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Education investments, not security spending, separates the United States from Third World status

Speaking today of education and crime, I saw a sad and unreal statistic from the Salvadoran Public Security Council which found that "El Salvador spends some 11% of its GDP on security, yet spends only 2.7% on education." Their crime problem is a lot worse than ours, too; for that matter, it's substantially worse than Mexico's.These stark data remind me of a recent exchange in Grits comments. Reacting to this Grits post, someone wondered, given Texas' high incarceration rates, "Do we need any more proof that Texas is really just another third world country?" I replied that no Third World country could afford incarceration rates that high, declaring "Mass incarceration is a rich nation's hobby."To judge by these data, I may have misstated things...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on August 25, 2008 (boomark / email).