Saturday, January 09, 2010

Thad Kousser, Please Call Home

Dear Thaddeus is a visiting professor of political science at Stanford. For that title alone, we should forgive him his idiocies. PoliSci is not exactly a magnet for productive, wise and creative individuals. Poor thing, it may have been the only degree he could attain. I'll try to be gentle*.

Here's Tad's take on the Governator's latest dingbat proposal, excerpted from the LA Times.
At the center of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State speech Wednesday was a proposal that outside of Sacramento might seem like common sense: Mandate that the state invest more dollars each year in its public universities than in locking people up in prison ...

"In concept, it absolutely makes sense to everyone," said Thad Kousser, visiting professor of political science at Stanford University. But "when you look at the trade-offs that the state might face to get there, it gets a lot harder."
No, Thad, it doesn't make sense, not even in concept. Thanks in part to the blithering idiots all around you in academia and the brainless multiculturalism and moral equivalence they've embraced, we've wrecked the American family and found ourselves with a monstrous prison population.

I blame Bush. And racism. But mostly Bush.

Thaddeus, my dear boy, it makes no sense at all to try and keep up with the galloping incarceration rates by funnelling vats of cash down the gullet of the education system. We've been trying, that, too and the results have been poor.

This is clear proof that Republican administrations slashed education spending. Or maybe not.

You see, Tad, education outcomes and prison populations are tied to cultural behavior patterns. If you wreck the traditional, nuclear family, you're screwed on both counts. I'm not sure if our dear PoliSci genius is married with children**, but if he is, he might want to call home and suggest to his wife that they get a divorce so she can raise the kids on her own. That way Thaddeus can show us all how raising kids with half the labor force and half the income of a traditional family doesn't lead to worse results. If that's not possible, then he ought to call a neighbor who is and make that suggestion.

I'd love to hear how that goes. In the meantime, linking education spending to prison spending with, say, a 10% bonus to education will bankrupt us. Sort of like what the moral relativists and multiculturalists have done to our society already.

* - Well, not really.

** - Here's his UCSD faculty page. He got his PhD from Berkley, which explains a lot. As an alumni of UCSD, the fact that he teaches there explains even more. I'm sure his kind of analysis goes over real well at the Che Cafe, a UCSD bistro that celebrates the life of Che Gueverra, a fellow who liked to shoot people like Thad in the head. With real guns, too!

Update: Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings have their own take on this gibberish proposal. Of course, just like Sarah Palin's real-world experience can hardly hold a candle to President Obama's Olympian academic credentials, Dean can hardly consider himself in the same mental class as Thaddeus.

3 comments:

Jeff Burton said...

More spending on higher education will harm us (additional english majors and women's studies grad students). More spending on prisons will help us (criminals do an astronomical amount of damage to a society, economically and psychically which most people prefer to ignore).

I begrudge not one dime spent on prisons. And as an American, I am proud that we are willing devote so much money to protecting the innocent from the guilty. A lax penal system = rich people massaging their guilt at the expense of poor people.

K T Cat said...

Good point, Jeff. As I thought more about it, I wondered just how much luxury there is in the prison budget. From the charts, it looks like the thing is driven by an exploding population, not by espresso kiosks and shiatsu massage therapists for the inmates.

Dean said...

"...Dean can hardly consider himself in the same mental class as Thaddeus."

... and I thank God for that.



While I'm open to specifically-targeted prison reform iwo sentencing or three-strikes matters, I am in full concurrence that, golly, its probably best to keep the bad actors separated as much as possible from law-abiding, productive members of society.

Thanks for the link.