“J.F.K. took us to the moon. Let B.H.O. take America back to school,” says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. His column “Tax Cuts for Teachers” is a bit of a sausage–a melange of gee-whiz ideas on how to stimulate the economy by getting “as much money injected as quickly as possible” into the economy while favoring investments in knowledge over infrastructure. ”Our stimulus needs to be both big and smart, both financially and educationally stimulating,” Friedman argues. In a single giddy paragraph, he encourages Obama to reach into the trough with both hands, throwing dollars at education.
One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers. I’d also double the salaries of all highly qualified math and science teachers, staple green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who graduate from any U.S. university in math or science — instead of subsidizing their educations and then sending them home — and offer full scholarships to needy students who want to go to a public university or community college for the next four years.
A bridge is just a bridge, Friedman notes. Once it’s up, it stops stimulating. While investing in education could get us “the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They create good jobs for years.”
Why increase the complexity of tax code when you could just increase spending on education? If the problem is that they don’t trust schools to spend the money responsibly, wouldn’t that be a major problem that they need to address?
Let’s spend on education realistically: practically everyone in the United States spends 12 years in public schools. It’s our best chance to help break the cycle of poverty, and offering better education is the best investment the government can make, given that it will pay off constantly, in every aspect of society, for the entire life of the students affected.
I suppose we’ll have to spend an entire generation making students repeat this every day at school, then 30 years later when those kids are in positions of power, education might be taken seriously.