Friday, June 19, 2009
Priorities
San Jose is increasing class size from 20 to 30 students to save $6 million. The state legislature, recognizing that such "savings", along with other "savings" like firing teachers and shortening the school year, is actually (imagine that) going to affect the quality of education, is proposing to eliminate the high school exit exam. No sense testing students if you know in advance you've done a poor job educating them. Just graduate 'em and get 'em the heck out of there. I'm sure they'll be qualified for the military, if nothing else.
$6 million is the cost of 13 minutes of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan (the "supplemental" just passed allocates $80 billion for war through Sept. 30 - that's $20 billion/month, $667 million/day and $28 million/hour). $6 million is the amount we spend on our total "defense" budget in less than one minute. $6 million is less than one percent of what Barack Obama spent to be elected President of the United States. $6 million is two-tenths of one percent of the $3 billion we will be sending to Israel this year to help them maintain their brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, less than four-tenths of one percent of the $1.5 billion we're about to send to Pakistan, much of which has been spent to arm themselves for a war against India.
Is there any wonder we can't find $6 million to educate our children?
