WATCH YOUR WALLET – AT 8:21 A.M. ET:  The budget battle in Washington begins today, and remember who's paying for all those lovely programs.  From The Politico:

Like fresh troops — or cannon-fodder — Barack Obama’s 2012 budget lands on Capitol Hill on Monday, and more than any of the president’s prior efforts, this one makes choices that help define the man himself.

He bets big on education spending — an 11 percent increase next year — while altering the Pell Grant program to try to save the aid levels now allowed for college students from the poorest families, The National Institutes of Health will grow by about $1 billion, even as old antipoverty programs and heating assistance are cut. And $62 billion in Medicare savings will be plowed back into paying physicians who care for the elderly.

Foreign wars, most especially the one of Afghanistan, drain Obama of $118 billion, but for the first time in many years, total expenditures for the Pentagon and military will begin to fall. And much as Republicans ridicule his five-year cap on domestic spending, it has bred new restraint in him.

COMMENT:  The annual ritual now starts.  No doubt Mitch McConnell will declare the budget Dead on Arrival.  The opposition always does.

Regarding the president's bet on education:  It is misplaced.  I yield to no one in my belief that every American child deserves a first-class education, through the highest level that he or she is capable of attaining.  But we don't underfund education in America, we overfund it.  We spend enormous amounts and get too little in return.  And we never ask too many questions about what is actually being taught.

Just throwing more money at education will solve nothing, although it will make the haughty education establishment very happy.  I think it's time for the Republicans to take a cold look at federal aid to education, especially to some of our plush universities.  We should start to question every aspect of education, including the four-year bachelor's degree.  (It can easily be done in three.)  We can question, as the educator Robert Hutchins did in the last century, whether we really need a 12th year of pre-college education.  We could do it in 11 or even 10 without breaking much of a sweat.

We can question the intolerable length of summer vacations, which were originally established so that kids from agricultural families could work the family farm.  Not too many young people in that category these days.

Education has been a sacred cow, and a cash cow for the education establishment, including teachers' unions and wasteful universities.

Will questions be asked?  Don't hold your breath.  What would help would be a parents' revolt. 

February 14, 2011