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I woke up to Trump pulling a plug on the Department of Education. There's the usual freakout because this makes great headlines, there's the usual handwaving from the WH about how the programs people actually care about will get renamed and shoveled somewhere else, and Trump's enemies become further entrenched.
In principle this is similar to a lot of his other actions: it's motivated by the belief that Americans are getting a raw deal (they are), that they are paying too much and spending the money ineffectively (the money is not resulting in better educational achievement), and the looming giant specter that the government is heavily debt laden and going to go broke if you are not a subscriber to some wonkery like MMT. Trump is using the full power of the executive to chainsaw away the federal bloat and return power and responsibility back to the states.
What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders. They will make a complete hash of it: "Brexit means Brexit" - never in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it, as if the organs of government were rebelling against being told to perform their jobs for the first time in years and immediately set about trying to sabotage the mandated accomplishment with malicious compliance (you voted for Brexit because you hate immigrants, let's get even more of them in the country).
I believed, and still do, think Trump is a better president for America than Harris and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming. Better yet, the loony side of Team Blue decisively lost in politics, and "demographics are destiny" has been proven false again. Maybe there's a chance they'll learn something before the pendulum swings back again.
However, there stands a very real chance of complete disaster across America as people who have never had to make a real decision in their lives find themselves suddenly having to as the Fed washes its hands and trims budgets. Not to mention the state employees who suddenly have to find room in the budget for all the things the federal government previously took care of. State governments are as subject to the same socialization of losses and the privatization of profits as the Fed is, and just as vulnerable to grifters, lawyers, and all manner of incompetent bureaucrats.
Before team red stans /ourguy/ some more, I would urge you to reconsider - do you have a good opinion of the people working in your state's government, and do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?
We already did state-run education and it resulted in varying degrees of intelligence across the countries as one state taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake and another taught that vaccines are evil.
Can you tell me which states (not individual teachers or schools, but states, as a matter of state policy) taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake, and which ones taught that vaccines are evil?
Tennessee's Butler Act, which was the instigation for the Scopes Monkey Trial, made it illegal to teach evolution or to contradict the Biblical origin story, but even among creationists, Young Earth Creationism is a minority view (maybe not in 1925; I don't know) and I don't think even 1925 creationists claimed that dinosaurs were fake.
Also, can you point to evidence that creationists are, on average, less intelligent than atheists?
Here's the thing: I see your point and somewhat agree with it (national standards for education are probably a good thing), but when you phrase it with this kind of sneering millenium-era atheism, you don't seem to be making an argument, just looking for a chance to demonstrate iamverysmart.
And relevant to our discussion elsewhere, if I really wanted to I could mod this comment as "inflammatory claim without evidence" or "boo outgroup." Which I'm not going to do, despite all the reports and downvotes it got, because I don't think it really is, it's just making your argument in an unpleasant and sneering way. But do you perhaps begin to perceive why we have to make judgment calls about modding posts? You want to make people upset and express your contempt for your outgroup, but you'd undoubtedly find it very unfair and mean if I modded you for this comment.
I am an atheist and I think creationism is stupid, btw. So none of this is coming from a place of personal bias.
This depends on what you count as creationism. YEC is definitely more common in the US than true old earth creationism but intelligent design is probably more common than either and the median 'God created the world and we know this because the bible says so' type couldn't tell you which of the three he believes.
Is it? I guess you're right, it does depend on how broadly you define creationism. (Some Christians say they believe evolution happened but God guided it, which is close to intelligent design but not quite, IMO.) But my impression at least from more intellectual and scientifically-educated creationists is that most of them don't necessarily believe the world is literally 6000 years old.
I can't speak to the rest of the country, but in Texas the use of scientific and intellectual arguments generally points to more commitment to the Usher Chronology(what people usually mean by 6000 years old), not less, because the Usher Chronology needs more epicycles than old earth creationism.
I mean it is true that if you count intelligent design(which in its heyday was popular enough to receive official endorsement from the Catholic church in addition to the usual protestant churches) as old earth creationism it's more popular than young earth creationism- and probably evolution as well. But I think it's probably best to see intelligent design as a middle ground between creationism and evolution; it quite explicitly allows for non-theistic mechanisms the way true creationism doesn't.
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