BREAKING: Trump Announces Plan To Gut Education, Eliminate 490,000 Teacher Jobs

[Ebowed]

I do enjoy that for some reason Republicans and Libertarians think that public school teachers are widely reviled and make a good punching bag for their dangerous free market experiments.

Yeah, why would we take any education proposal from the creator of Trump University seriously?

[Dr. Arch]

I do hope that those reporting Ebowed's post also have the decency to report other posters when they call Hillary a: "crook, liar, b**ch, rapist enabler" etc.

[Figueira]

I'm still waiting for the blue, yellow, and beige avatars to explain what's so great about this proposal.

[Averroës Nix]

Yeah, I can't figure out why I'm supposed to be especially horrified by this. It's a policy idea that Republicans have been running on since No Child Left Behind went out of fashion. And it's about as likely to pass overnight unaltered as something like single payer healthcare.

You can't run a full-fledged policy analysis on platform proposals. They are no more than a framework for developing detailed and politically feasible policies once a candidate is actually elected. We get plenty of interesting and important information out of these promises, but this is mostly in terms of values, priorities, and the interests groups and coalitions that a given candidate is most interested in satisfying.

Of course, none of this is going to stop the Center for American Progress from publishing its analysis, because the Center for American Progress is a partisan think tank, or, in other words, an organization that exists to provide politicians with the veneer of intellectual credibility when they criticize their opponents' plans. I don't like the plan either, but I'm not about to make myself look like a policy-illiterate shill by regurgitating a liberal mouthpiece's estimates at face value and acting shocked and appalled by anyone who doesn't immediately concede defeat.

By the way, this proposal is wrong in the same way that Republican proposals to "repeal and replace Obamacare" are wrong: It does not even establish a workable framework for replacing what exists. It tells us essentially nothing about what Trump and the Republican Party want to do about federal education policy. And it provides no sense of what Trump means when he talks about "waste." You don't need to know how many teachers would lose their jobs down to the nearest ten thousand to respond to this effectively.

[Ebowed]

I do hope that those reporting Ebowed's post also have the decency to report other posters when they call Hillary a: "crook, liar, b**ch, rapist enabler" etc.

I find it especially amusing coming from pbrower given his weird stated belief earlier this year that the gay rights movement was initially associated with child molesters.

Yeah, one standard will do just fine, thanks.

[Ebsy]

Reminder: Rick Perry actually remembered that he was going to gut the Department of Education during his famous debate gaffe.

[TarHeelDem]

Trump just loves the poorly educated. It's obvious that he just thinks they're great people and wants more poorly educated individuals in the electorate. Sad!

[Simfan34]

Do you think Trump had anything to do with this or cares about its contents? This is likely the work of Conway et al.

There is no point debating about the merits or demerits of this plan. It is tarred by its association with Trump, not vice versa.

[Storebought]

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Yes. But the point of Trump is to introduce such confusion and concern over funding sources drying up among federal and state education agencies that the agency officers, teachers, and staff all fire themselves through attrition.

[‼realJohnEwards‼]

oh my god, can we just lock this thread? it's pretty clear that nobody is convincing anyone, and that we're just going to keep shouting at each other. we already have enough of that here

[Wisconsin+17]

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EpiPens are a monopoly, which is why they can jack up the price. If they had competition, they couldn't raise the price the way that they have. Now that the price has gone up, there will be incentives for EpiPen alternatives.

[Wisconsin+17]

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As a parochial school, we can teach kids for about 2k or so per year. Right now with public education you get a worse education for 5x as much per student.

[Figueira]

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As a parochial school, we can teach kids for about 2k or so per year. Right now with public education you get a worse education for 5x as much per student.

And how would eliminating the DOE solve that?

[Ebsy]

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EpiPens are a monopoly, which is why they can jack up the price. If they had competition, they couldn't raise the price the way that they have. Now that the price has gone up, there will be incentives for EpiPen alternatives.

So I guess you favor the elimination of all patents?

[DrScholl]

Closing down the Department of Education is one of those ideas that sounds like it's an innovative money saver, but really is not. It's similar to the idea of eliminating PBS, it has no real budget cutting value.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Could someone explain what the argument for getting rid of the Department of Education is?

Trump and his supporters hate education, just like the Khmer Rouge? (That *is* why the hats are red, right?)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Again, clearly for the red avatars that simply don't seem to understand:

Eliminating the federal Department of Education IS NOT THE SAME as eliminating the entire public education system.  It merely decentralizes it to the states, as it was before 1980.

The idea that the Department of Education had any more control over education in this country than the previous Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has absolutely no relation to reality.  If anything, it had less because separating HEW into HHS and ED made it easier to target Federal education programs politically.

The only idea in this thread that has even less of a relation to reality is the idea that people who talk about eliminating the ED are only proposing to eliminate some bureaucracy but not any programs.  The savings, if any, from recombining HHS and ED into a revived HEW are at most a few million unless programs themselves are being cut.

[Speed of Sound]

The only idea in this thread that has even less of a relation to reality is the idea that people who talk about eliminating the ED are only proposing to eliminate some bureaucracy but not any programs.  The savings, if any, from recombining HHS and ED into a revived HEW are at most a few million unless programs themselves are being cut.

That pretty much says it all right there. This is a talking point and nothing more.

[Adam Griffin]

[Gustaf]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

What you mean the kind of economics which requires evidence for its claims? You statist hack! I once half read the Wikipedia page for A Road to Serfdom and that's all the evidence i need.

[Rules for me, but not for thee]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

What you mean the kind of economics which requires evidence for its claims? You statist hack! I once half read the Wikipedia page for A Road to Serfdom and that's all the evidence i need.

I read the Cliffs Notes on Keynes General Theory therefore ipso facto I'm an expert. Now I'm going to break some windows and avoid the liquidity trap!

[Gustaf]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

What you mean the kind of economics which requires evidence for its claims? You statist hack! I once half read the Wikipedia page for A Road to Serfdom and that's all the evidence i need.

Exactly.

And to Dabeav, leftwing people who don't understand economics tend to make this more obvious from the get-go. Libertarians often pass themselves off as in line with the science based on understand benefits of competitive markets and so on. But then I see threads like this.

[Rules for me, but not for thee]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

What you mean the kind of economics which requires evidence for its claims? You statist hack! I once half read the Wikipedia page for A Road to Serfdom and that's all the evidence i need.

Exactly.

And to Dabeav, leftwing people who don't understand economics tend to make this more obvious from the get-go. Libertarians often pass themselves off as in line with the science based on understand benefits of competitive markets and so on. But then I see threads like this.

I just simply believe what Hayek did, that we can't know enough to control economies as it is a market of many different individuals...hence the "Pretense of Knowledge":

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."

[Gustaf]

My main takeaway from this thread was the reminder that a lot of libertarians need to read actual economics.

What you mean the kind of economics which requires evidence for its claims? You statist hack! I once half read the Wikipedia page for A Road to Serfdom and that's all the evidence i need.

Exactly.

And to Dabeav, leftwing people who don't understand economics tend to make this more obvious from the get-go. Libertarians often pass themselves off as in line with the science based on understand benefits of competitive markets and so on. But then I see threads like this.

I just simply believe what Hayek did, that we can't know enough to control economies as it is a market of many different individuals...hence the "Pretense of Knowledge":

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."

Well, I think that is oversimplifying a generally sound point. There are plenty of examples of market failures that don't always call for government intervention but reasonably do in some cases at least.