Chilean Police tear gas student marchers

From Reuters via Yahoo! News:

Police used tear gas and water cannons to try to break up Chile's biggest student protests in decades on Tuesday as thousands of students marched to demand the government spend more of its fat budget surplus on education.

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We need protests like this in the States.

As my Economics teacher Mr. Jack Foster told us on a few occasions, education is the most underalocated resource in this country. Whether that is statistically true or just opinion, its definately something to think about. Mr. Foster's basically philosophy is based on the fact that people with higher education are less likely to commit a crime and more likely to vote and/or participate in other ways in their communities; therefore, the easier that higher education is to obtain, the less crime and higher voter turnout you will have. It also goes without saying that the more educated people we have, the less unemployment and therefore less poverty we will have, which is probably why having higher education reduces someone's chance of commiting a crime.

So the better alternative to building more prisons to accomidate more criminals is to instead give more money to schools to lower their tuitions. Its my own philosophy that other government functions should be cut as well to have more funds for education, the main one being National Offense (also called "Defense"). I've said before that we should cut funding to NASA too, and it pains me to say that because space travel is so freaking COOL, but it just shouldn't be such a high priority anymore. I mean, landing more things on Mars will not lower the poverty rate, nor anything but prove that we can land more things on Mars and that to me is pointless, lets cut their budget.

It may also help out our country a lot to FIX THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM, but you can read all about that at RealArt.

In summation, before our president became president, he was governor of Texas, Texas being having the second worste education system in the country, with Bush being responsible for the way the current Texas school system. With education being such an important resource to harness to fix very important things like crime, poverty, and participation in government, was Bush ever the right choice to be our country's leader? I think not, seeing as he and his Congress cut student loans a few months ago! Combined with his John Reagan Wayne foreign policy, was there a worse choice?

College is too expensive. Most people can barely afford it. If the government gave more money to their schools they wouldn't have to charge so much. The cheaper it is to go to college, the better off our society will be. Poverty poses a bigger threat to us than terrorism, this should be the hot issue today, not whether illegal immigrants should be made felons.