drjamesarnold.com

     Betsy and I have been mostly following the latest version of the required and/or suggested stay-at-home-shelter-in-place-if-you-don’t-want-to-die policies since this whole thing started, either in February or 3 years ago, one or the other. Most of it hasn’t been too hard, but we did experience a few unintended consequences with the online ordering thing that eventually took over most of our daily activities.  She ordered, for example, the requisite face masks online but didn’t notice they came from China and cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 apiece shipping costs, and we got 100 of them. They arrived after about 4 weeks, which wasn’t too bad considering where they came from, but they were sort of lost in the flurry of deliveries that soon became a flood. We live on a gravel road that is essentially one way with no room to pass, so the UPS and FedEx trucks found themselves meeting each other coming and going, and there were occasions where words were exchanged between driver

     Happy Birthday to the United States Department of Education! Once a relatively innocuous part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, President Carter decided he could create two bureaucracies where only one existed, and the USDOE began operating on its own as a Director level agency on May 4, 1980. The Department of Health and Human Services continued without the education part, and ostensibly serves our citizens in areas other than education.        The USDOE, affectionately and unfortunately known by those employed there as The ED has somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,400 employees as of 2020, and a budget of about $68 billion.  Their website says that “education is primarily a state and local responsibility” and they are funded primarily from tax monies collected from states and allocated by Congress.  Somewhere around 8.5% of every state’s educational funding comes from The ED, and about 90% of The ED’s funding comes from state and local taxpayers.  This year