"“Things that will destroy our economy” is primarily the financial services sector taking up 30 or something percent of the entire profit of the economy, ..."
That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this? Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while still somehow retaining its efficiency, we still choke on our unfunded mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation, faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.
All of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things. Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean, physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say "physically", I mean that one way or another we will not pay those unfunded mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only question is how we will fail to meet those mandates.
Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though. There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage changes nothing. Here we are.
("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)
Hmmm, investing with money we don't actually have, has that been in the news at all lately?
Besides, I seriously question the marginal value we're getting out of the part of the investment that's killing us, which isn't salary, benefits, facilities, or management costs. We've been trained by various things that the answer to "Do schools need more money?" is simply "Yes", regardless of context, but that produces pathological economic policies. At some point the answer becomes "No", and personally I think we long passed that point.
See also: "Do we need more money for crime enforcement?" "Do we need more money to fight drugs?" "Do we need more centralized power to fight terrorism?"
I am totally willing to reconsider that question as circumstances change. Reform things, start outputting better graduates (according to my rather strict standards which involve actual training to think and such, not just better test scores), and demonstrate that under these new circumstances the bottleneck is money and I'll be happy and overjoyed to reconsider.
That's the past tense, what tanked our economy in the past few months. Looking forward, what will kill us is unfunded mandates. You know how I know this? Because even if we completely fixed the financials industry, completely and utterly tamed it and turned it entirely into a non-profit organization while still somehow retaining its efficiency, we still choke on our unfunded mandates in 10 to 20 years, tops. They're growing faster than inflation, faster than the economy, and faster than any conceivable first-world economy could possibly grow even if $YOUR_FAVORITE_ECONOMIC_THEORY was perfectly instituted and it worked exactly as you expected.
All of the unfunded mandates are gloriously sweet and wonderful things. Money for teachers. Money for old people. Money for retired firefighters and police. Money for public servants. Money for sick people and especially money for sick old people. Our political inability to say no to the sweet and kind and needy people is what brought them to us in the first place. But it doesn't matter how gloriously wonderful they are. They are unaffordable. We physically lack the resources to fulfill the mandates. When I say "physically", I mean, physically. We lack the energy and materials and manpower they are. When I say "physically", I mean that one way or another we will not pay those unfunded mandates, because we are actually, factually incapable of it. The only question is how we will fail to meet those mandates.
Yeah, the teachers have had a role in that. Not much I can do to prevent that from being the outcome. I can point out there are hardly alone, though. There's a lot of people lined up at the trough of unsustainable mandates. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, that list is "Pretty much every citizen of the United States and a fair number of non-citizens". Outrage changes nothing. Here we are.
("Defined benefit payouts" ought to be striken from our vocabulary. They are physically implausible. What happens when you build huge chunks of the economy on a physically-implausible primitive should hardly be a surprise.)