The Wrong family is at its annual temporary winter headquarters in Florida, enjoying this view. Blogging will be intermittent until March 12th, when we will be back in residence at the Mansion of Wrong. 2015 photo by Wrongo.
A few cartoons. When will the GOP start complaining, saying âArmed union thugs are patrolling our schoolsâ:
Trump refines his role:
US Cyber Command chief Adm. Mike Rogers said Trump hasnât granted him the authority to disrupt increased cyber threats. Trump, no longer jumping to the rescue. Heâs just the security monitor:
Well, two things Wrongo never thought would happen: Revived student activism, and the US winning an Olympic gold medal in Curling! Wrongo cares deeply about the former, but not so much about the latter.
The week was dominated by the continued fall-out from the Parkland shooting. The gun debate produced a rich harvest of appropriate cartoons, like showing how the NRA would re-write the Second Amendment:
The gun debate points out some GOP inconsistencies:
McConnell and Ryan try reframing the issue:
LaPierre has a message for Mitch:
NRA says only one Amendment really matters:
Trump says we should arm teachers and pay them bonuses for carrying. Think of the consequences:
Where teachers packing heat will lead:
And how would kids react to guns in the classroom?
Redwood logging, Humboldt County CA â 1915 Photo by AW Ericson, hat tip Eric Loomis
Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. What we love is nostalgia –Regie Gibson
Can we survive a mal-educated population? The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) just released a study called âTeaching Hard History, American Slaveryâ that indicts our high school education system, at least as it relates to teaching about the Civil War and slavery. Here are their most damning conclusions:
Only 8% of high school seniors surveyed identified slavery as the central cause of the Civil War
Almost half identified tax protests as the main cause
68% didnât know that it took a Constitutional amendment to formally end slavery
Tax protests? Possibly, the kids who thought slavery had to do with “taxation” are conflating the Civil War with the Revolutionary War.
We teach vignettes, not context. We talk about individuals and concepts like the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, or abolitionists. There is little discussion about how slaves were the most important element of net worth in the south, or how hard southern landowners fought to protect that source of value.
The SPLC says that teaching lessons rarely connect slavery to white supremacy, the ideology that grew up to sustain and protect it. They point out that the American ideology of white supremacy, along with accompanying racist dogma, developed precisely to justify the perpetuation of slavery. The report concludes:
If we donât get the early history of our country right, we are unlikely to be equipped to do the heavy lifting necessary to bridge racial divides now and in the future…
Most towns probably devote an hour a day to history class in high school. If a class year is 180 days, which means kids have 1,000 hours of history a year, at least for high school. That totals to 4000 hours, plenty of time to truly teach American history, regardless of protests about teaching to the test or Common Core.
We can surely do a better job, or we face the consequence that our future is in the hands of Trumpâs âpoorly educatedâ, most likely, an easily swayed group of voters.
Welcome to the weekend. By now you, like Wrongo, know what is in the Nunes Memo. The NYT denounced the Memo in advance, but with the caveat that:
None of this is to say the FBI and the rest of the federal law enforcement apparatus should be immune from criticism or reform.
Nope, not when back in the day, the FBI was run by a cross-dressing maniac addicted to blackmail.
Anyway, to get distance from the world, Wrongo is making chili today. That way it can rest overnight before we eat it during the Super Bowl. What are you having?
To help you read The Memo, get in your most comfortable chair and drink a fresh-brewed vente cup of Kicking Horse Coffee. You can choose between âSmart Assâ blend or, their âKick Assâ blend. Wrongo suggests Smart Ass, only $11.99 for 10 oz at Amazon.
BTW, they sell âHalf Assâ, but no âBad Assâ or âDumb Assâ brands. Why?
To help you relax and forget DC, Dumb Ass Democrats, and Trump for a while, settle back and listen to the West Ocean String Quartet perform the old Irish melody âThe Lark in Clear Airâ. This is one of many versions, some include lyrics from a poem by Belfastâs Sir Samuel Ferguson. The tune is from a folk song called âKathleen Nowlanâ or, alternatively, âThe Tailorâs Sonâ from the early 19th Century:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
On Friday, an ESPN program, âOutside the Linesâ made public a 3-year investigation into Michigan State Universityâs (MSUâs) inaction on claims of sexual harassment in its athletic department. Here is the takeaway: (emphasis by Wrongo)
…an Outside the Lines investigation has found a pattern of widespread denial, inaction and information suppression of such allegations by officials ranging from campus police to the Spartan athletic department, whose top leader, Mark Hollis, announced his retirement on Friday. The actions go well beyond the highly publicized case of former MSU athletic physician Larry Nassar.
