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Forums - General - Why is this man not out next president?

TheRealMafoo on 26 September 2008
Tispower1 said:
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the fact is you can't change what happened.

 

It's not Hindsight, He has been predicting this for years. Ironically, he is the only one who thinks you can't change what has happened.

The rest of congress is trying to see if we can get out of going into a recession. Ron Paul thinks we have already put that in motion, and regardless of what we do, a recession is going to happen. He wants to make it as quick and painless as posable, and not give out 700 billion dollars that will only prolong the situation.



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Galaki on 26 September 2008

It's like having a pimple. You either squish it out or leave it there and patch it up.

Over time, with enough patching, it becomes part of you and once in a while, it'll swell up and cause irritation but it will subside again into your flesh only to come out every once a while.



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TheRealMafoo on 26 September 2008
The Ghost of RubangB said:
Jackson50 said:
steven787 said:

1. I don't agree.  Public education is one of the great developments in human history. It is not "broken" despite the number of people who say it is, except the inbalance of where the best equipment and teachers go.

2. What would then happen when the market crashes and banks go out of business?  All your savings would be gone and you'd be relying on the government; whether they write a check to you or to your banks and brokers.

 

 

1. Education is an inherently private good. There really is no way to disagree with that. It is both rivalrous and excludable. I would say public funding of education is one of the greatest developments in human history. Subsidizing the producer is never the optimal choice. Subsidizing the consumer, however, allows for choice in schooling and will efficiently allocate educational resources. There are other areas where the government chooses to subsidize the consumer as opposed to the producer. One such instance is food stamps. Instead of creating government owned grocery stores, we subsidize the consumer through food stamps.

2. I diversify my investments. Whether it is bonds, a Roth IRA, a 401K and so on. To suggest, however, that someone should invest in social security because the market may fail-haha-is surprising. The (potential) wealth created by other investments should be more than enough to offset the costs of the low rate of returns on social security.

 

I think education is a basic human right, and I think your education should be safer than the shopping skills of your parents and how much money they have.  Not every parent can afford to pay more for a better education for their kids.  That means poor families put their kids in poor schools.  That would be very bad.

Or am I missing something here?  What if a parent doesn't want to buy an education for their stupid expensive baby?  Is the magical Libertarian government going to invade my privacy and tell me how to raise my kid or force me to put them in school?  I'll shoot the sons of bitches.  They can't tell me how to spend my money.

 

I live in an extremely small town (under a thousand people). Down the street is a building that once was a school. The 90 year old man who lives down from me went to that school. We were talking about politics, and education. He hates the education system. When he went to school, the town ran it. That little school had 30 grand in the bank, and gave a VERY good education. (this was the 40's). When the federal government took over, the school was closed because it was deemed to expensive to run (even though the community ran it on a lot less money then they were paying the feds to run schools). All the students were then bussed into a larger town 30 minutes away (about 10,000), and given far worse education.

How is this better?

I am not against the asking the people to pay for education. I am just against the government running anything the Constitution does not require them to run (Military for example).

This state collects about 20K per student for education. If you were to drop that to 15K, give every parent that money in a voucher (meaning it's only worth something to an accredited school), and let the parent pick where there child gets there education, education quality would sky rocket. The reason I would drop the price by 25%, is so after the child turns 18, they get it for 5 more years to give that voucher to a collage of there choice.

This would make for a far better educated country, and cost a lot less as a lot of people will choose not to go to college. If this does raise college rate, that's a good thing as well. More money will be made, and thus more taxed will be collected.



Jackson50 on 26 September 2008
The Ghost of RubangB said:

I think education is a basic human right, and I think your education should be safer than the shopping skills of your parents and how much money they have.  Not every parent can afford to pay more for a better education for their kids.  That means poor families put their kids in poor schools.  That would be very bad.

Or am I missing something here?  What if a parent doesn't want to buy an education for their stupid expensive baby?  Is the magical Libertarian government going to invade my privacy and tell me how to raise my kid or force me to put them in school?  I'll shoot the sons of bitches.  They can't tell me how to spend my money.

