Ronald Reagan was once criticized for not being in touch with the current generation. He was confronted with the fact that the people today have "television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, and computers." Reagan replied that the heckler was right, and that was because his generation had invented all those things.
Reagan's generation - my parents generation - did wonderful things that mean the world to us today. They gave us microwaves, cell phones, and a myriad other things that makes this modern world possible.
But one thing gets forgotten ···>
They did it with a 94% tax bracket for people making more than $200,000 a year.
A great deal of those taxes went to education to make sure that our country would continue to grow and get better. Now, the top bracket is 39%, and people who qualify for that have ways to make sure that they pay something like 13.9%
Where is our education system now? Here in Pennsylvania, our good governor Tom "the Weasel" Corbett has cut education spending to the point that my school district has eliminated pre-kindergaten entirely, cut out all sports under 7th grade (those not funded by PIAA), cancelled all after school activities such as band and chorus for elementary schools. They even had to lay off the gym teacher at our local elementary and have teachers covering it instead of their lunch break, resulting in one 45 minute gym class per week.
Why? There are no billionaire CEOs in education to give millions to Weasel's reelection campaign - but there are in the Shale Oil operations.