It is unclear where the investigation into MSU will lead. The state of Michigan, the NCAA and the US Department of Education are now all interested in what appears to have been a systematic effort to cover up sexual abuse by athletes at MSU. Larry Nassar has gone to jail for life. Note that he was a faculty member in MSUâs athletic department. The university president and the athletic director have already resigned.
Protecting the MSU brand was more important than justice for the women who suffered at the hands of Nassar, or the schoolâs football and basketball teams. It is more than a culture of indifference; it was systematic obstruction of justice designed to let the players play and keep the stink of scandal away from the athletic department. This case seems to be far worse than what occurred at Penn State.
The Universityâs Board of Trustees resisted calls for their Presidentâs ouster until public pressure became too overwhelming. The Board is dominated by former MSU football and basketball players. Four of the Boardâs eight members are in this category. Others at MSU must go, possibly including one of Wrongoâs favorite coaches, Tom Izzo, head coach of the basketball team. But is firing a head coach enough? How many have to go?
How do we cauterize the wound that is sexual harassment in Americaâs universities?
Time now to bring to justice all those who enabled a monster. He didn’t abuse those women in a vacuum. Many more should be behind bars:
Add Michigan State to the abusers who shout the mantra:
USA Gymnastics gets a perfect 10 on their routine:
Trumpâs $25 billion opening ask for the Wall shows who really is dreaming:
The GOPâs plan is to undermine Mueller and the FBI:
Few things are harder to understand than Evangelicals minimizing Trumpâs dalliances:
The WSJâs Weekend Edition had an article about the cultural and economic split between small towns and big towns in America. In âOne Nation, Divisibleâ, Michael Phillips follows a young woman, Caity Cronkhite, who left rural Indiana for San Francisco. Caity recalls:
All growing up, if we were too smart or too successful or too anything, there was always someone ready to say, âDonât be so proud of yourselfâ…
Caity was smart. She bucked the system to graduate from high school a year early, but the school would not let her be named valedictorian, because she had skipped a grade. She left town, got a scholarship to Carnegie-Mellon, graduated and became a technical writer for SalesForce.com.
Still, she remained attached to her home town. She wrote an online 5000+ word essay about Kingman IN. It brought thousands of hateful responses from Kingman, including:
So keep your elitistsâ rear ends in your little office cubicles while we handle the tough, physical things that keep you and your perfect friends alive…
That anger about town vs. city brought to mind Merle Haggardâs 1969 tune, âOkie from Muskogeeâ. Haggard and the band were on a bus outside of Muskogee when a band member joked that the citizens in Muskogee probably didn’t smoke marijuana. In about 20 minutes, Haggard had the song. The band played it the next night at the Fort Bragg, NC officers club. And after the verse:
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,
We like living right and being free.
The officers stood and gave huge applause. They had to play the song four times to get offstage. The song later went to number one on the Billboard country music charts. At the time, Reuters reported: (emphasis by Wrongo)
Haggard has tapped, perhaps for the first time in popular music, into a vast reservoir of resentment against the long-haired young and their underground society.
So in 2017, a young woman worries about being accepted in her small home town after finding success while living in San Francisco. While 48 years earlier, âOkieâ was telling small town America to have pride, and that it was ok to be for the Vietnam War, and against student protesters.
These two events made Wrongo think about the roots of todayâs fractious sociopolitical divide in America.
People in small towns have to fit in, the place is too small to look different, or subscribe to ideas that are outside the main stream in their townâs culture. If they do, the local hierarchy has ways of enforcing conformance with the dominant ethos. People insist that you should fit in. They think that everybody should fit in, and they donât understand why there are places in America that donât operate that way.
Haggardâs hit brought small-town America self-identification and pride. And it galvanized the âusâ vs. âthemâ attitudes in small-town USA that were opposed to the growing counter-culture of the 1960âs, and the student opposition to the Vietnam War.
