The focus of Obama’s attacks this week has been on education.  Anything but our economy …

On the campaign trail yesterday, Obama told an adoring crowd that Mitt Romney believes that we have enough teachers and that we don’t need any more.  Well … did anyone in the audience who booed bother to stop and think, “Well, maybe Romney has a point?”  Since 1970, the number of government school workers has doubled. However, student enrollment has only increased by 8.5%.  And what do we have to show for it?  Andrew Coulson in the Wall Street Journal has the details:

Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.

Obama, Democrats and even many conservatives seem so eager to hang on to our broken system of government education.  Why?  Well … for many people, it is because this is the way it has always been and changing it would require work.  In other words – we are lazy.  Government schools are the easy solution, which provides mediocre results. 

Mitt Romney supports the more difficult solution: School choice.  Why do I say “difficult”?  Because he puts the power back in your hands.  He forces you to be responsible and to make the decisions that affect your life.  If you choose to send your child to a mediocre government school, then look in a mirror when you are griping that the only job your child is capable of obtaining upon graduation includes the phrase, “Would you like fries with that?” 

Obama may be in the majority for now in his support of government education, but that is starting to change.  A poll recently released shows that 40% of Americans now favor school choice and/or vouchers.  That is an amazing 10% increase in just one year.  But if you listen to Obama, here’s how he paints Mitt Romney’s stance on education (this is paraphrased): Romney believes that we’ve got enough teachers; we don’t need any more.  Teachers are nothing but a bunch of nameless government bureaucrats that we need to cut back on.  Romney wants to cut education spending by 20% to pay for a new $5 trillion tax cut that’s weighted towards the wealthiest Americans.

About that last line … this $5 trillion in tax cuts are the proposed tax cuts for ALL income brackets, not just the rich, under Romney’s plan.  And based on that column by Andrew Coulson, does it not seem like we could stand to do some trimming from the education budget?  If it were President Boortz (yeah … right), there would be no Department of Education.  Period.  So in my mind, trimming 20% off the budget isn’t going far enough.  But don’t you just love how Dear Ruler loves to pit these two against each other as an either/or scenario: Either we give tax breaks to rich people or we fire teachers and our children will go uneducated.  He did the same thing recently with military cuts: Either we give tax breaks to rich people or we are forced to cut military spending.  Has it ever occurred to this man that across the board tax breaks could potentially generate MORE revenue?  And since when did the current spending levels become the norm?  Perhaps we CAN cut certain things because we have increased spending levels to a point that cannot be sustained, even if taxes are increased on the evil rich.