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His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy

by ohyes 16y ago

His claim is that California is bottom of the barrel WRT the amount of money that it is reinvesting in its education system. (Hence the 'prime the pump' analogy)... This is true: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_pergdp-finance-current-expenditures-per-gdp http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per... To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and mean-spirited. If a politician wants to raise taxes (in any way, even on the wealthiest 1 or .1%, who would barely notice), countless will bitch about it, without regard for data or reason (or common sense). It will be a knee jerk reaction. WRT to his assumptions, I don't think that he is assuming that California is not spending its money wastefully (see his mention of the penal system). There is an argument to be made, however, that it is incredibly difficult to reclaim wasteful spending that has already been done. (California is not going to pardon 60% of its prison population and close its prisons or cancel state pensions). So the expedient solution, if you believe in spending more on education and social services, would be to tax more. (but no politician in their right mind would say that).

moron4hire 16y ago
The fundamental problem is that everyone has only ever focused on expedient solutions.
- ohyes 16y ago
  I think that there is a distinction to be made here between /politically/ expedient solutions, and expedient solutions with regards to actual goals. The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve. In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result. This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out. Our political system needs a new heuristic. (Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)

by ohyes 16y ago

moron4hire 16y ago

The fundamental problem is that everyone has only ever focused on expedient solutions.

ohyes 16y ago
I think that there is a distinction to be made here between /politically/ expedient solutions, and expedient solutions with regards to actual goals. The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve. In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result. This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out. Our political system needs a new heuristic. (Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)