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Posted on 02/25/2013 2:35:15 PM PST by Olog-hai
High school dropouts are costing some $1.8 billion in lost tax revenue every year, education advocates said in a report released Monday.
If states were to increase their graduation rates, state and federal lawmakers could be plugging their budgets with workers’ taxes instead of furloughing teachers, closing drivers-license offices and cutting unemployment benefits. While advocates tend to focus on the moral argument that all children deserve a quality education, they could just as easily look at budgets’ bottom lines. …
Lawmakers in state capitols are making tough choices about whether to raise taxes to keep classroom lights on or to sell off state agencies to provide health care to seniors. Federal officials, meanwhile, are looking at some $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that are set to take hold at the end of the week. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Will anyone look at the real problem:
An underclass culture that celebrates hoodlums and pays more for more bastard babies?
Schools are just the last stop before society is inflicted with these horribly raised kids.
In this day and age, the longer a person stays in the school system, to include the university system, the more worthless he becomes. How many good people were ruined by the Marxist fluff being taught at K-12 and beyond who could otherwise have been decent people if they had simply been taught to read and write? If I were an employer looking to hire, I would consider a Harvard degree to be a detriment, not a plus.
This is utter hooey.
Imagine the typical “Son Of Barry”, a high school dropout, gang member, repeat offender. His value to society is about the -$2,000,000 it will cost to try and incarcerate him for 20 years.
However, send this SOB to Princeton, to sit at the foot of the great Marxist lunatic Cornel West, who will give him a BA for just sitting there, or a Masters degree if he can spout dialectic back at him more or less accurately.
His value to society will have skyrocketed. Hired by the federal Department of Wasteful Spending, he will creatively cost the public purse BILLIONS of dollars, squandered on the most pathetic and aggravating schemes imaginable.
He will never have any real power, but will be like a drunken monkey pounding on a typewriter, with a hundred dollars a character for each character he types, gleefully shoveled into an incinerator.
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“Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.”
Free Diplomas for everyone! Instant cure for the billions and billions lost.
How pathetic that the collectivists and statists only look at the dollars lost to the treasury by turning out functional illiterates. They don’t see the lives lost. But, with them, it’s never about people...only about their self-aggrandizement and power.
“Well, the world needs ditch diggers too.”
Yeppers
Teens who are kept in school when they don’t want to be there, cause disruptions in the education of the other students. This is even more crippling to the economy.
The education behemoth is bemoaning the fact that some of the youth become "insufficiently productive slaves"?
Can you say "chutzpah", I knew you could.
Most of the people you deride are products of the "Great Society" and it is your job to turn them into productive members of society - at least that is what you claim to be able to do. You then blame the product (victim).
It must be great being a mindless liberal and not burdened with logic.
Here is what I think is the AP’s sloppy logic:
“High school dropouts are costing some $1.8 billion in lost tax revenue every year”
— is like saying “people who don’t drive their cars seven days a week are costing the government billions in lost gas tax revenue.
The revenue is what it is. Could it be more? Sure. But the fact that more is not coming in is not “costing” the government anything. Someone should inform the AP that it’s just tough luck for the government that people make decisions — whether to get a diploma, whether to drive. Government does not “deserve” any tax revenue from anyone.
“Lawmakers in state capitols are making tough choices . . . “
The AP doesn’t observe lawmakers very accurately, does it?
” . . about whether to raise taxes to keep classroom lights on or to sell off state agencies to provide health care to seniors.”
False choices. Is there no other way to balance their budgets? Do they not have an option to cut wasteful spending and programs, or downsize? Not according to the AP.
And what is this bull about “sell off state agencies to provide health care to seniors”? Even the master exaggerator, Obama, didn’t go far as to claim that. What “state agencies” are states contemplating sellng off in order to fund health care, AP? And to whom? Or did you just make it all up?
You know, I’m beginning to doubt that the AP has actual facts in front of them before they write scare stories about “what could happen.” I mean, if they did, wouldn’t they include them in the article, by way of illustration, if not by way of proof?
P.S.: AP, although the situation that the states find themselves in has been decades in the making, and has nothing to do with this one “sequesterization” battle, can you by any chance link this story to it anyway, as if it is the root cause of all these woes?
“Federal officials, meanwhile, are looking at some $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that are set to take hold at the end of the week”
Good job, AP! I knew you could!
A few years ago while riding with my wildly over educated brother in law he punctured a tire. He was ready to call a wrecker and a rental service for a car.
He was shocked that I could put the doughnut (I hate those things) on the car and directed him to a garage to fix the tire. He was going to spend an easy $300 but I fixed him up for about $9.
Yup, them edumacated people shore is smart.
A Harvard Law Professor must be incalculable.
I find the responses here interesting.
It wasn’t that long ago that a child with an 8th grade education could make it big in the world. It was up to the ‘sexual revolution’ that one person could make enough for a home, car, have a family and still take vacations.
1) Gov’t, specifically taxes, are the #1 cause
2) Whom owned the $$ to start? Govt? That’s the only way it ‘costs’ anything, and is incorrect.
3) What happened to the tech schools? The apprenticeships? Give a child the opportunity to learn something they LOVE, the rest will fall into place.
4) The degrees today aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on...passing students who can’t read = job, but ‘drop-out’ who got their GED 3 years early = ‘bad’?? Would show me that school isn’t worth the $$ being spent.
Harvard Law School grads contribute *nothing* of value to this nation.Many Harvard Medical School grads do (the ones that don't become abortionists or "cosmetic" surgeons)...but not the law school.
The lure of halfway decent introductory pay would motivate many, especially if the gov't disincentives were dropped.
There’s a lot of holes in this line of thinking, I don’t even know where to start. First of all, some people wouldn’t get a better job even if they had a diploma, for example, your neighborhood stew bum, crackhead, or village idiot. Second, just because you have a bunch of new candidates qualified for jobs does not mean that jobs will magically materialize for them to fill.
Most importantly, the tax revenue is not “lost”; to even use such language is to designate every citizen as a serf to the state, useful only for how much the government can squeeze out of us. Taxes should be designed to cover necessary expenditures of government, and if there is not enough revenue, then you raise taxes, or cut expenditures. You do not bemoan the fact that there aren’t more people, or more productive people to tax, so that you could have more revenue to play around with.
I would imagine that one half of the high school population have an IQ below 100. Some groups are notoriously worse. That should have something to do with a dismal drop out rate.
Check the Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power and you will find that decision made it illegal to administer IQ tests (discriminated against blacks, you see). This decision led directly to why it seems that everyone now goes to college.
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