Americans always gather into relatively small groups. People in cities have misconceptions about small town life, just like rural Americans have them about cities.
The nature of todayâs politics, and the nature of group identity in America pushes us into sparring camps. You can call it your âtribeâ, your âpeopleâ, or your âteamâ, but groups in small-town America have a well-defined sense of identity. It is different from the identity politics in big-city America, where there are hundreds of examples of people of many different groups. Large metropolitan areas are much more diverse, but they are also knitted together by a transcendent identity with place.
Ms. Cronkhiteâs parents planned on selling the farm and retiring, but Caity wasnât ready to let it all go:
If I ever have kids, theyâre never going to understand this huge part of me…I want there to be a reminder of where I come from and who I am.
Her parents sold her about 10 acres for the per-acre price her father had paid in 1972. Caity plans to build a small house. She said:
Iâm still a rural American.
But she doesnât plan on moving back just now. Fewer and fewer of us are rural Americans, and while those societies shrink, no dominant identity is replacing it.
But the sometimes-toxic sociology of small groups, or Merle Haggardâs sentiments, canât be allowed to destroy what America has in common. In fact, appropriation of culture and patriotism by one tribe is a threat to our common good. Thus when Haggard says:
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,
Heâs misappropriating, since every town has always flown Old Glory at the courthouse, and wouldnât dream of taking it down.
Time to wake up America! Fight the appropriation of our symbols and ideals. To help you wake up, here is Merle Haggard with âOkie from Muskogeeâ:
Big Ben being cleaned. In order to clean the four clock faces, every 5-7 years, skilled climbers hang down from the belfry on ropes, and they clean the front of each clock face. There is one removable panel of glass on each face, which is removed during the cleaning so that the clock maintenance staff can talk to the cleaners while theyâre working. (“you missed a spot?”) Hat tip to Wrongoâs friends at the Goodspeed Opera House!
Yesterday we pointed out that there is a very large program that the country needs to fund if we are to maintain our position in the global superpower competition. The issue at hand is the stunning thought that we might lose up to 75 million jobs to automation in the next 13 years, and that we need to train the out-of-work unfortunates for new jobs in a different economy.
Itâs highly unlikely that we would need to train that many, but it could be 25 million Americans. And we have no idea where the money would come from to accomplish that. After all, the Republicans now plan to reduce tax receipts bigly, thus adding to the deficit and thereby, to the total debt of the country.
We know that as soon as the new tax cuts begin accruing to their patrons, the GOP will start talking about reducing the budget deficit by cutting non-military expenses. Ron Brownstein conceives the Republican tax plan correctly:
Gaius Publius observes: (brackets and editing by the Wrongologist)
As they did in the 1980s, Republicans are laying a “deficit trap” for Democrats. As they did before, they’re blowing up the budget, then using deficit [fear] to force Democrats to “be responsible” about cutting social programs â “because deficits matter.”
In the 1980s Republicans ran up the deficit, then insisted that Democrats work with them to raise taxes on the middle class to over-fund the Social Security (SS) Trust Fund. This converted SS from a pay-as-you-go system that increased revenues as needed via adjustments to the salary cap, to a pay-in-advance system. That allowed any excess SS money to be loaned back to the government, partially concealing the large deficits that Reagan was running up.
Today, Republicans are expanding the deficit again, and are already starting to talk about deficits to argue for cuts in what they call “entitlements” â Medicare, Medicaid, and eventually Social Security, even though Social Security can be self-funding.
Fear of deficits is the go-to Republican ploy to try to maim or kill the FDR and LBJ-created social safety net. To the extent that Democrats are willing to accept the GOPâs argument that both parties need to be responsible to decrease the deficits, they will support cuts in social services. Even Obama was willing to consider doing just that in the name of âbipartisanshipâ. More from Gaius:
The reality â Deficits aren’t dangerous at all until there’s a big spike in inflation, which is nowhere near happening and won’t be near happening for a generation…
Do we want the US government to shrink the money supply year after year after year, by running budget surpluses, or do we want to grow the amount of money in the private sector, making more available for use by the middle class? The trillions spent on the current GOP giveaway to the already-rich could have been given to college students in debt, or people still underwater in their mortgages since the Wall Street-created crash of 2008. It could have been used to build better roads, airports, seaports or a national high speed internet backbone.
