I’m not saying some states are “too dumb”. I’m saying some states are too poor, and the poor shouldn’t be left to suffer compounding negative results because their citizens can’t shoulder the burden of higher state taxes. Because I promise you that federal taxes will not go down. Once the government has gotten used to milking you for X amount, they aren’t going to give up that cash flow. All that will happen is that poor states will just get worse and worse as education falls and they fail to produce a workforce qualified for anything other than menial labor.

We are too dumb to set our own standards!

It’s not about being “too dumb”. It’s about having skills that transfer across state lines. There’s a reason we don’t let doctors and lawyers from other countries just set up a shop and start practicing in the US without meeting American standards first. Now imagine that happening from one state to the next. In your naive attempt to reduce the size of government, you’ve actually increased government bureaucracy and red tape by orders of magnitude.

And again, where are states going to make up that 15% of funding provided by the federal government?

The problem with this is that there ends up being no national education standard. You take a state like Alabama, which ranks dead last in so many education metrics, and remove those federal standards. Now Alabama can just change their state standards, and suddenly they have a 100% graduation rate with all straight A students. Guess what happens when Cletus the Alabama valedictorian tries to get a job in the medical field or the tech sector.

And that’s before we ever even talk about funding. States get about 15% of their K-12 funding from the federal government. Where are the states going to make up that difference? Higher state taxes? Higher property taxes? Or are they just going to let already struggling schools go to shit? Guess who that affects the most?

You really haven’t put a lot of thought into this beyond “federal gubmint bad”.

If you read the Bible with a purely objective mind and come away thinking God is the good guy in the story, I have some serious questions about your morality and ethics.

Sometimes it takes me forever to get these, if I ever get them at all. This one though… It immediately clicked.

Dude. Reading package labels is the same for me. I end up having to take a picture with my phone, then zooming in.

I have my PC screen size zoomed in to 125%.

Getting old sucks.