Biden consolidates support, but trails badly in enthusiasm: Poll

Wise nations take no lessons from France. Unless you’d like riots and cultural su

It's all but over for Joe. The DNC would be better served to start planning on midterms.

 

Agreed.

 

Biden will name Amy Klobuchar as his VP running-mate -- watch for it. That way, when he finally has a total brain paralysis episode that makes him even unable to stand, smile, and wave, the Democrat Party will have a lock-step liberal ready to force-feed us with more "socialism-lite"....

. Where would we be without Upper-Midwest, Democrat hyperliberals to wreck the country?

 

TRUE ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Wishful thinking. There will be no brain paralysis when Biden is elected. (And Donald Dork is sent in emergency to the closest sanitorium.)

People like you use the word "hyper" because that conflation is all-you-have-got as an argument. 'Tis a pity.

THIS graphic from the OECD here shows what I think is "wrecking the country". Economists call it "Income Disparity". The Toxic-Right calls it, "That's the way the cookie crumbles".

The fact of the matter is that inconsiderate upper-income US-taxation is sending untaxed and thus unfair income where it doesn't belong. It simply accumulates during a lifetime at the top and then passes on (again insufficiently taxed) to others in the "family". Which is simply generates the cancer eating away America.

True Economic-Justice is NOT achieved by the equality of income - which is where socialism flubbed-it. It happens when key elements of any society are assured a future of reasonably good health and decent prosperity. Which requires an "equitability" of chance that does not exist in the US today. Those Key Elements are Healthcare and Tertiary Education. (Meaning more-than-ever Free Healthcare and very low cost Public State University Schooling.

Not when the average annual cost of a post-secondary degree is $14K as in the US, and those at the bottom of the Income Ladder are locked out ...

PS: Note that here in Europe I sent my kids to university at a total annual cost of a post-secondary degree of 1500€ a year.
PPS: The Next-highest portion of non-governmental "private" debt in America is that for Tertiary-level Education. First highest is Mortgage Debt.

 

You will get no argument out of me about the growing, laughably bad quality of "education" in the United States! Without going into a long, drawn-out harangue about it, suffice to say, the educational system in Germany is far better than ours -- for the kids themselves (and that's who SHOULD matter -- not a bunch of overpaid 'baby sitters' in the teachers' unions). I don't know how we 'fix it' now -- our schools have been going straight to hell since about 1990.

As far as success or failure in a democratic republic like we have in the States, with a free-market, capitalistic economy. Well -- it's all up to YOU! If you focus on what's important to your success, and you do, indeed, WANT to be successful, there is a good chance that you'll make your own way in this world and achieve your goals.

Similarly, if you've got a jive-ass, slacker mentality, you're not very enthused or motivated to so anything of lasting value for YOURSELF, then you'll be somebody who just slops through life, at best. You might just get trampled in the dust by those who are intent on accomplishing something worthwhile and who are more than happy to pass YOU by....

Thus, you can think it's so cool to major in some kind of 'basket-weaving' degree-plan in college, and as long as you have a healthy income not reliant on what you're likely to EARN with a bullshit bachelor's degree like that, then all is well. But if you're planning on making your living 'on your wits', and the inherent WORTH of your educational accomplishments, in a marketplace made up of other human beings who want the same things that you want, then you'd better be able to compete effectively, or, you're likely to be a 'bottom-feeder' your whole life.... It's all up to YOU!

. "Naw, let Biden give me free college, and then give ME a good job -- like Hunter had...!"

 

SAT SCORES OVER TIME

Pathetic sarcasm. That's all the Rabid Right has got.

I agree about the kids, but the average SAT-scores historically "wiggle" over time:


As seen above Verbal and Math scores are on a downtrend. Whyzat? No answer is given in the Wikipedia article, except this:

But two articles have appeared somewhat recently to address the matter, which I will leave for consideration:
*From the New York Times, here.
*From CNN, here.

So there, now let's discuss the matter if you think you are fit to do so.

I happen to think that where someone comes from (ie School Board) has little to do with innate intelligence that the SAT-scores should be testing. Meaning this: We humans seek intelligence and will likely find it if we look hard enough. (That is, if there is a personal bent for any individual to seek it.)

Can schools trigger that "bent". Yes, they can, but that depends upon the receptivity of the child. Does that depend upon the income scale of the child's family?

