You know who’s not laying off anyone? The military. Local funding of schools is ridiculous. Education benefits the whole nation. Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions.
Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense?
Education is funded largely by local taxes, and local tax revenues are being gutted, so there isn't much that can be done here without nationalizing public education.
The US's definition of National Defense is actually playing world police for corporate profit. With that in mind it shows that they are superficially similar only.
Gerry was pretty well spot on, it seems... The argument against an oversized standing army goes back to the founders in the US.
U.S. has been involved in quite a number of wars in the last century. Always as an aggressor, never as a defendant.
Let's not entertain the fantasy that a military budget of $732 billion, the size of 10 next biggest budgets combined, exists to defend US soil from invasion.
Obviously not in its entirety, but it's also worth recognizing that the world is a different place in 2020 than it was in 1940 and that no country - the United States or otherwise - can afford to purchase a national defense at the last minute. Once you realize you need one, it's already too late.
And the lead time for ICBMs to kill ~ a billion people has been ~40 minutes for the past 40 years.
The Russian equivalent is called the CRRF, and has a similar force mix for obvious reasons.
Look at the massive logistics effort that was necessary to invade and occupy Iraq, a country one-tenth the size of the US, where half the opposition deserted before a shot was fired, half of the rest deserted after the first shots were fired, and where half of its neighbours have US or NATO military bases in them.
No other country in the world is capable of doing this across an ocean.
1 - Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
2 - Even if that were true, American allies are frequently not across oceans from Russia/China/Iran/North Korea.
Are you suggesting that the United States should back out of NATO? Tell Japan and South Korea we don't like our treaty obligations and to fend for themselves?
This is a semantic game. Sure "national defense" is important, but the US military is not primarily a tool of national defense, it's a tool of global empire building and management.
Most of what the US could ever plausibly need for actual defense is sitting in nuclear missile silos and submarines.
And of course, you don’t want parity with your enemy. You want an overwhelming advantage.
The rest of its military budget is largely spent on its imperial ambitions.
War is and always will be asymmetric. Our military isn't expensive because we need it to be, it is expensive because it is an invasion and occupying force.
Those who don't like this can still send their kids to private schools.
Germany uses a decentralized system where the federal government and state government allocate budget to schools with some small additional contributions by local districts. Apparently 80% of the budget is spent on salaries. In 2016 the total education spending was 7100 Euros per student per year. This system seems to work quite well.
P.S.: I was a fool for not taking advantage of free university in Germany.
This is not dissimilar to how the system works in the US. Here is the spending for my state: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-...
Depending on the county, 20-60% of the funding comes from federal and state levels, with lower income areas receiving more support from the federal and state government. Also, the spending in Baltimore, a very low income city where there was riots a few years ago after a police brutality incident, is double the 7,100 euros you mention above.
I feel like i have read hundreds of cases from all across the country confirming what i experience personally.
Groups of naughty little assholes from early childhood to puberty, terrorizing and vandalizing anyone and everything.
Not all of them, but many.
This may look like I'd favor the AFD, or something similar. But I don't.
Just watching and noticing the change in general, confirmed by the few people i personally interact with, in part heavily sobered up by what they experienced when engaging into voluntary support work for them, the feeling of entitlement some had, the rage when confronted with the not so rosy reality, and so on.
(When we talk about “systemic racism” in this country, that’s what it means. It means that, even in blue states that are willing to provide ample funding to majority-minority schools, white and Asian parents would rather spend hundreds of thousands more on housing to avoid sending their kids to those well funded schools.)
I don't live in the district I teach in, but I've already said that if I'm still teaching there (a big if) and have kids (another big if), I won't send them there if they're academically inclined. The school is routinely trying to gut AP classes in favor of "dual credit" (which is a joke) and they're removing normal accelerated classes for increased 'rigor' in others; which doesn't happen, as you get accelerated kids mixed in with kids in a collaborative class because the guidance doesn't care enough to separate them, and then we're also forced to cater to the lowest common denominator by administration as well... And "differentiated learning" just basically becomes "Oh, you're smart, here's another worksheet". It's, sadly, becoming a race to the bottom, and it's something the more wealthy schools in the area I live at wouldn't have.
