E.J. Dionne: who needs facts when I have moral grandstanding?

In today’s WashPost, their resident liberal wrote a column titled “In search of a new new deal – How will the good jobs of the future be created?” Dionne tap-dances around the answer to this query which finally arrives in the ninth paragraph:

For the past 15 years, progressive free-market politicians have offered an appealing mantra about how to save the middle class: What's needed, they've said, is heavy investment in education and job training to allow people to make the transition from the "old" economy -- those auto jobs -- to the new.

There’s a shocking solution: more education spending. But Dionne doesn’t deign to throw us a morsel of information about trends in education and/or job training spending. The only numbers in the article chart the decline of union membership as if that, ipso facto, is proof of a decline of “good jobs.”

In fact, over the past five years, the Bush Administration has increased spending on education by an annual rate of 7%, a pace unmatched since the LBJ Administration. Also, when adjusted for inflation, spending-per-pupil has more than tripled:

Whenever I ask this, someone nearly always says "Oh, spending back then was much greater than it is now" (again, adjusting for inflation). Well, if you go to the 2001 Digest of Education Statistics, table 167, you see the answer: Per pupil spending, in 2000-01 dollars, was $2235 in 1959-60, and $7591 in 1999-2000. Spending has risen by a factor of 3.3 in the last 40 years.

I know Google is confusing with both those button choices, but E.J. Dionne really should try it once in a while before churning out yet another article long on moral vanity and short on facts.

Extra reading – From the Heritage Foundation: “The folly of an education spending race”