Patricia Grose - Ready to work ... or not

Well you have several issues related to this. First let me start that the avg American reads at a 8th grade level. Education is important, we need to start our children earlier and go from 180 days to about 223 the rest of the worlds avg for Developed Democracies. Rather that be total days "at" school or some sort of stay home program ?

Next problem is levels of education received. Since most schools are funded by local bonds, rich areas have better schools than poor areas. Oregon has worked hard on attempting to fix this problem. But it is still there, in fact the best in the poor areas tend to produce the results of the worst in the rich areas. Let's face it, social economic mobility in America is very low, in fact in a recent study in the world for developed economic countries (kept by world trade org). The U.S. finished last. Which basically means when born poor you will die poor, born rich, you will die rich.

Next you have jobs leaving overseas while importing people thus lowering wages and causing shortages of work, especially in production areas. Thus many people with legal history in which to help them not re-offend (with job, community, living, and behavior changes) can't get employed because of two factors (people coming into our country and jobs being moved to China) That is about 10% of your population with a higher level of unemployment than others (regardless of education). We also have the highest crime rate in the world, and it tends to build on itself. This creates more cost for jails and prisons, supervision and medicaid for families of those people.

So you have all these factors. There is a lot more, but it would take more space than Patricia used in her article. I might suggest a new book out called the 'Servant Economy" Which I think has some excellent points.

Troy Prouty*

I want to suggest one other thing:

http://www.khanacademy.org

it is FREE and you can learn..

Troy*