Kicking the Can Down the Road, Cutting Taxes for the Rich, Borrowing Along the Way

Kicking the Can Down the Road, Cutting Taxes for the Rich, Borrowing Along the Way

Using Educational Quality as a Metric: We Have Totally Unraveled What Used to Be the Best

The future for growth and success in America did not used to be determined by your status at birth. While Europe was filled with hereditary titles of nobility, truly “old money,” military and educational institutions of higher learning populated by the scions from the highest reaches of society, the United States didn’t start out that way. The Continent was rife with barriers, religious discrimination, clearly defined class structures where opportunity was often limited by your generic pedigree. The “New World,” populated by indigenous peoples unable to resist Western diseases and military supremacy, offered what to Western migrants appeared to be a blank slate, filled with natural resources and that currently evaporating intangible: hope. Upward mobility if you worked hard enough.

Maybe the political pundits missed it of late, but hope was in short supply, upward mobility had been relegated to the history books and the schism between the monied classes and everyone else had become a canyon wider than the Grand Canyon itself. Knowing that blame fomented class warfare and populist revolutions, those with unlimited finances using the uncapping of using vast wealth to spread a tsunami of publicly spewed propaganda (via the infamous 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United vs FEC), recreating the perception of America. Although they were the obvious culprits in tilting the playing field severely in their favor, those with money were quick to redirect the blame towards religious, racial ethnic and academic constituencies. Not themselves.

Eschewing traditional but inconvenient economic principles, those at the top of the success ladder rejected the notion that a nation at war must make sacrifices (“guns or butter”). The military industrial complex (Eisenhower had warned us of this greedy powerhouse) touted the possibility of “guns and butter” to support the Vietnam War and the later wars we mounted in Central Asia and the Middle East. Government could cut their taxes while accelerating the necessary military expenditures. The mythology of supply side economics (also “trickle down” theory) told us that the rich were the “job creators” who would “float all boats.” It was never true, but instead of austerity which needed to be imposed most on the richest in the land, tax cuts passed… and those jobs never arrived.

Federal deficits soared, state coffers were sucked dry, and the necessary belt-tightening was relegated to the vast bulk of the nation… sparing those at the top with special tax benefits and rules, statutes that made playing in the world of mergers and acquisitions the greatest redistributor of wealth in US history. At a state level, that belt-tightening led to cutbacks in support for medical health and, most of all, public education. Averages for public primary and secondary educational performance began to plunge in this country when compared to other developed nations. States couldn’t handle deficits – they did not control money supply; the feds did – and simply cut school funding and, for higher education, shifted the cost burden for tuition from the state and the individual educational institutions and to students and their families. Over the last 50 years, tuition has risen at triple the inflation rate… and student loans now exceed our entire credit card debt.

But metrics can also be somewhat misleading, as Taija PerryCook, writing for the November 16th Snopes tells us: “For example, U.S. News ranked the U.S. as first in its widely-cited 2024 Best Countries report, which reportedly surveyed the views of ‘close to 17,000 global citizens.’… On the other hand, a report by WorldTop20 — a project associated with New Jersey Minority Educational Development, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group cited by the World Population Review (visible upon clicking the U.S. on the world map at this link ) — found that, in 2024, the U.S. ranked 31st worldwide in education.

“Other studies offer a more-detailed assessment broken down by subject and parameter and compared to other countries of similar wealth, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries. For example, according to the average scores of 15-year-olds from 37 member countries in 2022, the U.S. ranked above average in science and below average in mathematics.”

But the OECD used standardized testing to generate more reliable numbers: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy, that was initiated in 2000 to measure comparative educational performance across many comparable (and mostly developed) nations. “In the 2024 OECD findings , the U.S. ranked 20th out of 41 countries in education overall. In 2015, results from the Programme for International Student Assessment — which tests 15-year-olds across dozens of countries every three years — placed the U.S. 38th out of 71 countries in mathematics and 24th in science.” Snopes.

You can look at those numbers, tracking “averages” to measure our relative educational performance, but when you are supposed to be on the cutting edge of scientific and engineering invention and entrepreneurial success, adhering slightly above or below “average” doesn’t cut it. So instead of rekindling upward mobility and making American great again, current political vectors embrace a conservative push to eliminate the US Department of Education and press for a new austerity to justify another round of tax cuts for the rich. In my mind’s eye, our educational standards for the most accessible level of education continue to fall. But did we really start out as first about 50 years ago?

“There was also no indication that the U.S. ranked first globally in education in 1979, which could be in part because international ranking was rudimentary at the time. However, one 1992 report published by The National Center for Education Statistics ( part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences) found that, after administering science and math tests to 10-, 13- and 14-year-olds from the 1960s through 1988 across six to 18 countries (depending on the subject and grade level), the evidence suggested, in general, that: Students from the United States have fared quite poorly on these assessments, with [their] scores lagging behind those of students from other developed countries. This finding is based largely on analyses of mean achievement scores and related rankings of countries participating in each survey.” Funny how those years were also filled with efforts to fund wars while cutting taxes.

The politics of blame, kicking the can down the road while letting essential governmental obligations to infrastructure, healthcare and education deteriorate with outdated necessities and lower per student expenditures (corrected for inflation) … but we choose to cut taxes for the rich… where the only results are a dilution in the quality of life, higher deficits and barriers to upward mobility reinforced with bias and blame.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you really want to make America great again, stopping cutting taxes for the rich, and invest in infrastructure, healthcare and that once expected path to upward mobility, EDUCATION.