newbie12

There is a deliberate effort in academia to downplay, or in the case of this piece, distort and even place blame on the Protestant Christian educational movements of early America. The Great Awakenings that spurred the creation of U.S. colleges and universal public education were fueled by a moral tradition and were an enormous success. That tradition has nothing to do with todays failing public schools. The author also fails to note that the current American home school movement has explicitly Christian roots.

Another key constituency are the school builders. Schools are in constant need of construction and renovation (often because they are poorly built). It is one of the larger budget items in any school district.

Actually most U.S. cities are in a huge rebound...from better policing and the memory of the 1960s riots is fading. Houston is our new Chicago.

The actual problem was the federal Interstate Commerce Commission regulated routes and ticket prices and wouldn't give passenger rail companies the flexibility needed to compete with cars and growing air travel. Central planning failed and completely destroyed U.S. passenger rail.

The main obstacle in the U.S. is that the interstate passenger rail system was nationalized by Congress. Congress forces unprofitable long-distance routes on Amtrak and keeps the monopoly company undercapitalized. Amtrak owns amazing assets like the Northeast corridor rail lines, but there's almost no innovation as the monopoly loses billions of dollars and can't really tap private capital markets.

Meanwhile American freight rail-- totally privately owned and managed-- is the best in the world.

You should control for geographical differences in pay and language distribution. California likely has more Ruby programmers-- the higher cost of living and higher salaries there may explain the entire difference between Ruby and PHP.

California is so large it has many great public schools, but other states like Virginia (UVA and William & Mary) have public schools that rival the best in California, and most large states have an elite public school (Texas, Michigan, UNC, Georgia Tech, etc etc) that would be top tier in California. To some degree, California's support for its universities has slipped and the reputation is based on the past.

Student loans are unsecured, so if they could be discharged, the market rate would be akin to a credit card with a huge balance-- 15% to 20% a year in the current interest rate environment. Plus if they could be discharged, such action would become commonplace, a rite of passage at graduation.

These entrepreneurs all appear to be legal immigrants. Most of the "ranting" in the U.S. is towards the law-breaking immigrants who now want amnesty. There is a consensus in America in favor of legal immigration, the political fight is over the inability of America to secure its borders and how to assimilate the millions of people who entered the country illegally.