Are Poor Kids Only Worth Being Made Drudges?

We now have in America a front-runner for the presidential candidacy suggesting (by unavoidable implication) that we should do away with laws protecting kids from sacrificing their childhoods (the foundation of their lives) in the service of sweatshops and service industries. Besides the obvious question of creating a situation that would effectively deny children of a certain socioeconomic class the right to a public education, my basic common sense question is this: if there aren't enough jobs for adult citizens of the United States, what are these jobs we would make these poor children do? Are they jobs that adults wouldn't apply for because they would pay less than a living wage, going back to the pre-Fair Labor Standards Act rationale that children can be employed in menial adult positions and be paid less for their work? This of course would be another "killing" for the voracious corporations, who could tap into yet another slave-like workforce that they could poorly pay -- added to the cheap illegal migrant labor for the fruit and vegetable farms and for the fly-by-night, low-bid, sub-contracted construction companies. Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich's defenders claim that the only thing he did wrong was in "just the way he said it" but that the "principle is sound". So how do you say nicely that you want to repeal the Fair Labor Standards Act and destroy the adult future of American children by making them drudges for corporations? Let's face it, if you don't get a chance at a decent education when you're young, you are fit for nothing but de facto economic slavery for the rest of your life. We citizens need to be watch-dogs about the things these politicians throw into the air. They are testing the waters, seeing how their radical notions are publicly received, and often the media tries to put on a straight face even when the reporters should express editorial outrage. If we allow these politicians to say these things over and over again without being properly challenged, the "appeasement crowd" will hold up these radical notions as the new "norm", and from there comes the boldness to create legislation that can erode our sacred body of human rights. The Nazis employed a similar technique, telling lies and proposing "solutions" to these lies, over and over again, creating a societal hypnosis, and people began to allow their government to support inhuman things that they would never have permitted but a few years before. A politician saying that the solution for financially struggling parents (who may already be collectively working two to four part-time minimum wage jobs) that they should also send their children to work, seems a far graver gaffe than that made by some other politico, who foolishly engaged in a sneaky episode of banal hanky-panky with an office aid. So please, let us not permit Newt or any of his "austerity" cohorts to one day in our Great Recession repeal a piece of humane legislation conceived and made into law during the Great Depression. Back in the 1930s, times may have been desperate, but they still had faith in a better future for their children. And because of that determined faith, their children got it!