I could not agree with you more! Have you read “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto (a former NYC and New York State Teacher of the Year?). It will break your heart to realize the prison-like system we have forced the children of our country to suffer through for 12 years of their young lives! http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
In addition to changing education, we MUST change the tax code. Our current monstrosity of a code has some of the same damaging characteristics of the public school system.
It gives citizens the idea that the gov’t has the right to take someone’s property (their income) and give it to another person who did nothing to earn it. The gov’t taking half of your income is no different from them taking half of anything else you own. It’s yours.
Yes, we have to pay taxes to support our country, but no one should pay a higher percentage of their income than any other citizen.
The reason politicians spend half of their time demonizing “the rich” is to make them seem less-than-human and inherently dishonest in the public’s eyes.
If the public sees “the rich” as bad people who somehow stole their income from others, then the public won’t feel so bad when a politician stands up and says that he is going to take half of it and give it to them in exchange for their vote. In any other instance, honest people would see that as theft.
(Yes, there are rich jerks who fit the stereotype, but there are jerks along every inch of the income spectrum and being a jerk does not justify theft of their private property.)
Besides punishing work and rewarding sloth, the tax code wastes billions of dollars, causes millions of jobs to go overseas, divides Americans up into an unlimited number of deductions and special interest groups and turns ordinary law-abiding individuals into tax cheats. There is no reason a tax code has to do any of those things in order to collect taxes!
Education and the tax code... two things that have destroyed the fabric of our nation and two things that must change!
(Just fyi, I’m no Joe Stack... I want to bring about those changes peacefully through the ballot box... and maybe even through the courts, but not with violence.)
It is no different than making a person half a slave.
Money represents labor. Time spent in labor is **life**! When the government takes half of our income they are taking half of LIFE’s labor!
By the way...No one owns a home in the United States. We are all renters. The real owner is the government. Our rent is property tax. Fail to pay our “rent” ( property tax) and the government will evict us. The government is like the feudal lord with his vassals.
And...In my county the overwhelm portion of our property tax goes to our socialist, single-payer, government schools.