I kept all of my engineering textbooks and there have been concepts in them that never made sense when they were taught in school but ten years later I re-read them and things click like they never did when I was learning them years ago.

I think one of the tragedies of the public schools is that all the kids are expected to learn certain things at specific ages and grade levels, and for some kids they’re just not quite ready.

That doesn’t mean they won’t be ready in the future. But they will get a failing grade and the associated feeling of “I must be dumb.” And I think that often changes the trajectory of their lives as you described, often in negative ways.

We spend an ungodly amount of money on education. The one problem the public schools don’t have is a lack of money. The budget for the public school system in my midwestern city of 750,000 people is larger than the city’s entire budget.

Third world countries get better educational outcomes with literally 5% of the money we spend on education. It can be done, quite easily, in fact.

This is not a socioeconomic problem. It is an incentive problem. No one is ever held accountable for educational outcomes in public school systems. Tie teacher and administrator compensation to educational outcomes and this problem will disappear in a semester.

As much as America pretends to be all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps it’s actually far more socialist than many would like to admit.

This includes zoning laws that protect incumbent property owners from loss of property value by massively changing the character of the surrounding properties.

As much as I would love to live in the free country you describe, it’s not the one we get to live in. And since that’s not the America that exists in reality, there is nothing wrong with people using these rules to protect themselves.

I would add that these aren’t one sided restrictions. They’re reciprocal. A typical property owner can’t convert their property to an eight-plex, and conversely, they can and should expect the same level of protection.

There are plenty of places to cut spending before we start raising taxes on the W2 wage earners that are contributing the most to federal tax receipts.

How would nationalizing health insurance even make a dent in spending? Ultimately the same amount of healthcare will be consumed. You are truly clueless about the federal fisc if you think these are even remotely serious ideas for fixing the federal budget deficit.

1. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...

Social security is easy to fix. Just raise the retirement age. Or do nothing and benefits drop by 25% or whatever it takes to become balanced based on current tax revenue.

Good luck rationing hip replacements and breast cancer treatments whose provision is statutorily required by law and whose cost will continue to rise with inflation.

None of this even begins to consider interest on the debt. As interest rates continue to rise and the debt continues to grow this line item will eventually dwarf everything.

Social Security is chump change compared to these two. But at least it’s nominally fixable by faking the CPI numbers used to set the cost of living increases. You can’t charge less for hip replacements or cancer treatments, they cost what they cost.

Yes, you are not a mechanical engineer.

"Nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s license."

A driver's license is not the only form of ID permissible to vote. You can vote using other forms of ID. Additionally, most states allow people over a certain age to use an expired ID to vote.

"Another 12% (28.6 million) have a non-expired license, but it does not have both their current address and current name."

People move and people get married. The average American will move 12 times in their lives and get married at least once. These people will get their license updated. They have one in the first place that isn't expired, after all.

Again, you can vote using other forms of ID beyond a driver's license, and furthermore, a driver's license with an old address is still valid to prove your identity.

"Millions of Americans across political parties do not have a license."

Again, the fixation on driver's licenses is a canard. Millions of American's aren't eligible to drive, so you would expect them not to have driver's licenses.

"People with less education and lower annual incomes are more likely to lack a current driver’s license."

Yes, people who can't afford to own a car are less likely to have a driver's license.

"People with a disability are far more likely to lack a current driver’s license."

Wow, what an insightful finding. People that are not able to drive don't have driver's licenses.

Here's a fun quote from your own link that refutes exactly what you are claiming:

Only "nineteen percent of individuals without a driver’s license cite bureaucratic or economic factors as the reasons for which they do not have a license." The rest weren't interested, or weren't eligible due to legal difficulties.

That means that only 4 million of the 21 million people who don't have a license can't get a license for the reason you're claiming. That's 1% of the entire country.

In a nutshell, only 1% of Americans are too incompetent to figure out how to apply for a license or too lazy to stand in line and fill out the paperwork to get one. Everybody else either has one, has a good reason they don't want one, or should not have one.

And that doesn't even mean that these people can't vote, only that they don't have a driver's license. It's entirely possible those people have other forms of ID.

Open your eyes friend. People are disenfranchised everyday, but it isn't because the mean old DMV denied them a driver's license.

Biden’s student loan forgiveness would have amounted to a gift of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to his most ardent supporters: young, college educated, poor people.

Trump’s proposal is a fraction of that, and all Americans would be eligible. If he’s trying to buy votes, he’s going to need to try a lot harder. This proposal is nothing like Biden’s vote buying scheme.