Education spending cuts are the most insulting reduction of any budget. The education of any country is the determining factor for its success. It carries on the understanding and improvement of certain procedures that maintain the integrity and the operations we’ve built our country on.
From the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, comes a sum of $787 billion. Only $100 billion has been assigned to the total amount of K-12 and higher education institutions across the nation. The amount available shifts from state to state, based on population size.
Although we are thought to be receiving $11 billion over the next three years in California, we are still faced with weakened college resources.
Any reduction to the current level of school budgets will be problematic unless one-day class size and selection are restored. In the state of California we are dealt debts to repay and in the only way we can; by feeding government funds through our everyday spending habits.
Many students don’t even mind the increased payments; we have been adjusting to higher prices since the day we’ve had enough money to meet any of them, but the reduction to teachers, course compression and growing class size is where the budget cuts hit hardest.
Trimming the education budget has potential to aid the state deficit, slightly, but many other paths can be taken to answer the debt larger than all of the school systems could buy out.
If the deficit is truly bruising, enough so that measures are taken to restrict spending on the most promising institutions, it should seem that a simple law change that could bring in the billions would easily slide right into the budget.
Of course I’m speaking of the legalization of marijuana. It creates $14 billion a year, under the radar, making it the largest cash crop of California. With that sort of potential, and one of the more dangerous drugs, alcohol, already largely legal, it seems more beneficial to legalize it now than any other time.
The reduction of petty federal crimes in the state, if marijuana was as legal as alcohol, would help to squeeze Schwarzenegger’s pennies.
As in regard to alcohol, consumers are undoubtedly dedicated to their favorite poison, and a slight tax increase across the board of liquor would surely bump the state dollar up.
To think the cuts of education seemed to answer Schwarzenegger’s money dilemma, instead of a handful of other money saving solutions, just shows how small our ideas of educational institutions has become.
We have come to a point where the modified state of humanity demands high financial attention, so much so that other basic human abilities and purposes are side-bound, because they don’t show up on the long term financial map our lives are forced to flutter over.