Where should government spend money?

[Epidemic]

I am not a big government education type but I am beginning to think if we are going to spend billions of dollars on something I think we should take all kids with (lets say ) a B average and better and either pay for their college or give them a no interest loan as long as they pursue a from a list of degrees in fields we need. No basket weaving, liberal arts... unless we run short of people in those fields.

Doctors, engineers, chemists, physics, computer sciences...

[Steve R Jones]

Thanks but no thanks. Have you not seen the news about high unemployment AND all the college grads looking for work.

Loaning money that MUST be paid back is one thing - giving it away is another.

[Epidemic]

Thanks but no thanks. Have you not seen the news about high unemployment AND all the college grads looking for work.

Loaning money that MUST be paid back is one thing - giving it away is another.

payback could be predicated on ability to pay. I mean we are writing a ficticious law here

[Steve R Jones]

I mean we are writing a ficticious law here

In other words - nothing to see here...move on to the next thread

[tony_j15]

Loaning money that MUST be paid back is one thing - giving it away is another.

So you are against the Pell Grant? Without it, I wouldn't have gone to college at all or left mired in debt.

[Epidemic]

the point of my plan is to increase the Quantity of good students who are denied an education robbing society of their potential.

Are we a better society for having left good students working manual labor?

would we be better off if more kids went into the sciences and swelled the ranks of our technology sector?

[Chuckiechan]

We have to get consumption back up. And to do that we need to put our own interests ahead of China's.

One way is to cut corporate and personal taxes, followed by an import duty on Chinese products found to be under valued due to currency manipulation. Sure there will be a stink up, but remember - we are China's biggest customer. They cannot exist without us. They are the "teetering giant".

FYI currency manipulation has the same effect as a tariff. We can't keep letting China get away with this. It is killing us.

That should help even the playing field for domestic businesses. As they expand, they hire more people and those people spend, stimulating demand.

Also, we are going be in this economic battle for a generation. I'd venture to say 30% of today's 18 to 30 year old's are going to have a rough time creating any sort of a life for themselves.

We have a very deep hole to slowly crawl out of.

Regarding education... fine. Do what you want, but we will have to keep importing talent. We just don't produce enough over here right now.

[MTAtech]

Jared Bernstein has a heartfelt lament about the priorities of the American right, and in particular the way it’s determined to slash taxes for the wealthy while slashing student aid.

Think of Pell grants as a ladder to climb over those steeper barriers. So the last thing you’d want to do is to cut rungs from that ladder. Yet that’s exactly what the House Republican budget, authored by Rep Paul Ryan, does. According to the White House, the budget changes “eligibility and funding under the Pell Grant formula so as to eliminate grants for 400,000 students and cut grants for more than 9 million others in 2013 alone.”
...
According to this OECD analysis, the US has essentially ceased making progress in terms of college attainment. The figure is a touch gnarly, but the blue (?—I’m color blind!) boxes show the tertiary, or college-level, attainment of 55-64 year olds in 2009, so people born between the mid-40s and the 50s. The light blue (??) triangles show the college attainment of the current generation of 25-34 year olds, so people born in the mid-70s through the mid-80s. This enables you to evaluate the progress made over a generation in college attainment across countries (let’s pause for some props to the OECD—they kill on this stuff).

And he gives us this chart:

[Theophylact]

Evident in the graph, and a key pull from the article:

Not only are the US attain levels now behind those of 12 other countries, but we’ve made no progress in a generation.

(I thought at first "attain levels" was a typo, but it's just edspeak or something.)

[Epidemic]

Now that I see that graph I am thinking that perhaps this is not much of a big deal. We started out high a generation ago and we are fairly close to all but 4 nations.

Seriously though I think those graphs mean little if the degrees are in basket weaving. Where we clearly are showing lag is the sciences. that is where the real money is made. Having a but load of lawyers only shuffles money around. Produce a couple of new products with some science majors and produce a couple of products with a good team of engineers and maybe we could export something besides wheat.

[thephilosophizer]

Now that I see that graph I am thinking that perhaps this is not much of a big deal. We started out high a generation ago and we are fairly close to all but 4 nations.

Seriously though I think those graphs mean little if the degrees are in basket weaving. Where we clearly are showing lag is the sciences. that is where the real money is made. Having a but load of lawyers only shuffles money around. Produce a couple of new products with some science majors and produce a couple of products with a good team of engineers and maybe we could export something besides wheat.

Agreed that the US should be doing more to encourage students in the sciences. But nothing is going to change so long as all the best jobs are on wall street. That's just the trouble, all the economic incentives are set up to send the best and brightest off to Bank of America. Whereas they need to be going to companies like GE, and Boeing, or starting their own.
Simply put, financiers make too much money, and we're all screwed if we don't do something about it.