The future is being hijacked by tax-cutting fiends
Although I also have concerns about the Bush administration’s full-scale assault on civil liberties, its poor handling of the economy, and a variety of other issues too long to list, this article at The New York Times sums up quite nicely the reason I am in no hurry to return to the United States.
With the economy in such dismal shape, I’m not sure how long it would take to find a job if I went back, but even more alarming is the fact that, faced with these budgetary problems, the states are deciding to cut funding for important programs like education. This means that not only would it be financially difficult for me to return to the States, but it would be bad for my daughter’s future as well.
Bush’s irresponsible handling of the budget is causing a lot of trouble for the states, which--unlike the federal government--cannot run huge deficits and simply wait for the economy to make up the difference in the long run. And because schoolchildren don’t generally have very good lobbyists, their interests are often neglected in tough economic times. The real moral outrage here is that the economy doesn’t have to be that bad, but Bush is making a colossal gamble on the idea that cutting taxes will stimulate growth. If you remember the economy of the Reagan administration, you might remember that this kind of “trickle-down” economics didn’t work very well. (Kevin Phillips, author of ”Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich,” says Bush’s plan is even worse; he calls it ”mist-down economics.")
And we’ve seen that Bush is only interested in state governors to the extent that they can help him put pressure on Congress for tax cuts, so the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon.
Of course, it is not only education that is being threatened by the Bush plan. What is going to happen to Social Security and related programs as the Baby Boomers retire? Under Bush’s plan, the only alternatives will be to raise taxes to an unacceptably high level or kill off these programs. Perhaps that is the real objective, after all. Why should taxpayers be forced to pay for things like Social Security or education? Why not just give that money back, at a few hundred dollars a year (for your average taxpayer, that is), to the people who earned it?
Well, for one thing, to do so would cause incredible social problems across the nation. Are people really so cheap that they would rather have a couple hundred bucks than a functional education system? Whatever happened to the Bush who promised to “leave no child behind”? I’m beginning to get the impression that what he meant to say was something more along the lines of “leave all children behind (except those from wealthy families and those fortunate enough to benefit from my faith-based initiatives).”
I see this as one of the biggest issues facing America today. Although my daughter is still too young to understand the implications of Bush’s tax cut fever, I can see that it has bad implications for her future.
With those things in mind, the Japanese public education system (which I usually disparage) doesn’t seem so bad.
