You dig up those old dusty textbooks I had when I was a kid and give them one of those teachers I had in the old public school and they will do just fine. I agree when it comes to the military I am probably over insured. Both textbooks and fighter planes are becoming obsolete. Spending more on one and less on the other is just moving a problem from here to there. We have major problems in how education money and military money is spent, not how much money is spent. Money is not the answer to everything.
Indeed, how do you solve spending inefficiencies in markets without competition? I'd say it takes money to even figure out how to more efficiently spend money. Consulting, auditing, ugh.
Giving more money to the government will not teach them how to spend it more efficiently. It's possible giving them less money will force them to become educated in spending efficiently. There is nothing wrong with the old math textbooks. They worked for me, nothing has changed. It's still the same old math. My teachers were not well paid compared to what they could have made if money was the sole motivation, but had a good life if they had a working husband since back then most woman were stay at home moms. There is little hope of our current school system upgrading anything because by the time they upgrade it it is already obsolete. Before I spend another dollar on education I want to follow that dollar from my checking account all the way to the student. I hear stories of administrators making outrageous salaries and who knows how much is just lost in the cracks. I'm already paying the auditor, I don't need to pay him more to find out where the money is going. If he doesn't know, he is useless to me and should be eliminated. And let's be real, the problem with public education is limited to a few areas and not widespread over the entire country. Many public schools are doing just fine with the money they have and need no more and more will not produce better results. Now they are trying to achieve the results they use to have when they had less money per student.
This premise is interesting; isn't it the opposite ideology that convinces us we should tax businesses less, as opposed to telling them to simply become more efficient? Obviously the lack thereof of competition is a big factor, but it's something to note. There's no telling where lack of funding will be absorbed, but I'm willing to bet it's the quality of education and not any paychecks. Fundamentally, what is a novel way to incentivize education? Merely passing a standardized test is perhaps some aspect, but that doesn't solve what happens when a school falls beneath a threshold and they can't just build another school and tell everybody to move constantly.
Per student spending on inner city pubic schools is already at the level of private schools, much higher than religious private schools, higher than average non city schools. School populations are a declining demographic in most places, inner city population is driven by immigration, most places will get smaller classes whether they want them or not.
I never wrote that a strong dollar would boost U.S. equity prices; I am sorry if thought I implied that, I did not mean to. I think the strong dollar will have a negative impact on U.S. equity prices. Gold and Oil are fungible commodities and reflect price changes immediately, both have characteristics of 'money', and oil itself is, or is a proxy for, a factor of production for all other goods,so its price should not be used to measure relative price elasticity with washing machines. Clearly a washing machine is less commoditized than steel, chips, plastic, wires it is made from, as it is more commoditized than say, jet engines.
The customer already told them they were inefficient. Why is it you big government guys never look at yourself when it comes to cutting and instead try to come up with a new way to spend new money to accomplish what cutting your regulations and taxes would accomplish. Everything you ever mention has already been tried. It's like fashion. Hang on to it long enough and it will be in fashion again. It's a dismal science, but nothing you say convinces me I should just give it a try with my money.
If the competition told them they were inefficient in any other industry, it's easy enough for the customer to go and get another product. The education industry is not like that; not everybody has the privilege or options of being able to relocate themselves and their children. While I'd entertain the idea of a system from scratch with more choice or vouchers (I'm still reading up on it), we aren't starting from scratch; are we supposed to just tell everybody who's in a failing public school, "Sorry, this one's a mulligan. You're just gonna have to be the collateral damage while we gut the system you ended up in." Also, another problem is teacher's unions; want to downsize or fire a bad teacher? It's too difficult, even if a school wants to! I'm still reading up on contradictory things on this as well; MA has one of the best public systems as well as a strong union. It's fine if you don't think more money is needed, I'm not entirely sold on it, either. But what I cannot understand is how you think defunding a given public school would improve the quality of the education instead of making it worse.
You already have two generations of collateral damage in the inner city; if you don't act immediately you will lose another. Choice, vouchers and charter schools is an attempt to save as many inner city kids as possible, and you are worried about a mulligan! A mulligan is a do over, these kids don't get a do over, they are already the collateral damage of a secular progressive ideology that has obviously failed but is, nonetheless, sustained by force, and movement organizing. It was a profound injustice, hypocrisy, for President Obama to pull the plug on the DC charter schools and then send his daughters to the elite Sidwell Friends school in the suburb, he pulled the rug on the future of thousands of poor city kids.