Saving Miss Oliver’s

When I first heard the term supply-side economics, I assumed that what was to be supplied as the engine of economic health was great education. Silly me not to know that what my interlocutor was talking about so enthusiastically was minimum taxation and maximum deregulation. He was very vague about what was actually to be supplied, but very clear about the source: namely the top of the economic scale,  from which wealth would trickle down. I was so embarassed by my ignorance  that I forgot to mention to him that most of us prefer incomes that flow to those that trickle .

A hundred years from now, we will still be arguing about monetary policy. There will be forever conservatives and liberals and the confusion about the meaning of those terms will be just as enduring.  The one economic policy that we can all agree on – simply because it is so obvious – is to invest whatever it takes to make American K-12 education the best in the world.

Some numbers, quoted by Thomas friedman in The New York Times, April 22, 2009, “Swimming Without a Suit” say it all:

#The 2006 Program for International Student Assessment ranked American 15-year olds 25th out of 30 in math; 24 out of 30 in science:

#Friedma’s quoting from The Economic Impact of the Achievemant gap in American Schools, a report by MCKinsey, a consulting firm. “If we had raised the 1983 achievement gap between 1983 (When A Nation at Risk came out)  to the level of Finland and South Korea the GDP in 2008 would have been between 1.3 trillion and 2.3 trillion higher.