ajax18 wrote: There is no problem that can't be solved by raising taxes on working people. .
* I guess when you say "working people" you aren't thinking of who I am thinking of.
I'm thinking of people who make between 25K and 65K who work full time often doing monotonous
unfullfilling things that enrich and build the ego of some asshat on a golf course somewhere (jee thanks job creators). I haven't heard of a liberal wanting to raise taxes on those "working people" per se.
* Intelligent people know that if illiteracy and indifference to education is being passed down generation after generation as a matter of habit and culture in poverty stricken subpopulations, then leaving it to the market so that people get what they pay for isn't going to help those populations at all (since they can't pay). It is in the long term interest of more affluent and educated populations to invest in public programs that have the LONG term goal of breaking that cycle. You have to start somewhere and the best place to start is by getting a critical mass of younger people in those populations educated and engaged in meaningful careers. There are at least three easily identifiable reasons why this effort has not been more successful and why we are yet short of the critical mass.
First, we are actually too cheap to make the needed investment. We have never really spent enough thanks to the crypto-socialdarwinist haters. We need to spend more than we spend on defense--because it is at least as important and a much harder set of problems.
The second reason is that the effort is intrinsically very difficult.
Of course it is going to take generations. Leaving it to the market is essentially doing nothing as far as the poor are concerned (remember--they are um, poor). It is tantamount to hoping that those "inferior" people just get wiped away by a social darwinism or at least put in there place working like robots for the lofty self-fulfilling egomaniacal goals of powerful people who are sitting pretty often thanks to a silverspoon. Unregulated market forces are unconscious indifferent forces that swing a double edgesword that can lop of a baby's head as easily as create a truly useful product. But left to the invisible hand what we can expect is that far from going away, the problem of illiteracy will just grow and with it crime and other social ills.
Third, people are selfish jerks--inside and outside of government. The money keeps being controlled by selfish interests such as careers and profit. But this would just be far far worse if it were all privitized. I have seen it from the inside and private companies really
are motivated and willing to give out grades and diplomas based on pressure from those who are paying top dollar. But in this case there is no public oversight so they can manipulate the system more easily from behind the private curtain. Even the "standard tests" would be profit driven and such would be bought and sold and manipulated in ways to benefit the highest bidder in sneaky backroom deals.
The private sector is not honestly going to take care of education any more than they have been willing to unilaterally pay attention to pollution and clean water. All the market players need these days is to
create an appearance while positioning themselves for a convenient legal escape when the next bubble they create pops. This is slash and burn capitalism. Who can doubt it? It happens everyday and is the new(?) culture in business.
So YES, Tax the rich-especially guys like Trump who offer nothing of lasting value to mankind. Then spend it on education with programs that really have the kids in mind rather than proprietary educational products companies or the careers of administrators and politicians.
We need a better more transparent government disentangled from big money and more responsive to empirical science. Smaller is not always better, especially in a complex society such as ours where billions of dollars are transfered every second according to the unconscious direction of mindless algorthms and where powerful multinational banks (too big to fail) write their own rules. The latter sort of mischief is far more threatening than terrorists with planes. More than tanks and battleships, we need a government with abstract tanks and abstract battleships that have the power and moral will to actually regulate those economic bubble making dicks who have managed to put themselves in defacto control of public policy and convince large portions of the population that they are merely benign overtaxed "job creators" rather than modern Gengis Khans who often avoid being taxed altogether.
by the way, publically funded educational programs can and actually have had measurable positive effects. I am involved in one right now that is both publically and privately funded and we are keeping very good statistics with a large sample size. Results are quite good. I didn't expect it frankly but there it is.