[SoftwareMaven]

In a knowledge-based economy, education is critical to keep that economy moving, which is good for every tax payer. Make parents pay the full cost of educating their children, you'll see half the kids out of school, poverty will increase, and crime will skyrocket.

Unemployment would go way up, but companies wouldn't be able to find skilled employees. This is already a problem now, imagine how bad it would be in a society with 1/4 of the current high school graduates not graduating.

Then, coming full circle, we would find ourselves paying $30-40k/year to incarcerate more people we could have paid $10k/year to educate.

Education isn't an investment in an individual, it's an investment in a society.

[leot]

You're under the impression that the wealthy are looking to increase their absolute, rather than their relative, wealth. But much of what I've seen in the U.S. are policies focused on preserving or increasing relative wealth at the expense of the absolute kind.

The millions who, for their whole lives, have been poorly educated and are now unemployed (or imprisoned) could be making stuff of value that would ultimately make us all (absolutely) richer. This would increase the absolute wealth of the people-paying-the-bills (the already rich), but would decrease their wealth relative to those around them.

[SoftwareMaven]

This effect will be I treating to watch as the cost to produce goods approaches zero and our economy transitioms away from a scarcity model to something else. I suspect there will be a lot of people fighting that along the way.

[sorbus]

> This is already a problem now, imagine how bad it would be in a society with 1/4 of the current high school graduates not graduating.

By comparison, the dropout rate in 2008 was 8.0%, down from 11.8% in 1998[1].

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16