REAL NEWS EDUCATION INVESTMENTS WON'T CREATE JOBS <[email protected]> (Common sense, politically incorrect newsletter to 14,931 subscribers) EDUCATION INVESTMENTS WON'T CREATE JOBS, MORE USELESS COLLEGE DEGREES NOT NEEDED, HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION ADEQUATE FOR MOST. By Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, political analyst and author March 29, 2011 Contrary to President Obama's political rhetoric, more taxpayer spending to send more students to college will not reduce unemployment or improve the economy. It's just Obama's way of finagling the unemployment statistics by listing young people as students instead of as unemployed. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland confirmed that when it comes to long-term unemployment, the length of unemployment is unrelated to education level. Although employment is higher for people with more years of education, the duration of unemployment is the same for all education levels. A new phrase is now commonly included in job ads for all kinds of positions: "must be currently employed." Charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show remarkably parallel lines for the duration of unemployment of Americans age 25 and older who have less than a high-school diploma, only a high-school diploma, some college or a college degree. The Obama administration continues to propagate the falsehood that solving the unemployment problem requires "more investments in education." Investment is a favorite liberal code word for more spending and higher taxes. As globalization spread and was touted by the elites as the wave of the future, conventional wisdom was that only blue-collar manufacturing jobs would be sent overseas, while college grads were safe. That assumption is now obsolete, as computers and telecommunications have made it possible to offshore the jobs of college-educated employees. I thought it was a tossup as to which was the greatest education scandal: the $2 trillion taxpayers poured into public schools that failed the twin goals of improving student achievement and closing the gap between higher-income and lower-income students, or the colossal debt students accumulate to pay exorbitant college tuition prices. But the Chronicle of Higher Education reported a third scandal under the headline, "The Great College-Degree Scam". The Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 now work in relatively low-skilled jobs that need only a high-school diploma or less. The actual count is 17.4 million college grads working in occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as not requiring college, such as cashier, waiter, waitress or bartender. Facts do not deter the Obama administration from playing the false tune that more federal education spending is the key to more jobs. White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes reprised this myth with a stream of buzzwords: Education is the "key to winning the future," we need to "improve educational outcomes" so we can "win in the global marketplace," and we must "out-educate the world" and put "greater emphasis on critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving," and grab "our generation's 'Sputnik moment.'" Vice President Joe Biden joined in this campaign by launching his "College Completion Tool Kit" -- a bunch of expensive suggestions to increase the number of college graduates by 50 percent. He wants to shift the focus from high-school completion to college completion and, of course, do more to subsidize the latter. Biden was the lead speaker at "The First Annual Building a Grad Nation Summit" held in Washington in March, to be followed by a similar summit held by each governor. The plan sets forth vague goals such as developing an action plan, using data to drive decision-making, accelerating learning and re-labeling "remedial" courses in college as "developmental". Of course, Biden's plan calls for extravagant taxpayer handouts such as the First in the World initiative to support "innovative practices" and College Completion Incentive Grants to reward states for undertaking "reforms". That's on top of money already committed by the Obama administration, such as $40 billion more in Pell grants, a 90 percent increase in tax incentives through the American Opportunity Tax Credit, making it easier for students to get grants and loans, and forgiving the college debt of students who promise 10 years of public service. Why should taxpayers be forced to continue unaffordable deficit spending to send more kids to college when the evidence shows that our economy is not offering enough jobs for college graduates now? The biggest issue today is the need to rebuild an economy that offers the three-fourths of Americans without a college degree jobs that pay enough to buy a home and support a wife raising their own children. Somehow we lost that kind of a society through a combination of feminism, unilateral divorce, illegal and legal immigration, and the steady drumbeat of free-trade elitists telling us that globalism makes it our duty to compete with foreigners willing to work for as little as 30 cents an hour with no benefits. Children should be taught to read in the first grade by an authentic phonics system in which they learn the sounds and syllables of the English language and how to put them together to read words of more than one syllable. There is nothing expensive or mysterious about this basic task. Instead of wasting more federal money on grant-writers and grant-readers, tell local districts to award a bonus to first-grade teachers based on how many kids they actually teach to read. Let the teacher select the phonics system she thinks will help her win the bonus. Knowing that learning to read is fundamental to education, the public-school lobby is yelping about proposed cuts in grants for literacy programs. Yes, literacy should be job No. 1, but after all these years why do we have to go to the unnecessary expense of passing out money to find a good reading program? Even this bad news fails to give the big picture because, as productivity was falling in public schools, it was rising everywhere else. Nearly all the products and services most of us buy have gotten better, more affordable or both over the past two generations. The fact that there is no education improvement even while spending has skyrocketed is a disaster unparalleled in any other field. In addition to the waste, this gigantic spending slowed our economic growth by taxing trillions of dollars out of the productive sector of the economy and squandering it on worthless programs. The party that has the best solution to the jobs issue will win in 2012. More years of taxpayer-funded schooling are not the answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------- --REAL NEWS Editor [email protected] Contact Your Govt http://www.usa.gov/Contact.shtml Is the Constitution the Supreme Law of the Land or not? I GUESS THE SCOTUS HAS ANWERED THAT QUESTION Patriot Freedom http://www.patriotfreedom.org/battlefield.php If a link above does not work, cut-and-paste to your browser. Please be aware that Barack Hussein Obama’s grandfather was a highly respected witch doctor with the Luo tribe. His white grandmother was VP at the Bank of Hawaii and she worked with and for Peter Geithner on other projects, Peter is the father of Timothy Geithner, Obama's choice of Treasurer of the US . We the People http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVAhr4hZDJE This email is archived at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en I'M MAD, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bprelutsky/2009/07/05/im-mad-as-hell/ . -- To join RichsRants, send email to: [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/richsrants?hl=en
