Bernie, Yang, Socialism, Public Systems, and Real Reform

[Vladz0r]

I started writing this in response to the Cuba socialism video but it quickly became off-topic, so I started a topic here.

I really like a sort of hybrid approach to our country that Yang and Bernie have been proposing, more Yang in terms of fixing current systems and UBI, and Bernie in terms of infrastructure investments. Yang for example in his book talks about why Disability and Welfare fail as systems. Ben Shapiro talked about this as well in a talk with Black Lives Matter (can you believe I actually sat through this video?). For example, current food stamp laws don't promote obtaining capital by not letting people own a vehicle worth over $4500. The disability system keeps 99% of its people permanently locked into the system, because it gives enough for most people to never want to return to the workforce that they've left, usually due to capitalist practices and lack of labor unions, and had to fight for disability to even get it. You need a good lawyer to even get disability in the US nowadays, whereas it used to be easier. Shapiro doesn't really think the government is capable of creating jobs and infrastructure, and it squanders money, mostly because I think the US government has been very incompetent and illogical in its approach to poverty and crime. I think it's fair that he doesn't want the tax for people to go to a 4 year-college for useless degrees to trickle down to him as his wife is taking on hundreds of thousands in debt. Taxes on the rich, even on the stock market, can often trickle down to people at the bottom to maintain their CEO wages and profit margins. 

 
With the school system: I actually agree somewhat with Shapiro and Yang on this over Bernie's plan. Bernie emphasizes college too much, as college has become the standard, but obivously college degrees are pointless for a lot of degrees, waste a lot of time, cost a lot of debt, etc. It'd be great if it was free, but it's not. I would start with reforms to the school system first, as Shapiro mentions. Bernie also wants to triple funding to public education, which sounds wonderful. Well, if you look at what happened when they put $12 billion into Camden New Jersey. A lot of the money was squandered and led to marginal improvements. Ironically the charter school system that a lot of people dislike in the US wound up leading to them having access to a good school over there. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing. Money alone won't solve the education crisis in the US.

As a former teacher in a big city, I can tell you that the education system K-8 is primarily bullshit. Private, public, charter, whatever. I've visited and been at schools all over my city and seen what their standards are based on, primarily New York schools. The focus on STEM is highly misguided. We're trying to get 8th graders to learn Algebra but don't even have a robust system for them to master their times tables. Students never even learn how to memorize basic facts effectively. Most people you talk to do not know the effective methods of memorizing facts, learning a language, or mastering a skill. We have hardly any decent national curriculums in a system of for-profit curriculum selling. This means too many changing standards where teachers have to do too much planning, spend too much on books, and it just constrains the whole thing in the end over having open source options that are publicly funded and worked on in cooperations with Ivy League colleges, for example. This type of partnership would be very possible, in fact I've had a professor from Harvard that encouraged this type of reform. We also don't focus much on social studies in its entirety, meaning including things like economics, psychology, systems thinking, trade, politics, modern history (1900s especially) in favor of keeping the status quo.

I've taught complex topics like spaced repetition for memory learning, self-actualization topics, talked about meditation, shown Ted talks, related classical artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart to modern singers like Drake and Eminem, and had discussions with 8th graders before, in a low-income urban school. It's not a pipe dream to implement this type of stuff in the classroom, but teachers have national and state pressure for common core bullshit, PSSA testing, etc. You can call it a good indicator of college performance all you want, but college is already bloated when 1/3 to half your credits are often forced to go to nonessential classes. It's great for opening the mind up, but really we should be emphasizing that heavily starting with grades 5-12, and leave K-4 as more of the skill and drill fundamentals. We could have a subsidized private+public audiobook system for children to listen to books rather than being forced to purchase or borrow physical copies of them.  If I could run the district, I'd flip a lot of things completely upside down. I also believe our teachers are competent enough to dabble in these topics, especially the English, Social Studies, and Science teachers. We need a bottom-up and top-down approach, I guess you could say, because it starts with fixing the system early and giving students things that are actually interesting and useful if we want them to find a job. With the impending job loss coming from automation, it's gonna be a complete shitshow for impoverisehd urban youth, honestly.

We will never become Venezuela 2.0 even if we had 12 years of Bernie implementing everything he wants to do. We're too rich of a country for that to ever happen. We will also be doing huge deals for improving our infrastructure using foreign technology and a local workforce, and if you throw in housing cost regulations, you're looking at a 5-10 year investment to vastly improve our infrastructure. I'm talking like a national bus system through private companies with public funding, investment in the Hyperloop for cross-state travel, investments in solar and electric to reduce utility costs over time. I also disagree with some aspects of Green New Deal outright, including the banning of Nuclear Power. Until we actually have a sustainable means of providing and storing power, I think we need to keep it. Bill Gates has also said that there's potential for a huge improvement to the safety standards of nuclear power, to the point where it will become essentially foolproof and safe. I think for the amount of live power it generates 24/7, and the minimal waste it produces, it's good to keep during our transition period, and we'll see how it pans out in the future. There's a lot of other topics but I mostly wanted to talk about the school system, which I feel strongly about. It'd be great to return to teaching and get paid decently to teach a class that doesn't involve a whole day of teaching Math to 36 reluctant students in a hot or freezing cramped room. I can't even imagine having public schools as nice as in Scandinavia, China, the UK, or other modern country, but I'd like to believe something can be done. I know Trump and Bloomberg won't even try to do something to improve the system, because they don't fundamentally believe in good public education. They're more about nature over nurture, say "a good student with good parents will succeed anywhere" and whatnot. I can tell you this is false, looking at how students behave from year to year, from classroom to classroom, when their good teachers leave the classroom for a day, or permanently.

 

So yeah, it'd be cool to see what you like or dislike about our current institutions, policies, president, and the potential 2020 candidates. I'm biased for Bernie because I've seen the impact of good policies as my friends over in Germany and Spain get their free college and public healthcare, have lower crime and better safety nets, despite maybe not having the same potential for massive career and business opportunities growth that we have in the US.

[Vladz0r]

1 hour ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

You're absolutely right about America's education system needing a reform. I really hate the monotonous way they teach here, the school board refuses to institute genuine changes that have been proven to work, such as making the schools start later, because we're too attached to the old way of doing things.

You mention the Venezuela crisis, Venezuela actually resembles a third world Scandinavian Social Democracy. The crisis in Venezuela was actually caused by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia flooding the oil market with cheap oil in order to hurt Russia's imports, Venezuela was just the collateral damage, as they relied on oil to fund their welfare.

And if by hybrid system, you mean a mixed market economy that has capitalism, that won't work because in order to achieve this, it will require the capitalist class to make concessions, and if they're not forced to, they won't.

Yeah, that's the consensus I've heard about Venezuela. I mean a lot of Latin America / South America in general is relatively poor overall. They seem to mostly just export food to us at low prices and not really have a strong global market economy. I always find it ridiculous when people bring up a socialist company that already didn't have much going for it before it was socialist, and compare it to the US (and only looking at the middle class).

Well, I'm not sure how certain markets will work in a hybrid format, but things like solar power already get federal credits for example. I think partnerships might be a better way. Capitalism leads to innovation, government standardization can increase the total market and enforce a decent price. Maybe I'm being too idealistic, but look at the water desalination plants in San Jose as an example of a private + public partnership.