Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [84]
“Giving lots of money to the public schools makes you money!”
When our pathetic schools send a generation of idiots and illiterates out into the work-a-day world, how in God’s name do you expect to make any money? Right now, your office is full of people who cannot spell, who cannot do long division, who do not know how to ship a box to Bolivia because they haven’t a friggin’ clue what a Bolivia is.
Wondering why your wallet is gone and the punk in front of you is ready to shoot you? Try these statistics on for size: 40 percent of the U.S. prison population is functionally illiterate. Gee, how’d they get that way? From 1980 to 2000, states’ expenditures on education went up 32 percent. In that same period of time, states’ spending on prisons went up 189 percent. Now that’s smart thinking! And while they’re in prison, are they making you any money? No! The state is actually taking license plate work away from your coffers. You want those workers free so they can come to work in your prison!
Seventy-five percent of welfare recipients are illiterate. Don’t you think things might be a little different if they could read and write? I don’t mean different for them, I mean different for YOU. That’s a lot of welfare mothers who could be slaving away for you and making YOU money if they weren’t stuck in the prison of their illiteracy. Educate them well and you will reap the rewards.
It totally boggles my mind that conservatives haven’t demanded, purely out of self-interest, that our schools prepare young people to contribute and even excel in the workplace. Workers are supposed to bring you great ideas and make you filthy rich. Instead, they’re sitting out there in their cubicles trying to figure out how to download the latest Weezer album. That’s the result of all these years of chanting “leave no child behind” and demanding that your state keep testing kids with mandated exams. Teachers have stopped teaching anything useful and now teach for the test. Here’s what it got you: a lot of kids who know how to beat a test but not much else. I’ve got a kid in my office right now who thought the U.K. was Russia, had never heard the name “George McGovern,” and figured a legal pad was where you store legal court documents. And he’s the smartest one in here! HELP!!!
“By never voting for a Republican again, you will make a ton of money!”
Look, I realize that at one time being a Republican and voting for Republicans seemed like the sure way to becoming wealthy. But that is not the way it works these days. Thirty years ago, if you made the equivalent of $50,000, you were rich. You lived in a big beautiful home. And there were hundreds, if not thousands, like you in every town in America. Roosevelt’s New Deal had created a massive middle class and the gaps between rich and poor had actually decreased 7.4 percent from 1947 to 1968. It was not that hard to make the leap from working class to middle class or from middle class to well-to-do. The gap between those groups was not that wide. That’s why all it took to be a rich kid back then was to have your dad be a family physician, a dentist, a lawyer, an accountant, a Realtor, the owner of a grocery store, or a mid-level management guy at the auto company. But all that began to crumble starting in the seventies when the income disparity really began to widen.
These days, the chance of you being rich, as I said earlier, is zip. Right now, the 13,000 families that make up the top .01 percent control the equivalent wealth of the poorest twenty million ones. And while those living it up in the top one percent have enjoyed income increases of 157 percent in the past twenty years, the middle class has only gotten a 10 percent increase. Only 10 percent for the mass of people who have powered the explosion in wealth we have