What would be the effect of that re-allocation of money?
Back to Gaius Publius for the final words. Which of these three options would you rather the government choose:
Spend money on the already-rich?
Spend money on you and the countryâs needs, ignoring the pleas of the already-rich?
Hoard as much money as possible in a vault and spend the least possible?
The first is the GOPâs current tax plan. The second is a plan for the many, an FDR-style economic policy. The third is the GOPâs wet dream, one that they will ask Democrats to help them accomplish once the already-rich have banked their share of our tax money.
Wrongoâs fear is that at some point down the road, a compromise will be offered up: Cuts to social programs in exchange for a repeal of some of the more onerous tax cuts. The only issue will be the extent of the cuts to social programs.
It will be celebrated as bipartisan sanity returning to Washington.
…less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”-an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56% of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85%.
The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. While websites showing sexual content such as www.tubev.sex are only becoming more popular, research appears to show that fewer young people are having sex of their own. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67% since its modern peak, in 1991. When they can see the hottest Scottish pornstars from their phones, can you blame them?
The article was written by Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. The article can be summarized as these teens are more comfortable online than out partying, but they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
More from Dr. Twenge:
Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture…has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school…In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents-a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
Quite a difference from Wrongo’s growing up in pre-boomer times. The idea of having your mom drive you to an event was as close to being humiliated in front of your friends as you ever wanted to be, so everyone got a driver’s license as soon as possible.
But today’s teens are less likely to leave the house to see friends. Twenge says that the shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
We have seen this kind of alienation in Japan, where these people are called hikikomori, a term the Japanese use to define those who haven’t left their homes or physically interacted with others for at least six months. Japan has virtual high schools for teens who can’t leave home. Virtual high school is a thing in the US as well.
Add smartphones and video games together, and you can slow or pause social development and engagement with the real world. The real trouble is in the separation of virtual from lived experience that becomes physical separation and alienation. They’re more likely to visit this website, rather than want to experience the act themselves. This creates a generation of socially awkward, dependent, soon-to-be adults who have had a lack of sexual experiences. It is true that they could look for escorts local to them on https://www.escortdirectory.com/escorts-zurich-241/ to give them experience of being with a woman, but the lack of social interaction will surely always hinder them.
No doubt there is a large group of teens who seem to live primarily through social media, some in Wrongo’s own family. Smartphones have made social media much more accessible, but are smartphones in and of themselves the causal factor? Hard to say. Wrongo has had a smart phone for a long time, still sees friends and family, and gets things done.
And the current crop of teens have the tools to be the best informed generation yet. OTOH, they have to be curious enough to perform in-depth search on those smartphones.
So, blaming the smartphone is using correlation to indicate causality.
In fact, this article may describe primarily an upper middle class phenomenon, not something that is society-wide. The kids being coddled are from families with enough money to do it. The intelligent ones among them are opportunistic harvesters of their parents’ resources, and perfectly capable of adaptation.
The genuinely alienated kids exist, but probably not in any larger numbers than the problem kids of earlier generations. But their problems manifest differently than in earlier generations.
If we believe our kids and grandkids are not prepared to face the reality of life, the fault lies with us, as it is our job to prepare them. The responsibility of any parent is to figure out how the world works, and to teach their children how to survive in it – this is true for all mammals.
BTW, today’s photo was shot by Wrongo’s grandson on his smartphone, on the way to his job, after his day at college.
Here is the Who doing “The Kids Are All Right” from their 1965 album, “My Generation“:
Rats Restaurant, NJ Grounds for Sculpture â 2017 photo by Wrongo
The politics of disruption brought us Donald Trump. With hindsight, the evidence was everywhere. Americans were unhappy with our political system. Voters had lost faith in the government and political parties. About 10% of voters believed Congress was doing a good job. Both political parties had favorability ratings of less than 40%.
In 2008, people were frustrated and angry. By November 2016, with continued economic discontent, worsening conflicts in the Middle East, and serious public policy issues left unattended, people voted for the guy who promised to break our politics.
