The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
President Joe Biden had a thing for wanting to compete with China in the 21st century. He talked about it all the time. Sometimes he seemed to go a little overboard with this, especially when talking about “winning” a space weapons race and war with China.
The Folly of Dreaming About Winning a Space War With Russia or China
The Trump administration, the Republicans in Congress and even special government efficiency czar Elon Musk, however, don’t seem to be concerned about competing with China, and you would think Musk would know a thing or two about this, since he is so dependent on the Chinese for building his now very unpopular electric Tesla cars.
Instead, even after somehow winning the presidential election of 2024 and controlling power in both houses of Congress, as well as a controlling majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Republicans in Washington seem only concerned about one thing: Competing with liberals, Democrats and anyone with an education, even to the point of drumming up a new Red Scare against them and coming after a few measly millions in federal funding for public television and radio.
NAJ: A New Red Scare Threatens American Democracy From Within the White House
PBS only gets 15 percent of its $373 million annual budget from the federal government, and NPR and member stations around the country only get about $240 million in federal funding annually. That’s not even a drop in the bucket of the $1.6 trillion national budget, $895 billion for defense and $711 billion in non-defense spending.
So if cutting funding for public television and radio will not save the government much money, why are Republicans like Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene so obsessed with gutting it? Maybe because they know the dumber they keep the U.S. population, the better chance they have of continuing to hold power and enrich themselves.
There is no reason for the government to fund NPR and PBS, Republicans say, and they went after the leaders of those outlets last week in a Congressional hearing, accusing them of “partisan programming.”
“You all can hate us on your own dime,” Greene said. The next day, the Republicans introduced a bill to end all government support.
If the United States was interested in competing with other countries in the 21st century, you would think they would want to beef up the education of the U.S. population, not cut it.
According to the World Population Review, Canada is the most educated country in the world, followed by Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Australia and Israel.
China is not included in that list for technical reasons, but don’t be fooled. China has the largest state-run education system in the world, with 293 million students and 18.8 million teachers in over 518,500 schools as of 2022. While the country mandates nine years of compulsory education — comprising six years of primary and three years of middle school education — higher education accessibility has become extremely common, with over 10 million college graduates in 2022. Moreover, the fiercely competitive job market has established advanced degrees as the prevailing standard, where a bachelor’s degree no longer ensures career success, according to these statistics.
Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, must be licking his chop sticks, dreaming of taking down the United States, along with his new buddy Vladimir Putin in Russia. Trump seems to be playing right into their hands, thinking he can cheat at international diplomacy likes he cheats at golf.
What a sad, pathetic state of affairs.
Is this really the end of America?
The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
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