What I think:
* No, the child is born with innate intelligence or not - and to which degree s/he possess intelligence.
*But schooling can (if competent) encourage them to find and absorb intelligence*.
*What they do with it is again another question - some do better than others and we simply do not know why ...

NB: And that means nowadays that what is key is how easy or not it is for a child to obtain post-secondary schooling. And that is the key issue!

 

We may yet agree, at least, that SAT tests have been dumbed-down again and again over the years. You can find literally dozens of well-documented articles to support that dreary conclusion.

The situation with ACT tests is not encouraging, either. "Continuous plunges in ACT score testing shows that students are not getting smarter, in fact it’s the exact opposite. Children are being dumbed down by this controlling system that does not inspire learning at all, there is a major change in schools the past decades along with dropping scores." Link: https://www.worldhealth.net/news/worst-student-test-scores-history-dumbing-down/

Look, we can argue forever about education, achievement, and resultant successes or failures -- people have done that for as long as there have been any formalized educational systems throughout history. Some of the worst students you'll find are the spoiled, coddled 'Daddy's Little Darlings' who are born with platinum spoons in their mouths. And many others in this "worst" student category are the to-be-expected ghetto trash that predictably and sadly will spend lives living on handout welfare and/or criminal activity. There's nothing new in any of this!

And yet, there are those among the 'ghetto trash' classes who DO learn, DO achieve, and DO become successes in life! The same is true of the "Little Darlings" of the wastrel class, who never have to dirty their delicate pinkies doing anything -- but, their minds were active... and they wanted to make something of themselves and satisfy their own ambitions.

I submit to you that these MINDS are what we should be cultivating, so that the students can become productive, goal-oriented, happy citizens of a nation full of us! I know... it sounds like platitudes and pablum, but we NEED people who know things, we NEED people who can do things, and we NEED people who can learn things -- and make productive contributions to our nation. Or, we will continue on down the road we're on and eventually, fail....

 

And I submit that all of the above makes excellent-good-sense.

We must get the educational system correct, and we can do that only when the Federal government subsidizes the states in the prime- and secondary-school education. Meaning that a standard can be set and the states held to that standard.

We spend 55% of the nation's Discretionary Budget on the DoD. See said budget here and note that only 5% is spent on Education (and one must presume where that money goes). I have been able to find only one comment of interest regarding "from where comes and goes the money?" (Archived: 10 Fact About K-12 Education Funding) - and I quote it here:

We all know that state-funding is not uniform either in geography or time-wise. When the bad-times hit, then state budgets "get-hit". Shouldn't the Fed assure the primary- and secondary-education in the majority and the state does so with some minority spending?

PS: There is PLENTY of money in the DoD-budget to put it to SOME GOOD USE!

 

Biden elected? Who's Biden?

 

I worked in that Prime Contractor - Federal Government arena for decades... and, yes, there is (and perhaps always was) a great deal of "waste, fraud, and abuse". I could go on and on, paragraph after paragraph, but it would just ruin your day. A lot of this flies way 'under the radar', and the public has no awareness of it at all.

Some contractors are held to very rigid compliance criteria, after going through brutal, 'pencil-sharpening' bid processes. But other contractors get the 'silver bullet' of "Sole-Source" designation, and they get to FEAST on government procurements like they're popcorn. And, most maddeningly, some companies are forbidden to even submit a bid on quite a large number of purchases, because those solicitations are "set-aside" for special classes of companies -- thus the vital dynamic of competition is arbitrarily voided. I'm not making this up!

I'm starting to 'ramble', and that's a bore. As I said before, I like the educational system in Germany. It's the best of 'a bad lot'. One thing is for sure -- we will never work our way out of this public school funding morass we've been in for decades until we base it on something besides the taxation of everybody's residential property. It was wrong the first day they ever started doing that, and it remains wrong and completely unfair today....

Snapshot of the German public schools system: https://www.howtogermany.com/pages/germanschools.html

 

No, your not rambling. But, I've seen that story somewhere before.

It was about the end of Rome - very much the same was happening there amongst a select group of families. It took a while, but inevitably Rome came apart at the seams because of abuse of public funds.

Want Uncle Sam to do the same? Because as it stands he seems quite capable of doing so. The Federal Budget is piling on debt, and should that dyke ever break there will be hell-to-pay.

Wakey, wakey, boyz-n-girlz - I'm teasing no one. See for yourself here: