In today’s political climate, government waste is a big red bullseye. To get that target off their chest, the American Postal Workers Union is running an educational commercial about where the U.S.P.O. gets its funding.
Personally, I find it sad that postal workers feel the need to defend themselves in this way. They may not be perfect, but I’ve always been amazed at the job they do. The idea that you can drop a stamped letter in a mailbox and have it arrive a few days later across the country, or across the world, is awesome. In fact, it’s the kind of awesome that our tax dollars ought to support, just like our taxes support bridges and roads, national parks, public universities, and so on.
Speaking of public universities, did you know that the community colleges in California used to be free? Yes, they were free until 1982, when President Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian took that “entitlement” away from citizens of the Golden State. According to Tom Hayden, “their motivation was not merely budgetary but also a matter of ideological principle. Nothing, they said, should be free in life, which meant that investment in public colleges and universities should be replaced by a consumer-marketplace approach.”
This narrow-minded greed in America must be eradicated. We educate our citizens so they can become productive members of society, who in turn contribute a great deal to the economy. The alternative is chaos and the undermining of the American way, which costs us a million times more than funding our schools ever will.