Do you honestly think the government has no meaningful work to pay people to do? I have seen almost no provisions in the stimulus that I would call unproductive work. You are talking about things in abstraction and aren't even attacking actual things that are in the stimulus bill. All you are doing is ignoring facts and going over talking points.
So didn't you just admit that infrastructure type programs and things are temporary in nature? And isn't every infrastructure or comparable program job temporary in nature? Its called contracting, and most of the contracting the government will be doing is with private firms. You are completely ignoring this.
Education jobs are not temporary in nature. So if anything, they are better than some of the very things you are proposing.
Why can't education be called a stimulus to the economy? Because you aren't building roads and bridges? That is absurd. How is paying people to work in one sector any different than paying people to work in another sector when that money is going into people's hands directly on an immediate basis and can turn around and spend that money in the economy. We have actually risen recently in terms of how we rank abroad compared to other countries in terms of the quality of our education (ironically in part to programs like NCLB, which could still use more funding).
Now I am not against reevaluating how we approach public education. I think it should be treated much more like the public sector and teacher's unions should lose a severe amount of the power they have. I'm not against reforming the education system. Honestly I think a large factor in how high are costs are is how spread out this country is. Having to maintain all these rural school districts can be pretty expensive.
That also goes back to mrstickball's point. Private schools are only going to operate in places that are profitable, like larger cities that have the population base to support them. Public school's have to operate everywhere by law. This significantly raises costs and private schools would never invest in a small rural area where they couldn't make a profit.
Its like comparing the United States Postal Service to Fed Ex. Fed Ex chooses where it wants to deliver and does not deliver to certain places if it can't make a profit there. The federal government is by law required to deliver everywhere. You are attributing all these extra costs to inefficiency. While arguably it is inefficient to have to provide service to everyone, that's the cost society has to pay for its education system because otherwise a significant amount of people would not receive an education. Unless you suggest that we just screw over rural America.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
