&gt; It sickens me that I have to pay taxes to support them when they just continue to spiral downward.<p>This is a feedback loop. I&#x27;m not saying that throwing more money at public schools will help them get better, but taking money away will certainly make them worse.<p>&gt; Most liberal solutions that I&#x27;ve seen leave out human nature and a history of complete failure and re-dress it as something &#x27;new&#x27;.<p>Actually agree. Most liberal policies are somewhat naive. But on the other end you have the free market people crowing about benefits of deregulation and wanting to disassemble public services because &quot;I don&#x27;t want <i>my tax dollars</i> going to [parks, buses, schools, etc etc] I don&#x27;t even use!!&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a medium ground here. The point of society isn&#x27;t to preserve <i>your</i> tax dollars or to give <i>everyone welfare</i>. The point is that when we all live together as a group, we all do a lot better than we did when it was six of us in a group starving out on the tundra.<p>There are some public services that we just shouldn&#x27;t live without, especially if we want to stay competitive as a country. However, some of them need complete overhauls or just shouldn&#x27;t exist in the first place.