Rick Perry is a serious contender for the next president of the US. Part of his platform is to eliminate three US government agencies completely: Education, Commerce and ... hm. In a recent debate Perry managed to completely forget which third agency he wanted to axe and was even convinced by others in the debate to name the Environmental Protection Agency, which he doesn't have any intent to dismantle. It turns out that he actually wants to eliminate the Education, Commerce and Energy agencies.
Here is the rub. The gaffe everyone is talking about is Perry forgetting which agency he wants to eliminate, rather than the bare fact that Perry wants to completely remove 3 critical government agencies! This isn't a joke folks, this is the actual platform of a guy who has a real shot at running the US by the end of next year. Forgetting which agency he wants to get rid of is a hell of a bad sign for a prospective president but it is small beans compared to the fact that he wants to do it at all.
While I think Perry is probably a nut bar, I've been thinking about it an maybe removing the department of education wouldn't be that bad. We don't have a federal education ministry in Canada because it's a provincial responsibility. I'm not sure how similar or different things are in the US. If the federal education department was responsible for No Child Left Behind then maybe getting rid of them would be a good thing.
ReplyDeletePerry is definitely a nutbar. You have a point though, if that the education ministry is doing nothing (or doing awful things, like No Child Left Behind) and it is duplicated elsewhere then it isn't helping. I doubt that it is so clear cut but I don't actually know for sure.
ReplyDeleteIf his argument was "I will change education so it is run by individual states because this will save money and improve education" then I wouldn't be able to evaluate it - it seems like it might be a fine idea. "Just get rid of it" seems like a bad plan for balancing the budget when you could just chop the bloated military budget instead.
Yeah, we both agree he's nuts, and we both agree that we don't know that much about what the federal department of education actually does. Between these two facts I'm left wondering if this is an insane idea or a diamond in the rough (where "diamond" means "not a terrible thing" and the "rough" is "an unfathomable sea of terrible things."
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