Indiana public schools to teach students what researchers call the “success sequence” — three steps that give you a 97% chance of avoiding poverty. Governor signed it. It’s law. And the left is having an absolute conniption.
Ninety-seven percent. Let me say that again in case you were distracted by the sound of progressive educators ripping their hair out. If you do three things — finish high school, work full-time, and marry before having children — you have a 97% chance of NOT being poor. That’s not a Republican talking point. That’s not a Fox News graphic. That’s peer-reviewed research from the Brookings Institution, which last time I checked was not exactly a right-wing think tank. And Indiana just said: hey, maybe we should tell kids about this.
The horror. The absolute, unthinkable horror of teaching children that actions have consequences and some sequences of life decisions work better than others. Somebody call the United Nations.
Democrats in the Indiana statehouse fought this thing like it was a bill to bring back child labor. State Representative Rita Fleming called it — and I’m quoting directly here — “state-codified moral judgment.” Read that again. A Democrat lawmaker is upset that the state is… making a moral judgment… about graduating high school and getting a job. This is where we are, folks. The party that wants to teach your six-year-old about gender fluidity thinks telling teenagers to graduate before they reproduce is crossing a line.
Let’s break down what this law actually does, because the hysteria from the left would have you believe Indiana just mandated Bible study and arranged marriages. The law requires public schools to include instruction on the success sequence as part of their existing curriculum. It doesn’t ban anything. It doesn’t force anyone to do anything. It says: here are three decisions that statistically lead to better outcomes. Here is the data. Make your own choices. That’s it. It’s literally just information. The same people who scream “follow the science” every time someone questions a mask mandate are now furious that a state is following the science on poverty prevention.
But wait — there’s more. The same bill also requires Indiana universities to accept Classic Learning Test scores alongside the SAT and ACT. For those unfamiliar, the CLT is an alternative college entrance exam that’s been gaining traction, particularly among classical education and homeschool communities. It tests the same skills — reading, math, reasoning — but doesn’t come with the ideological baggage that’s been creeping into the SAT for the last decade. Naturally, the education establishment hates it, because nothing threatens a monopoly like competition.
The combination is perfect. Teach kids how to build a successful life AND give them more options for proving they’re college-ready. Indiana basically said: we’re going to prepare kids for the real world instead of whatever it is we’ve been doing for the last thirty years. And the left is treating it like a war crime.
Here’s what kills me. We have spent decades and trillions of dollars on anti-poverty programs. Head Start. Food stamps. Section 8. Medicaid expansions. Free school lunches. Free school breakfasts. Free phones. Free internet. And the poverty rate has barely budged. We’ve built an entire bureaucratic empire around managing poverty, and nobody — NOBODY — in the government thought to just tell kids: hey, here are three free things you can do that virtually guarantee you won’t be poor. No program needed. No application. No caseworker. No government check. Just a sequence of decisions that costs exactly zero dollars.
You know why nobody told them? Because there’s no money in it. There’s no Department of Common Sense. There’s no federal grant for telling teenagers to get their diploma. The poverty industry — and make no mistake, it IS an industry — doesn’t make money by solving poverty. It makes money by managing it. And Indiana just committed the unforgivable sin of offering a solution that doesn’t require a single new government employee.
The success sequence isn’t controversial. It’s math. Brookings ran the numbers. The American Enterprise Institute ran the numbers. The Institute for Family Studies ran the numbers. They all came back with the same answer: if you do these three things in this order, you almost certainly will not be poor. Whether you’re Black, white, Hispanic, rural, urban — doesn’t matter. The sequence works across every demographic. It’s the closest thing to a silver bullet that social science has ever produced.
And Democrats are against teaching it.
Let that sink in. The party that claims to champion the poor, the marginalized, the disadvantaged — that party is actively opposing a law that teaches children how to avoid poverty with a 97% success rate. Why? Because it implies that personal decisions matter. Because it suggests that individual choices — not systemic oppression, not institutional racism, not whatever buzzword is trending this semester — are the primary driver of economic outcomes. And that is ideological heresy on the left.
If you tell kids that graduating, working, and marrying leads to prosperity, you’re implicitly saying that NOT doing those things leads to worse outcomes. And that means some people’s outcomes are… their own responsibility. Can’t have that. The entire progressive worldview collapses if people start believing they have agency over their own lives. You can’t run a permanent underclass through the government dependency machine if the underclass figures out they don’t need the machine.
So here’s to Indiana. A state that looked at the data, looked at the screaming from the left, and signed the bill anyway. Every state in the union should follow suit by the end of the year. Teach kids the success sequence. Accept the CLT. And watch the people who’ve been profiting off poverty for decades absolutely lose their minds.
Ninety-seven percent, folks. That’s not politics. That’s a cheat code for life. And the only people who don’t want your kids to have it are the ones who need your kids to stay dependent.
Comments are closed.