The mess we have is much deeper than the mortgage mess, or the war on terror, or the oil mess. America has become an institution of weaklings. Our political system is great but the people in it have corrupted it. Business is great but the people have corrupted it. To fix all of it we need to reboot the systems not revamp or overhaul them. Regulations don’t work and never will. Regulations are like locks they keep the honest people honest but the crooks will still be crooks. We need to strip away all regulations and laws and write new ones to incorporate the lessons learned along the way and get rid of the ones we know don’t work but because they are still laws we have to obey. When was the last time someone was arrested for the misuse of a buggy whip? The laws are still on the books.
Dump it all and start from scratch. The same with education. We waste so much money on things that don’t work that we don’t get to educate the children. If you can’t read you should not get promoted, if the children can’t read the teacher should be fired! If a congressman is corrupt the congressman should be arrested and jailed, we don’t need a new law we need to enforce the ones on the books.
Have you ever met with a kid that was home schooled? It is eye opening! They are easy to spot if you know what to look for, they are the kids that are in public, and act like human beings even when there is no adult around. Speak to a home schooled child and you will hear language you would not believe come out of their mouths. Things like, yes, sir, or yes, ma’am. They show maturity and judgment. Yes, they can act their age but they do so with respect and dignity. I don’t see that happening outside of private schools and home schools. The private school I went to cost $3,500 a year including room and board. 30 years later the price has not gone up much when you contrast that with public schools where in Washington DC they spend over 15k per student with free lunch, (not sure of the figure) and they can’t read past a third grade level. It is not that they don’t have enough money or the teachers are not paid enough it is because the teachers are not teaching. Public school teachers want the pay of a private school but in private school you are expected to get results. The children are expected to pass each and every grade with the knowledge of that grade level. That would mean the teachers would have to ensure that each and every student actually learned something. It is called work and most teachers don’t know or understand this word. You say work and they picture cashing their pay cheque.
The first part of the no child left behind was a competency test for the teachers. The teachers had to pass the same tests the students were required to pass for the grade level they taught. In the liberal cities you had a 40% failure rate. Teachers with degrees and tenure could not pass the tests they administered to their students. This requirement quickly got dumped. I am talking about the Boston public school system. If the teachers did not know how to pass the tests how do you expect them to teach the students.
This lack of knowledge has been passed down from teacher to student until all the kid knows is to vote democrat. Elect idiots that don’t know how the system works to make laws to run the system.
You want an informed electorate then we have to start with the basics. Elementary school, forget Mary has two mothers and concentrate on 2+2=4. Teach vocabulary words in English. The average baccalaureate has a 12th grade education, that’s right folks 16 years to get 12 years of schooling. Every child in school can be taught what they need to survive in this world in 12 years for 5k or less per student per year. In Japan for example the highest and most respected job is that of a teacher. This is because the nation understands that teachers create the future of their nation by teaching and molding the students. Students go to school five and a half to six days a week. They cover in one year what we cover in two. By age 15 the student is ready for college. In America by age 18 the student is ready for prep school. All children are the same it all depends on what and how they are taught. Children are like computers, garbage in, garbage out.
We need to go back to basics with the American work ethic as well. One of the reasons the bible used to be taught in schools was it had ethics in there. If you don’t work you don’t eat. Contribute to society or die. Don’t give me any crap about cripples there are jobs for everyone at every stage of development and ability.
On economics we bring the minimum wage to one dollar an hour. See how fast the prices fall in line because if the majority of people in the work force are making a dollar an hour and can’t afford a computer they will have to cut wages in order to make the things affordable. If no one can afford 4 dollar a gallon gas no one will drive. The price will drop to what is affordable to the masses. At a dollar an hour I can afford to hire seven employees instead of one. With seven I can expand my business with one I can barely keep the money coming in to pay the one and me. Everything will have to come down in price in order to make a profit. Deflate the economy rather than inflate it. The best way to do this is to get off the credit economy and back onto the gold standard. If a dollar is backed by gold then you have money no matter where you go. At 700 dollars an ounce for example the dollar will be worth one seven hundredth of an ounce of gold. This will bring our money supply back into the realm of reality. Multi billionaires will fade away because there will not be that much gold to back that much money. I heard somewhere that we only hold 68 billion dollars in gold that will mean that we can only have in our system 68 billion dollars and the rest will have to suck air. On the other hand a million dollars will be worth a million dollars.
None of what I suggest will be easy, or painless, but once a full alignment of our economy and our political systems are complete we will have the strongest nation in the world and no one can doubt that. It all depends on US to fix the U.S.