It's not the schools they are looking for, it's neighborhoods where the proportion of families that have parents who are well educated and higher earning, in order to put their kids in an environment with a higher proportion of kids who have more resourceful parents. Any school with motivated kids with stable home environments will be "good schools". And since schools draw their pool of students from the neighborhood, it eventually turns into a system where parents will cluster together by income, as income determines how much of a mortgage you can afford.
California is one of them: the state ensures each school district is funded based on enrollment, with some correction for poverty and English learners.
Oregon is another state where schools are largely state funded.
Hawaii has one school district for the whole state.
Illinois and a few other states have a robin-hood like system where money is redistributed to poorer districts to meet a set baseline.
District finances are typically open and searchable, i am sure you can find out exactly how much the state pays and how San Francisco’s per pupil funding compares to other districts in California.
Where do you draw the line with local parents fundraising to ensure schools in richer areas are always ahead in terms of opportunities?
Local education can prepare areas differently. Some states/areas like Texas would benefit from Spanish as a language course others like Hawaii might be better served with Japanese. Gym in Alaska must be different compared to Florida.
Nevermind the private schools. You have other school systems like the Amish, Native education or faith based or even home schooled.
Uniform models work better in smaller less diverse countries.
Local fundraising, usually for arts and music, do very little for “getting ahead”.
Private schools operate by mostly weeding out the disruptive/ low performing kids and selecting self motivated students with supportive parents. They don’t usually have amazing teachers that “work magic”.
I’ve lived in some very poor areas in my life as both a child and adult. By far the #1 influencing factor is the education of the parents.
There are countries that try to ban inequality and the only thing that happens is things go underground and get more unequal.
That said, even if things aren’t all the same, there is no excuse for the bottom to be so low. A variety of terrible policies ranging from finances to letting disruptive kids have their way ruin what could be a much better experience.
You mean something like Common Core? We have that.
For example, the FCC, the FDA, the FAA—these powers aren't in the constitution and I'm not saying that because there weren't cell phones or airplanes in 1789.
All three regulate different aspects of interstate commerce.
> national defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
I'm not as against military spending as some people, but almost 800 billion dollars is too much
One of my favorite parts about Apollo and Kennedys involvement specifically is the very deliberate choice to make it a civil program. The question wasn't if we needed to put effort into demonstrating superiority in space or not. The question was to do it as a military or civil program.
Point is, a country can accomplish a lot of the same things in different ways just by varying to which government agency we give resources.
I would rather go to space on a peaceful, multi country mission, not on a military weapon. I also would rather give our public resources to first responders, medical workers, emts, fire fighters and other civil servants than to our military. We reap what we sow.
Edited - typo
It almost definitely has nefarious abilities, but it's main purpose is probably materials science they can't test on the ISS (military gear)
However, reducing the number of pilots/planes mean fewer training missions and reducing the military headcount reduces the need for recruitment.
I'm not a fan of constant military displays at sporting events, but the argument is usually shut down very quickly as required flight-time and as recruitment. I was trying to turn that into a more productive direction.
As a percentage of GDP, we spend less on defense than France did in 1994, and half of what France spent in 1960.
Or a fraction of the capability..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-water_navy#Classification...
it's 10X bigger than it needs to be. spend the other $900B on infrastructure of all sorts, including healthcare and emergency readiness. the new, new deal.
I took that to be the point they were making.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/army-says-no-to-more-tanks-...
If anything, we want government spending to be inversely correlated with economic conditions, so it should go up during economic downturns.
It is apples to oranges. The argument should be who should employ and fund teachers and if the States are willing to give up some control and taxation to the feds in exchange for ???
I'm not so sure this is true - or at least it's not true in practice. Look at "Obamacare" - the lever it used to control state medical regulations was federal medical funding, and that's not an uncommon situation. Federal highway funds are also a pretty well-known case of funding providing control.
IMO even if there was a "fund all the schools with no control" bill passed and signed this year, in ten years (when everyone is dependant on federal school funding) that "no control" provision would be looking pretty doomed.
Well, we're boned.
For that matter, "funding" is also "control" - do you think many states or cities are going to be eager to hand over their curriculae to the federal government?
I can think of a few examples of national control and national funding, or local control and local funding, but not national funding without national control. What are you thinking of?
I would not bet about it. Military robots are in the way. Even if the budget is increased, machines eventually will replace a lot of the current people.
Ye olde new deal...
Oorah!
edit: notice to self: need to rewatch Starship Troopers