Some notes regarding some of the hot button issues in our 24/7 media stream
1) Deficit is about the war
The debate over the national debt is interesting (from an innovation p.o.v.) for various reasons.
If one stands back from the issue, to get a big picture, one of the major causes is obvious - it's our war on terrorism.
This became obvious, to me, when I looked at a couple of charts: Tea Party Briefing
The thing is not just the cost of the war, but that military spending no longer spurs economic growth.
Military spending during WWII is routinely credited with bringing this country out of the depression. Yet our forays into the middle east have acted like a vacuum cleaner on our economy.
If we would have taken a more defensive posture, by taking greater security measures in the U.S. the costs would have probably been lessened by the benefits of keeping the expenditures in country.
2) School system works
After browsing an Atlantic article ( World's Schoolmaster ) it occurred to me that the education system in the U.S. works just fine. The only proviso being that it be a fully funded education.
This is complicated because the cost issue seems to involve more than how much money is spent per student in any given district, since rich communities have greater resources (and real life experience with higher education) with which to assist in the education of their children. Whereas poorer communities need to find this support system through some other means because the community doesn't have the same resources. So it's difficult to calculate proper funding since the need in poorer communities involves more than education funding. It also requires the support of auxillery community support systems.
But it does seem that when there is proper funding, and community support, our education system is as good as any in the world. I'm almost positive that if one could quantify the amount of school funding and the affluence of community then compared this with test scores it would show a definite correlation.
