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Deterioration, Dissolution And Default
"The contested 2020 presidential election, brinkmanship over the debt limit to advance political agendas and failure to reach consensus on the country's fiscal challenges are recent signs of the deterioration in governance," Fitch said on May 24, while putting America's credit rating on watch for downgrade.
That sentence deserved more attention than it received. A ratings agency suggested, out in the open, that America's system of government is unraveling.
Fitch's warning was generally brushed
As usual, right on the head!
H
I look forward to your next monthly post as I suspect it will be well worth my time. Since some bright economist opened his copy of the US Statistical Abstract long ago, in a galaxy far, far away and looked at the table showing average incomes for various levels of educational attainment, he changed the world a bit because he saw that people with college degrees actually made much more money that the less well educated. Sadly, he got it wrong because the real correlation is between Education and income, not the ownership of a degree. Degrees mean very little to the many folks who got one, without absorbing the actual education that was supposed to accompany it. When a 2.0 or 2.25 GPA will get you the piece of paper, the over-under on your monetary outcome will likely be the under. I spent 40 years of my life trying to help my 12,000 odd students absorb an education. Truly, 90% of those folks had little inkling of what they were supposed to be doing. To be fair, what I was doing actually helped the top 10 or 15% become quite successful, and most importantly, able to change their lives, when necessary, to continue to cope and successfully lead others. About 20 years ago one spring semester became my best ever as I was presented with 7 undergraduate exchange students from Austria to be enrolled in my strategic planning class. For the next 15 weeks I was awed and delighted by these students and their work. The work I saw from these folks on their tests and papers was nearly flawless and would have received an A in my MBA class on the subject. They may have been the best in class in their home country, but their best was virtually unparalleled compared to my best US native students. We in the US, in spite of all talk to the contrary, actually don’t much respect or value education. When my daughter was just starting 7th grade she was selected for a new talented and gifted program with five other children. On the first day of class the teacher informed the students that their life was about to be come a living hell because being pegged as smart would make them outcasts. Better they should forget bettering themselves because only then could they achieve popularity. That was her last day in that program, actually the last day of the program.
There is a rural town i knew as a youth having spent summer months there with my grand parents, retired civil servants (Air Force). It was a place of conservative democrats Rick Perry was a democrat back then from a nearby town and Paul Harvey was on my grand pappies radio as we went to check his spread and his cattle every morning. This was their childhood home, my grand pappies family literally had to ford the river to get to town in his youth. It was a prosperous clean populated by remnants of old Texas pioneer stock.
I drive through a rural town every few years on my way to central Texas or beyond. The place is run down, nice houses from my youth have heaps of horded trash and Trump flags out front and it reminds me more of “Deliverance” than apple pie and lemonade. Back in the day a drive by and look would have evoked a wave from the people sitting outside on the porch, not these days. In 1978 you would have never heard a peep from anyone to a stranger about how many guns and what types a person owned. Today it would be the most practical way to get them to open up and engage in a conversation.
Well said!