Somebody FREAKIN shoot me!!!!

[Mkelcy]

There are many issues in the air here.

On education: do some reading on the Finnish educational system - they don't test; they surely don't use standardized tests; teachers are highly paid and even more respected; they view investment in their kids as critically important; oh, and they are also one of the most successful public school systems in the world. Note that none of those statements are (generally speaking) true of our educational system.

Next, the notion that the 1% are the economy is just utter BS. The vast majority of the 1% are executives who have played the corporate political game well, Wall Street vulture capitalists of various stripes who have manipulated financial instruments of various kinds (including corporate LBO's, junk bonds and so on), folks with inherited wealth and so on. The folks making $1,000,000 or more per year aren't, so far as I can, see job creators: they are the lucky beneficiaries of the visionaries who were, in fact, the job creators or are manipulating the legacies of those same job creators. Mostly the 1% are corporate executives (aka job exporters) and financial manipulators who have never created anything.

The "job creators" are folks like my gardener who has 2 employees on his payroll, the guy who painted my house recently, and all the other small shops and businesses throughout this country. With each job they create, their employees can afford to consume more goods, the fortune 500 companies run by the 1% get to sell more stuff and claim to be "job creators."

What this thread does demonstrate is that, as a nation, our values are seriously out of whack.