Americans Don’t Believe in the Own Future

Or, it seems, their own children. We have absolutely no will to invest in our future if the budget cutting idiots in Washington are communicating their priorities to us properly. Military spending is number one. I guess because our armed forces have succeeded in achieving our goals with such regularity since WWII… NOT! Almost nothing to show for the big spend! But education is getting slammed from every quarter, particularly the once virtually free state college educations we promised the last few generations of American youth.

Instead, we increase tuition at vast multiples of the cost of living increases, make students and their families incur loans at levels never required by any preceding generation … with little real chance of find a job to pay such loans back and which can linger for decades now… and watch as student protests grow by the day. Still, we will not support our children. They didn’t ask to be dropped into this economic mess! We handed this abomination of an economy to them, but we have the temerity to make them pay for our mistakes.

What’s worse, we are making sure that we will not remotely have a competitive work force to be able to afford even half the military budget we have today, because we simply will not fund even the earliest years of public learning to give our children a chance… unless of course, they are the scions of the mega-rich families able to afford the $20-40,000 a year charged by the better private schools in tuition alone. Think we are overfunding our primary and secondary schools? Want to compare our spend with that of another western nation, like Norway? Norwegians like to eat canned sardines; we prefer to pack our students into classrooms that make them look like sardines! WolframAlpha presents the analysis of such expenditures in a way that sticks in your mind:

Note the year that these numbers came out? 2008! The big budget cuts came after that! Do you care about this country’s future? Does it bother you that our children are being short-changed in the global labor marketplace? Do you think it’s outrageous that we spend a multiple of our per student allocation (3 times on average) to house convicted felons? That the dropout rate in inner city schools in major cities is over 50%? That a whole pile of these dropouts will be costing us a whole lot more when they wend their way through the criminal justice system? That some school districts are applauding the dropout rate because it cuts the current school budget? And if you do care, exactly what have you done about it?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I write about it and spread the word that this just isn’t good enough to be the USA I have loved my entire life!