National Security Strategy – February 2015 by Barack Obama.
If you are not already following the U.S. Dept. of Fear (FearDept) on Twitter, you should be.
FearDept tweets that “terrorism” is mentioned fifty-three (53) times in thirty-five (35) pages.
Despite bold claims about our educational system, it is mentioned only sixteen (16) times. And the president doesn’t mention that LSU is facing a one-third (1/3) cut to its budget, damaging higher education in Louisiana in ways that won’t be easy to repair. Cutting Louisiana higher education by $300 million, putting it into perspective Louisiana isn’t the only state raising tuition and cutting state support for higher education, but it is one of the worst offenders.
If you want to know exactly how grim the situation is for education, see: States Are Still Funding Higher Education Below Pre-Recession Levels, which details how all fifty (50) states, save for Alaska and North Dakota, have cut funding for education. The report explores a variety of measures to illustrate the impact that funding cuts and tuition increases have had on education.
Unlike the extolling of the U.S. education system rhetoric in President Obama’s text, the report concludes:
States have cut higher education funding deeply since the start of the recession. These cuts were in part the result of a revenue collapse caused by the economic downturn, but they also resulted from misguided policy choices. State policymakers relied overwhelmingly on spending cuts to make up for lost revenues. They could have lessened the need for higher education funding cuts if they had used a more balanced mix of spending cuts and revenue increases to balance their budgets.
To compensate for lost state funding, public colleges have both steeply increased tuition and pared back spending, often in ways that may compromise the quality of the education and jeopardize student outcomes. Now is the time to renew investment in higher education to promote college affordability and quality.
Strengthening state investment in higher education will require state policymakers to make the right tax and budget choices over the coming years. A slow economic recovery and the need to reinvest in other services that also have been cut deeply means that many states will need to raise revenue to rebuild their higher education systems. At the very least, states must avoid shortsighted tax cuts, which would make it much harder for them to invest in higher education, strengthen the skills of their workforce, and compete for the jobs of the future.
The conclusions on education funding were based on facts. President Obama’s text is based on fantasies that support the military-industrial complex and their concubines.
Can you name a foreign terrorist attack on the United States other than 9/11? That’s what I thought. Unique events are not a good basis for policy making or funding.