Thursday, July 31, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Letters

Do we really need public education?

While I agree with George Knapp that the larger businesses in this state have been expecting consumers to float the state budget on "fees" for far too long ("Just Wait Till '05," July 24), the fact that education was, at least ostensibly, the sticking point of the state budget standoff means we have to analyze the importance of education to the state budget. Even if Nevada's public education budget is deemed inadequate, we are still spending far more on that expense than medical care or law enforcement, the latter of which is necessarily a government responsibility.

Knapp disses another local column where the writer said that people in bygone days were just fine with only an eighth-grade education. Knapp also said, "[It's] true that more money doesn't mean better schools, but it's absolutely true that a lack of money will pretty much guarantee crummy schools."

Well, according to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research website, graduation rates in 2000 listed Nevada as 44th out of 50 (with a 60 percent graduation rate). In New York, state spending on public schools increased by $4.4 billion, or 45 percent, from 1995 to 2002. In 2000, New York's public school graduation rate was...39th out of 50, or 64 percent.

Are we to believe that if we spend that same level of money (which we really don't have), we will achieve New York's only marginally better results? That other columnist seems to have a point.

Is education necessary? Certainly, when one considers the results of ignorance. Is public-funded education necessary? No. Face it, FOOD is an even greater necessity to people of all ages, and we don't have a single state bureaucracy in charge of the production and distribution of food products. There are many good reasons why that is not the case. Ask a North Korean.

Is education such a great responsibility that it should be entrusted only to government? Why then do we allow home schooling, or have private institutes of higher education? Is the problem a lack of funds for private school? Why then do we have the regressive tax structure that Knapp accurately points out, given that the taxes the working class pay for public schools make it that much harder for them to afford a private institution of their choice? Is public education necessary because the state constitution says it is? The constitution also said there could be no tax increases without a two-thirds majority vote in the Legislature.

Basically, what is often thought of as objectively "necessary" in public spending is actually what one political faction TELLS us is necessary. In other words, there's a difference between what we need and what we want. And given the ever-escalating cost of government, and its insistence that spending and taxes must always go up regardless of the citizens' ability to pay, people in this state (and this country) are gonna have to make some hard decisions about how much government they NEED vs. how much government they WANT.

--James Gillen

There's no gray area in San Francisco

The Bush administration knowingly misled the nation into war. Ten thousand innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed. The Iraqi environment has been contaminated with depleted uranium and unexploded cluster bombs.

The administration rained down an unprovoked blitz of over 14,000 Tomahawk

missiles alone, at a cost of a million dollars each, on one of the poorest countries in the world the size of California, with a population that is 50 percent children.

The administration ignored international law. The voices of 40 Nobel Peace prize winners. The pleas of heads of all the world's main religions. The leaders of 90 percent of the planet's countries. Tens of millions of world citizens who marched against the war. The U.N. and a roster of prominent international environmental and humanitarian organizations that predicted the quagmire that the U.S. faces today. The administration bragged, "It'll be a cakewalk. ..."

The administration has bankrupted the U.S. treasury. Hijacked the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the government "of, for and by the people," while consolidating the "free press" necessary to democracy under control of a few corporations.

The administration is the ground zero of corruption. It must go. Now.

--Suzanne Nonamee,

San Francisco