GOP Debate Thoughts

[Xantar]

Xantar, I have plenty of links to polls that show both McCain and Guiliani beating Obama and Clinton in the general election, and I'm sure you've seen them. It depends on the pollster and the poll taken. To isolate on only those that back your opinion is dishonest.

Well yeah. I myself said that the polls I cited were meaningless. All I said was that Obama or Edwards winning against a Republican is within the realm of possibility. It's way too early to actually make a prediction on who will win.

You asked me if I could imagine Edwards beating Giuliani or Obama beating McCain. I said yes, because some polls show that it could happen. That's all.

All that raising the minimum wage will do is eliminate those 1% who have those jobs. Why pay a clerk $12 an hour when you could just have a touch screen instead? The only reason why those positions are available (mainly for students and retired) is because its cost effective. Remove the cost effectiveness, and kiss those low skilled jobs goodbye. It changes nothing except eliminating jobs for those that need them to supplement income or create expendable income. Raising the minimum wage is an issue that has no business being an issue, because it solves NOTHING.

You missed my point. I was saying that the wage increase enacted by Congress is little more than a meaningless token gesture. Maybe you're right and raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. But to really have an appreciable impact on the job market, you have to do a lot more than raise the minimum wage by a few dollars. Just like to really raise people out of poverty (if it can be done by raising the minimum wage), you would have to raise the minimum wage drastically high. Going from $5 to $7 isn't going to cut it.

Our education system is only as good as those that are in it. We keep on saying how out schools are now garbage, yet I can't see anything that we have removed from them? We've added course after course, we've expanded curricilum, changed it constantly to keep up with the latest and greatest fields, and yet it is failing.

I take a much more expansive view of education reform than people typically understand when they hear the term. Public schools in middle- to upper-class neighborhoods are actually pretty good. It's the ones in poor neighborhoods that are failing, and that doesn't mean just the inner city but also many rural areas.

I'm sure you would agree that a big part of this is parental involvement. In rich neighborhoods, if kids are ending up with gaping holes in their knowledge, then the parents raise hell until the school fixes itself. In poor neighborhoods, schools are basically a place to park your kid while you go to work.

So here we have a problem of culture and attitude. Parents aren't looking after their kids properly. But then how do we fix that? In these kinds of neighborhoods, the parents (or very often, single parent) are struggling just to make ends meet by working overtime or working two jobs. They don't have the time to go over the kids' homework. So part of the problem also seems to be economics.

And while we're talking about economics, I'll just say incidentally that teachers aren't paid nearly enough. It does matter. My old high school, which actually pays fairly decently, still can't hold on to a decent math teacher.

Also on economics, it doesn't help that so much of the work force is jailed and then ostracized for possessing drugs. This is especially a problem in poor neighborhoods. I think you and I generally agree that we ought to legalize drugs, so I won't get into that any further.

The point is in just this brief time, I've linked problems in our education system to our culture, economics and criminal system. Give me a few hours to research the subject and I could probably draw in immigration and health policy too (kids who get PE are likely to do better academically). I'm not deluded into thinking that the government can fly in and fix such a massive, systemwide problem. Giving more money to buy more books and computers is not going to fix anything. But at the same time, the government does have a role to play in these issues.

Bad education causes people to feel out of control of their lives because they don't understand the forces shaping their world. This leads to disillusionment and despair as they blame the system because they don't understand how they can get it to work for them (a large segment of the population doesn't even understand how interest rates work). And they pass this attitude on to their kids who similarly give up on achieving anything great for themselves. And on and on the cycle goes. So yeah, doubt and despair holds us back. It's created by a confluence of failed policies across the society and government. We can at least do something about the government part, and I find that much more appealing than just telling everybody to get together and fix their own poverty already.

The war on poverty? Failure.

Because it was just a narrowly based initiative rather than a serious look at the whole system (as I've outlined above). Oh, and we haven't been conducting a serious war on poverty for the past several years.

The war on drugs? Failure.

Wait wait wait. The war on drugs is the result of a leftist view of the world? In which solar system?

The IRS? A failure that has turned into a an intimidating gestapo-like agency.

What did they fail at? I wasn't aware that the IRS had any particular agenda other than collecting our taxes. Now tax policies are a different matter, but the IRS doesn't create those.

In the past, many European countries have moved to policies like the one's mentioned above, and they have also been massive failures. France just elected a CONSERVATIVE, PRO AMERICAN president. YES, FRANCE.

France went too far. Even liberal economists here in the U.S. think so. They made it almost impossible to fire someone from his job, and their education system sets people on a path in life that's almost impossible to get away from once you've fallen into it. This created a society that was extremely rigid, classist and unequal which is ironically the exact opposite of what a socialist society wants. Marx would have been horrified.

None of that means liberal theory is wrong. It just means you have to implement liberal policies that are smart and constantly evaluate how they are working. You're always railing against the evils of liberal policy which raises taxes and inflates the government, but that's a straw man argument. Modern liberals generally regard that sort of stuff as an outdated idea from the 60s. Liberals these days are more likely to try to leverage the power of the marketplace to achieve their goals rather than create brand new, unwieldy government institutions and programs.

We'll leave that to President Bush.