Closing the Department of Education
rickdugan
Verified and Certifiable Super-Reviewer
If there ever was an agency both more useless and meddlesome than this one, I do not know of it. It is long past time to shut this social experiment posing as a governmental agency down.
Under its purported stewardship, American educational standards have steadily declined. This is what happens when you prioritize social goals over working to maximize academic excellence and rigor.
I remember my first direct taste of this when my kids were young and Michelle Obama used the agency to force schools to move to supposedly healthy lunches. What a shit show. The food was often so inedible that children were throwing it away and going hungry in the process, which defeats the whole purpose of providing school lunches, especially to poor kids. For many years we had to send our kids to school with lunch boxes, until common sense finally prevailed once Trump was elected and these initiatives were rolled back.
But the worst is probably the many ways in which the agency used Title IX as a hammer to compel schools to comply with their social policy experiments. Most recently by trying to force schools to allow boys in girls' locker rooms and bathrooms and on their playing fields, which was blessedly blocked by the courts. But even long before that, during previous Dem administrations, they were using it to deprive young college men of due process in school administrative proceedings in which girls claimed that they were raped (yet the police were somehow almost never involved).
But even better, while they showed great ability to promote crazy ass social policies, they couldn't get right one of the few things they actually should have been doing. Recently they were tasked with upgrading and rolling out a new electronic FAFSA form, which is the form that kids and parents must fill out to qualify for need-based college grants and loans. They fucked this exercise up so badly that many kids didn't know what they qualified for even as the new college school year was about to start. This is information that kids needed several months prior in order to decide which school to attend or if they could even afford to attend one at all.
The agency may have started with good intentions, but it has morphed into something that accomplishes little other than to serve as a social policy petri dish. It is long past time for this thing to go.
Under its purported stewardship, American educational standards have steadily declined. This is what happens when you prioritize social goals over working to maximize academic excellence and rigor.
I remember my first direct taste of this when my kids were young and Michelle Obama used the agency to force schools to move to supposedly healthy lunches. What a shit show. The food was often so inedible that children were throwing it away and going hungry in the process, which defeats the whole purpose of providing school lunches, especially to poor kids. For many years we had to send our kids to school with lunch boxes, until common sense finally prevailed once Trump was elected and these initiatives were rolled back.
But the worst is probably the many ways in which the agency used Title IX as a hammer to compel schools to comply with their social policy experiments. Most recently by trying to force schools to allow boys in girls' locker rooms and bathrooms and on their playing fields, which was blessedly blocked by the courts. But even long before that, during previous Dem administrations, they were using it to deprive young college men of due process in school administrative proceedings in which girls claimed that they were raped (yet the police were somehow almost never involved).
But even better, while they showed great ability to promote crazy ass social policies, they couldn't get right one of the few things they actually should have been doing. Recently they were tasked with upgrading and rolling out a new electronic FAFSA form, which is the form that kids and parents must fill out to qualify for need-based college grants and loans. They fucked this exercise up so badly that many kids didn't know what they qualified for even as the new college school year was about to start. This is information that kids needed several months prior in order to decide which school to attend or if they could even afford to attend one at all.
The agency may have started with good intentions, but it has morphed into something that accomplishes little other than to serve as a social policy petri dish. It is long past time for this thing to go.
16 comments
USAID
Dept of Energy
NEA
Ad Council
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and the big one...
The Internal Revenue Service. Do away with all of the income taxes, sliding scales, loopholes, and cut outs. Lay down a flat tax on business and a VAT tax on private individuals. So fucking simple and FAIR.
Congress could simply block grant the money to state DoEs and let them figure out how best to allocate it. True Title IX violations can still be pursued by the DoJ. And any "reinterpreations" of Title IX can be handled by the outfit that is supposed to do the legislating, which of course is Congress.
I will be the first to acknowledge their are severe problems from many government organizations. Most of these problems stem from being influenced by corporate lobbyists who benefit from them.
That will be a thread for a different time when I have all my facts together.
The only thing I strongly disagree on is the IRS being removed. I have read countless theories about going to a flat tax, but there is one thing that even those articles admit. A flat tax rate would primarily increase the cost of consumer goods and housing. Effectively making everything more expensive for the lower classes of society who spend most of their income on housing, goods, and services.
For the any family bringing $360K or above annually, it's just more of a tax cut.
These deductions tend to be the government's attempt to turn people towards "socially desirable" behaviors. If the government started to "live and let live," we could let most of these deductions go. The rich pay more since they can't create legal structures to avoid taxes. Loads of "professionals" whose whole raison d'etre is to navigate all these rules and carve-outs go out of business. Within a few years, AI will be able to tell us who's cheating and by how much, so we don't need a whole agency of paper pushers to do that. We all save an assload of time, as taxes under the new system take 10 minutes.
Everyone wins, except those who benefit from making our lives as difficult as possible, or wannabe overlord who would be better off trying to create "harmony" in Xi's China.
The current screaming about USAID is hilarious: a 60+ year old EO JFK put into place, that has grown on auto-pilot with zero Congressional oversight from a baby alligator into a Nomenklatura behemoth on it's own living in the NYC sewar system with spending as a Global Agenda Slush Fund needs to be drawn and quartered, everyone released, and somehow the Radical Dems are calling this a "Constitutional Crisis." Sure, we can provide aid properly where needed, we are a compassionate country, we are NOT a The Soros Bank for the UN, IMF and World Bank. We are running a $2T deficit - Millions/Billions of Dollars from small programs add up, like the $1B we spend on PBS/NBR that needs to be go.
Now the Dems are screaming "Musk is taking over Treasury", which is hilarious. "This is how Hitler rose to power."
I am disappointed the first day Elon arrived to start DOGE on 20-Jan he didn't carry a kitchen sink with him. RINOs and Dems would have had to change their underwear.
The ones who will be affected the worst will be disabled kids who rely on Special Ed programs. But who needs those leeching Invalids anyway, right? Just more hungry mouths to feed. Compassion is for weak woke libruls!
But hey, the United States president was expelled from his private grammar school despite his father being a board member, for not only being stupid as a rock with an IQ of 73, but because in his dimwitted frustration, he ultimately attacked one of his teachers. He was then sent to a military boarding school as a punishment. That's his background, so of course he doesn't see the value in education. Most people aren't born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Getting rid of publicly funded education sets the stage for other countries to surpass the USA and just run laps around us in the future.
In the late 1700s, the Jesuits said, "Give us your children until they are 7 and we'll have them for life." This is a common theme that was used in Germany and Japan in the 1920s/1930s, North Korea, ect. The Liberals = The Blue Shirts, and it has been ongoing since the DOE was created by Jimmy Carter, and bolstered by the MSM, and we are now ranked like #32 when in the 1970s we were #1.
Companies that go from #1 to the bottom either collapse or reorganize (like GE & IBM).