Trump won 53% of the over-65 vote, but was supported by only 37% of 18-29-year-olds. He won the white vote by 58% to 37%. And 51% of American women voted for him.
Mark Leonard  says that the election was decided by pessimistic voters. They were attracted by Trumpâs anti-free trade arguments, his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his (false) statistics about increased crime, and the loss of American jobs to Asian countries.
Trump said all of this was caused by Washington and could be fixed by a disruptive billionaire. The pessimists won, and felt very hopeful that Trump would change America.
Are they having buyerâs remorse today? No, most say that they still support their guy.
Yesterday, we highlighted some findings of the Public Policy Polling (PPP) national poll taken after Charlottesville. PPP found that Donald Trump’s approval rating was steady despite all of his backtracking around the Charlottesville attack:
40% of voters approve of the job Trump is doing to 53% who disapprove, little change from the 41/55 spread we found for him in July.
This despite that just 26% of Trump voters think he has delivered on his promise to âdrain the swampâ, to 53% who say he hasn’t. When asked if Trump has come through on “Making America Great Again,” just 33% of his voters say he has, to 59% who say he hasn’t.
PPP found that 57% of Republicans want Trump to be the party’s nominee in 2020, compared to 29% who say they would prefer someone else. That 28 point margin for Trump against âsomeone elseâ is the same as his 28 point lead over Mike Pence. Both Ted Cruz, with a 40 point deficit to Trump at 62/22, and John Kasich, a 47 point deficit to Trump, are weaker potential opponents than ‘someone elseâ.
All in, Trump is keeping his base together, while losing a few moderate Republicans. So the question is, what will it take to make Trump a one-term president?
If you want to defeat Trump, focus on how his political disruption has only caused destruction. It isnât enough to tear shit down. Any president has to be a builder, and not just for a phony wall.
Have there been any gains from the disruption? Is there any evidence that Trump has the leadership skills to bring policies into law that will improve the lives of those who voted for him?
The winning message is about building: Build unity. Build the economy. Build a vision for a growing middle class.
Be a builder, not a disruptor.
Wake up America! Find a builder, or be a builder. To help you wake up, here is John Mayer with his 2006 Grammy-winning hit âWaiting On The World To Changeâ:
Takeaway Lyric:
It’s hard to beat the system
When we’re standing at a distance
So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
Now if we had the power To bring our neighbors home from war They would have never missed a Christmas No more ribbons on their door And when you trust your television What you get is what you got Cause when they own the information, oh They can bend it all they want.
Don’t wait to be a builder. Dr. King didn’t wait, neither did Mandela. They changed the world. WE have the power to change America.
Is it the best of times or the worst of times? This is no longer a partisan discussion. We have an economy in the midst of a long expansion, the third longest since 1850. The statistics say we are close to full employment. But, our mortality rate is moving in the wrong direction, and we have an opioid epidemic that is serious enough to cause jobs to go unfilled. The NYT reports that in Youngstown Ohio, middle class factory jobs go begging:
Itâs not that local workers lack the skills for these positions, many of which do not even require a high school diploma but pay $15 to $25 an hour and offer full benefits. Rather, the problem is that too many applicants â nearly half, in some cases â fail a drug test.
The Fedâs regular Beige Book surveys of economic activity across the country in April, May and July all noted the inability of employers to find workers able to pass drug screenings.
So the best of times? Probably not. Bloomberg reports that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) looked at the US economy. This is what they see:
For some time now there has been a general sense that household incomes are stagnating for a large share of the population, job opportunities are deteriorating, prospects for upward mobility are waning, and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy. This sense is generally borne out by economic data and when comparing the US with other advanced economies.
The IMF then goes on to compare the US with 23Â other advanced economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in this chart:
The chart is a bit of an eye test unless itâs viewed on a big monitor, but its overall point is that the US has been losing ground relative to its past OECD reports by several measures of living standards. 35 countries make up the OECD. The members include all of Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia, and several developing nations like Korea and Panama.
And in the areas where the US hasn’t lost ground (poverty rates, high school graduation rates), it was at or near the bottom of the heap to begin with. The clear message is that the US — the richest nation on Earth, as is frequently proclaimed, although it’s actually not the richest per capita — is increasingly becoming the developed world’s poor relation as far as the actual living standards of most of its population go.