 

 

Are you unaware of what a subsidy is? I am not proposing we close down state run schools and tell parents to fend for themselves. The US spends approximately $9,000 per pupil on education every year. What consumer subsidized education would allow is the parents to use that $9,000 on a school of their choice. If you are poor and do not want your kid going to a run-down inner city school, take your kid and the money, and enroll in a private/independent school. In a land where freedom and liberty supposedly rain supreme, why do we force our parents and children to use their money at schools they do not wish to attend? If they decide a vocational school or an arts & sciences academy is the best option, should they not be allowed that choice? If they want to take their kid to a school that uses the methods of  Montessori in lieu of the methods of Pestalozzi, should they not be allowed that choice?. Why should we expect public schools to improve? They face no competition. What is the impetus for improvement? There is none. If we allow parents to choose the school their child attends, it will force all schools to improve their quality. If not, no one will attend their schools and they go out of business. 

 

So we should prohibit parents and children from choosing their education because of a few bad apples? That makes no sense. Implement school choice and the American education system will improve vastly. I, just like you, think education is a basic human right and that access should be universal. We differ, however, on whether or not we would allow freedom of choice.

 



rocketpig on 26 September 2008
Jackson50 said:
The Ghost of RubangB said:

I think education is a basic human right, and I think your education should be safer than the shopping skills of your parents and how much money they have.  Not every parent can afford to pay more for a better education for their kids.  That means poor families put their kids in poor schools.  That would be very bad.

Or am I missing something here?  What if a parent doesn't want to buy an education for their stupid expensive baby?  Is the magical Libertarian government going to invade my privacy and tell me how to raise my kid or force me to put them in school?  I'll shoot the sons of bitches.  They can't tell me how to spend my money.

 

Are you unaware of what a subsidy is? I am not proposing we close down state run schools and tell parents to fend for themselves. The US spends approximately $9,000 per pupil on education every year. What consumer subsidized education would allow is the parents to use that $9,000 on a school of their choice. If you are poor and do not want your kid going to a run-down inner city school, take your kid and the money, and enroll in a private/independent school. In a land where freedom and liberty supposedly rain supreme, why do we force our parents and children to use their money at schools they do not wish to attend? If they decide a vocational school or an arts & sciences academy is the best option, should they not be allowed that choice? If they want to take their kid to a school that uses the methods of  Montessori in lieu of the methods of Pestalozzi, should they not be allowed that choice?. Why should we expect public schools to improve? They face no competition. What is the impetus for improvement? There is none. If we allow parents to choose the school their child attends, it will force all schools to improve their quality. If not, no one will attend their schools and they go out of business. 

 

So we should prohibit parents and children from choosing their education because of a few bad apples? That makes no sense. Implement school choice and the American education system will improve vastly. I, just like you, think education is a basic human right and that access should be universal. We differ, however, on whether or not we would allow freedom of choice.

Well said. The "but some parents are bad at making choices" is a strawman argument.

If a parent is bad at making choices, the kid is fucked no matter what. Those types of problems extend far beyond anything even the most perfect school system could repair. Implementing a forced, universal, generalized approach to education won't help stupid parents one bit and the negatives of our current approach far outweigh the negatives of approaching the education system in a proactive, competitive manner.




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HappySqurriel on 26 September 2008
Jackson50 said: 

Are you unaware of what a subsidy is? I am not proposing we close down state run schools and tell parents to fend for themselves. The US spends approximately $9,000 per pupil on education every year. What consumer subsidized education would allow is the parents to use that $9,000 on a school of their choice. If you are poor and do not want your kid going to a run-down inner city school, take your kid and the money, and enroll in a private/independent school. In a land where freedom and liberty supposedly rain supreme, why do we force our parents and children to use their money at schools they do not wish to attend? If they decide a vocational school or an arts & sciences academy is the best option, should they not be allowed that choice? If they want to take their kid to a school that uses the methods of  Montessori in lieu of the methods of Pestalozzi, should they not be allowed that choice?. Why should we expect public schools to improve? They face no competition. What is the impetus for improvement? There is none. If we allow parents to choose the school their child attends, it will force all schools to improve their quality. If not, no one will attend their schools and they go out of business. 

 

So we should prohibit parents and children from choosing their education because of a few bad apples? That makes no sense. Implement school choice and the American education system will improve vastly. I, just like you, think education is a basic human right and that access should be universal. We differ, however, on whether or not we would allow freedom of choice.

 

On top of this there is another thing people often miss ...

For a long time people have noticed that regardless of how much money is invested into education schools with the highest concentration of middle-class students tend to outperform schools with lower concentrations of these students. Being that even the poorer students generally perform (far) better the conclusion I have most often heard is that middle class parents generally put a far greater focus on education and are far more involved with their child's school.

