The president has committed $100 billion in new money to the nation’s public school systems, and required that states accepting the funds promise not to reduce their own k-12 spending. The official argument for this measure is that higher school spending will accelerate U.S. economic growth. But a July 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Sciences finds that, to the authors’ own surprise, higher spending on public schooling is associated with lower subsequent economic growth. Spending more on public schools hurts the U.S. economy.

Ouch! Pretty painful stuff there.  It seems it’s not all about school but more about achievement (something our schooling systems are doing less and less of). Read it all here!  Obama has to be the biggest pork barrel spending, lobby loving, irresonsible, wasteful spender of all time!

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

“From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination,” the researchers wrote in an article, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” recently published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.

via 07.22.2003 – Researchers help define what makes a political conservative.

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.

Um, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and the list goes on end up making a profit.  Oh, and nobody propped up the poorly run companies.  Obama is actually sustaining what has happened.   How he can say this with a straight face is beyond me?

We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.

Now, Obama is talking about decideing what people study in college!!!  Jeez and right in the NYTimes???

Now, the fact that we had such poor regulation means — in some of these markets, particularly around the securitized mortgages — means that the pain has been democratized as well. And that’s a problem. But I think that overall there are ways in which people have been able to participate in our stock markets and our financial markets that are potentially healthy. Again, what you have to have, though, is an updating of the regulatory regimes comparable to what we did in the 1930s, when there were rules that were put in place that gave investors a little more assurance that they knew what they were buying.

Updated regulations (i.e. more regulation), yep that’s the solution.  Because all of the last centuries worth of regulations hasn’t been enough.  While your at it why not raise taxes some and spend more government money.  Yep, that’s the solution…

We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.

 Great, I was hoping my kids would have a choice in the type of education and career they wanted.  I guess they’re going to be to stupid to figure it out on their own.  Good thing the State has a plan for them

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting. And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

Even Obama admits the problem.   What’s his solution?  Private pay like he mentioned he’d have done for his Grandmother…

Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Oh, he doesn’t have a solution.  I guess this issue then is a sideline issue?  Nope, it’s more like a top priority!

From dictating our children’s educations, to increasing legislation, to helping the “doctors, scientists, ethicists” decide the fates of our grandmothers it’s pretty interesting stuff.