Education spending

The self-interested claims of educators and their unions aside, does anybody still believe that the problem with education in the US is that we don't spend enough money on it? Or that spending even more would produce improvement?

How about introducing voucher systems that allow kids to get out of perennially-failing schools? The teachers unions will have none of that idea, thanks anyway. President Hope&Change presided over the destruction of just such a system, a small and very successful one in DC, in a deep kow-tow to the demands of the local teachers union. The reformist head of the DC school system has also been forced out. Back to business as usual, a massively expensive school system, hugely overloaded with highly-paid entrenched administrative staff, a system that is a nuclear waste dump of abject, perennial failure. Nice going, Obama, you pathetic fraud.

Byron

Fleeced

Fleeced: The upper 1% earned 19.6% of total income before tax, and paid 41% of the individual federal income tax. "No other major country is so dependent on so few taxpayers"

The "Progressive" politics of resentment, hatred, envy, and revenge (i.e., "Hope and Change") is destroying the United States. It's a case of self-destruction that's unparalleled in human history, and it's occurring at the hands of a redistributionist, "getting even" ideology that has never brought anything but misery, anywhere, ever. The damage being done to our always-fragile social contract was masked by sustained high economic growth and expanding opportunity. But now we begin to see. Cities and counties are broke, states are broke, Washington is broke, this generation is broke, and the next generation, also, crushed with debt. The fight over the scraps has barely begun. I think we really haven't seen anything yet, haven't begun to imagine the kind of cascade that's possible from here.

Byron

Simply amazing

Feel like getting your blood up on a cold day? Well, here you go:

'Don't ask, don't tell' has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn't be on campus.

There are already over 700 comments to this article, many of them extremely good. Of course, this is just what narcissist Colman McCarthy wants; he's always been like a little kid who says outrageous things to get as much attention from the adults as possible.

Two of my favorite quotes appear among the comments:

George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

Thucydides: "The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."

Smells like victory

Harry Reid pulls $1.1 trillion spending bill from floor
The Appropriators Buckle
Brave Sir Harry Ran Away

The Pomeroy Amendment in the House that would have increased estate tax rates has also failed.

Game over. Democrat attempts to undo the results of the recent election have come to nothing.

The Tea Party movement is now a major force in US politics. My prediction is that the major fights going forward will be between the Tea Party people and the public employee unions on the spending front, and between the Tea Party people and unelected government bureaucrats/regulators on the power front. There will be blood. I like the Tea Party's eventual chances in those fights, both of which will be very, very tough.

Byron

Hope and Change

$511 billion to build 245 reactors: China leading the way to the future. They also now have the world's fastest bullet train and the world's fastest computer.

Meanwhile, sadly, the US slips ever backwards as Obysmal and his moronic minions in Congress find new ways to throw our money away, to multiply our crippling debt, and to discourage wealth creation in the future.

The Obama administration is the same predictable disaster that leftist politics always creates if it achieves power. But I have to admit that this is much worse than I imagined it could be in such a short time. To achieve the record of this administration, you have to do essentially nothing right. And as Obama's drilling moratorium demonstrates, his assault on common sense, the laws of economics, and the United States is not finished yet.

Byron