Now I could be wrong, but I suspect that if parents were given the option to choose their children's school that there would be a greater focus on education from parents across the board; the parent who worked hard to get their child into a better school will (probably) not accept the same poor performance from their child, and those parents who end up stuck with a poorer school might see more of a reason to get involved in the school and fix its problems.

 



ManusJustus on 26 September 2008

Because Ron Paul doesn't understand the economy. He wants to deregualte everything, which is exactly what got us in this mess, and he wants to move back to the gold standard, which is economic suicide.



HappySqurriel on 26 September 2008
ManusJustus said:
Because Ron Paul doesn't understand the economy. He wants to deregualte everything, which is exactly what got us in this mess, and he wants to move back to the gold standard, which is economic suicide.

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/09/24/wall-street-crisis-stephen-schwarzman-explains-it-all/?mod=sp_deals

It’s a perfect storm. It started with Congress encouraging lending to lower-income people. You went from subprime loans being 2% of total loans in 2002 to 30% of total loans in 2006. That kind of enormous increase swept into the net people who shouldn’t have been borrowing.

Those loans were packaged into CDOs rated AAA, which led the investment-banking firms [buying them] to do little to no due diligence, and the securities were distributed throughout the world, where they started defaulting.

When they started defaulting, out of bad luck or bad judgment, we implemented fair value accounting….You had wildly different marks for this kind of security, which led to massive write-offs by the commercial banking and investment-banking system.

In the face of those losses…you needed to raise new equity…which came from sovereign-wealth funds in part, which then caused political resistance to sovereign-wealth funds, who predictably have withdrawn from putting money into the system….It seemed pretty obvious that would happen. We now find ourselves with a liquidity crisis where fundamentally the cost of money for financial intermediaries [such as investment banks] is significantly in excess of their cost of lending it. So several institutions found themselves in a structurally impossible position. We had a series of bankruptcies, whether Bear Stearns or Lehman, or forced sales like Merrill. Goldman reverted to a banking charter for a lower cost of funds, which today is still not low enough for the business.

So that’s the story of how we got there.

In other words, a large portion of the problem relates to the government using (semi) private organizations (Fannie May and Freddy Mac) to execute social programs ...

 

Moving back towards a gold standard (at least in part) isn't that bad of an idea, but it would take a very long time because you would want to buy Gold when it is inexpensive.

 



TheRealMafoo on 26 September 2008
rocketpig said:
Jackson50 said:
The Ghost of RubangB said:

I think education is a basic human right, and I think your education should be safer than the shopping skills of your parents and how much money they have.  Not every parent can afford to pay more for a better education for their kids.  That means poor families put their kids in poor schools.  That would be very bad.

Or am I missing something here?  What if a parent doesn't want to buy an education for their stupid expensive baby?  Is the magical Libertarian government going to invade my privacy and tell me how to raise my kid or force me to put them in school?  I'll shoot the sons of bitches.  They can't tell me how to spend my money.

 

Are you unaware of what a subsidy is? I am not proposing we close down state run schools and tell parents to fend for themselves. The US spends approximately $9,000 per pupil on education every year. What consumer subsidized education would allow is the parents to use that $9,000 on a school of their choice. If you are poor and do not want your kid going to a run-down inner city school, take your kid and the money, and enroll in a private/independent school. In a land where freedom and liberty supposedly rain supreme, why do we force our parents and children to use their money at schools they do not wish to attend? If they decide a vocational school or an arts & sciences academy is the best option, should they not be allowed that choice? If they want to take their kid to a school that uses the methods of  Montessori in lieu of the methods of Pestalozzi, should they not be allowed that choice?. Why should we expect public schools to improve? They face no competition. What is the impetus for improvement? There is none. If we allow parents to choose the school their child attends, it will force all schools to improve their quality. If not, no one will attend their schools and they go out of business. 

 

So we should prohibit parents and children from choosing their education because of a few bad apples? That makes no sense. Implement school choice and the American education system will improve vastly. I, just like you, think education is a basic human right and that access should be universal. We differ, however, on whether or not we would allow freedom of choice.

Well said. The "but some parents are bad at making choices" is a strawman argument.

If a parent is bad at making choices, the kid is fucked no matter what.

 

With this system, the worst school available for their kids would be better than any public school today. Even the parents that didn't care to check would be giving their kids better education.