This analysis is contained in the staff report of the IMF’s annual “consultation” with the U.S., which was published last week. The IMF economists havenât turned up anything shocking or new, it’s just that as outsiders, they have a different perspective than what we hear from our politicians and economists.
For example:
Income polarization is suppressing consumption…weighing on labor supply and reducing the ability of households to adapt to shocks. High levels of poverty are creating disparities in the education system, hampering human capital formation and eating into future productivity.
What is to be done? Well, the IMF report concludes:
Reforms should include building a more efficient tax system; establishing a more effective regulatory system; raising infrastructure spending; improving education and developing skills; strengthening healthcare coverage while containing costs; offering family-friendly benefits; maintaining a free, fair, and mutually beneficial trade and investment regime; and reforming the immigration and welfare systems.
In other words, they suggest substantial reform. Itâs doubtful that America can take care of these things anytime soon.
The subtext to most of their suggestions is that other affluent countries have found ways to improve in these areas, while the US has not. We donât have to look too far into the past to see when those countries were modeling their economies on ours. But today, on all sorts of issues, like taxation, labor markets, health care, and education, the opposite is now true.
Other wealthy countries have figured out how to raise revenue, provide quality education, help the the unemployed, reduce poverty, and keep their citizens healthier than America has.
We must catch up, or admit our time as the world’s indispensable economy is over.
Todayâs music (dis)honors the turmoil in the White House. See âya Mooch! Remember that in just six months, Trump has gone through two National Security Advisers, two Chiefs of Staff, two Communications Directors, two Press Secretaries, and two Directors of the FBI.
Here is âDisorder in the Houseâ by the late Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
How could America be so divided about the value of higher education? Education is becoming less about learning and more about doing, this day in age you can even pay to have someone else write an emergency essay for you. That’s not to say that education still isn’t as important today as it has been in previous years for giving everyone a chance to learn and get an education. You can’t get a higher education without first going to school and gaining qualifications from there, so if you’re looking for school education, you can click here to apply now.
Today, we look at another survey that offers insight into the economic views of Americans by educational level. The survey is by the global PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M), working with the survey firm, PSB, an affiliate of B-M. It shows that education level drives a big divide in Americans’ expectations for the future.
42% of Americans with a high school education or less say they have the right skills to succeed in the 21st century, while 71% with a college education or more, say they do.
Americans with high school or less education are 25% less likely to say they are optimistic about the future US economy than those with a college education or more. And they are 50% more likely to feel scared about the future of the US economy.
38% of Americans with a college education or more think the American economy is headed in the right direction compared to 30% of those with a high school education or less.
30% of Americans with a high school education or less say automation could replace their job within five years. Only 14% of those with a college education or more said a machine will do their job in the next five years.
Here is a slide from the B-M slide deck:
Only 13% of those with high school or less think that reading comprehension and critical thinking skills are important to future manufacturing jobs, a thought decidedly at odds with business leaders. 58% of business leaders say spending more on infrastructure is the public policy action that will most support job creation in the US. 31% with college or more agree, while just 15% of those with high school or less agree.
The Pew results tell us that if America is sharply divided about the value of higher education, there is little hope for our democracy. When we factor in the top line results for the B-M survey, we see that less educated Americans are fundamentally more pessimistic about their economic future.
So, higher education has little value, and yet, those without degrees are insecure about their current jobs and their economic future. More and more are looking into clep exam prep://www.instantcert.com/”>clep exam prep to find a way to get a degree that may suit them better because of this.
How does this compute for the GOP? They say that they want more economic growth, and more jobs for Americans. How does having an anti-education worldview support making America great again?
Why isn’t more/better education the top priority for both political parties?
And private, for-profit GOP educational alternatives shouldn’t be favored by anyone seriously interested in a better-educated society.
Today’s music: The Kinks did a concept album about education called “Schoolboys in Disgrace” in 1977. Here they are performing “Education” from the album:
Takeaway Lyric:
Everybody needs education
Open Universities, education
Every race every creed, education
And every little half-breed, education
Every nationality, education
All the little people need education
Eskimos and pygmies need
And even aborigines, education
