Wednesday, January 28, 2009

If only we had kept the extremist right in power...

...we might eventually have achieved our goal of becoming a third world country.

From the New York Times today:

Frederick Hess, an education policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized the bill as failing to include mechanisms to encourage districts to bring school budgets in line with property tax revenues, which have plunged with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

"It's like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close, and the solution is to open the bar for another hour," Mr. Hess said.

Yes, spending on education is like spending on alcohol. If only we weren't so addicted to education we might be a dirt poor third world country today.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I gotta say, education is one of the few areas in which I believe the government should spend money. But I don't believe in big government spending primarily because the money is controlled by a group of selfish politicians. We know that the government doesn't create wealth -- it only spends the wealth created by private industry. Every job created by government is a job not created in private industry. Imagine if everyone had government jobs -- then no wealth would ever be created!

said...

20% of the U. S. of A. 'twas & 'tis a third world country.

Anonymous said...

to Anonymous ~ the biggest problem with the constant calls for "smaller government" imo is the frequent inefficiency of the contractors.