[quote]First, spending clearly has not been cut enough or we wouldn’t be discussing this.[/quote]
Depends on what you mean by “enough”. Not enough to close the budget hole. Enough that there are no easy solutions left.
[quote]Second, it has been shown time and time again that pumping money into a school system does not translate to better educational outcomes. [/quote]
Yes, it does. States with high K-12 spending per capita, (MA/NJ/CT/VT/…) tend to have high test scores and high apple-to-apple (race-adjusted) graduation rates. We spend 40% of the state budget on K-12, but that 40% is quite low by national standards. (Which is further proof that the state budget is bare bones, without much meat left to cut.) Last year California ranked 43rd out of 50 states by spending per student. NJ or VT spend twice as much as we do. Cutting the spending any further does not strike me as a wise experiment.
[quote]Moreover, just because someone doesn’t have health insurance doesn’t mean they could not buy it if they so chose.[/quote]
I don’t want to get into a full scale healthcare debate here, but I’ll just say that an average individual family health plan costs $6,500/year and comes with a $5,000/year deductible. And it does not cover sex changes. (Not that sex changes would account for more than 0.001% of the total premium, even if they were covered.)
Accusing people with 20-30k/year incomes of buying cell phones over health insurance seems silly.
