I think reduced spending will be front and center part of the R arguments now that we have inflation trouble.
Until they get the White House back…
3 Likes
Reduced spending is rarely popular. I’d guess the worse anything else is, the more they will go for “safe” cultural scare stories.
2 Likes
As a soundbyte it is quite popular and appealing to a lot of people. When you try to get it down to specifics it all falls apart.
The R’s will certainly say “reduce spending” a lot over the next few years. It won’t really be part of their agenda though.
2 Likes
I’ll give DeSantis this his latest authoritarian power flexing on nothing issue has generated an amusing number of math puns/jokes into the mainstream.
1 Like
I think actual cuts are unpopular, but the concept of lower government spending is popular with a lot of GOP voters as long as it’s someone else’s bank account getting hit. For decades the GOP playbook has been to label themselves as the party of smaller government and responsible spending, yet when in control they typically greatly increase spending and pork for their local pet projects.
That doesn’t mean they won’t continue with their culture war of course. Trump has proved that it resonates with certain segments of the GOP base.
2 Likes
From my yahoo news feed this morning. Enough so that I can post a couple here, a couple in the Innumeracy thread, and still not use them all. (all related to the 1 billion apprehensions
3 Likes
That’s a talking point that is never far away from Republicans, and I might listen to them a bit more if they came up with an agenda focused on moving the country forward rather than the nonstop nonsense that seems to be working for people like DeSantis.
1 Like
agree in part. a program disliked will be ill-funded until its performance is terrible and then they can shout “govt programs don’t actually work.”
It looks like they’ve now provided a small number of examples. I haven’t looked at them beyond what’s described in this article:
The examples given in the article are kind of lame (a polynomial predictive model of racism?) but to me don’t seem so egregious to warrant outright rejection of the textbooks, but 
One thing I finally got from this article was the impact of the state DOE endorsement/rejection that maybe everyone else here already knew: school districts can still select textbooks not on the ‘approved’ list but can’t spend as much of their budgets on them, so it’s a state funding issue.
[Quote=TB Times article]
Several Florida school districts, meanwhile, are reconsidering the titles they have already adopted or plan to approve, based on the state’s announcement. They are not required to buy books from the state approved list, but they may use only half of their state funding for instructional materials for items not on state lists.
[/Quote]
2 Likes
I side with Florida (DeSantis) in this case. The 4 examples that I saw, or any other type of social commentary, do not belong in these math books. Sometimes the crazy right gets it right.
Pretty sure they flipped out about the graph on the right.
I only saw 2 examples on the FL website (2 pictures each). Did you see more?
Surely they picked the worst examples. Even if you agree the worst examples are inappropriate, that’s little reason to think the majority of exclusions were appropriate.
3 Likes
I don’t disagree, especially in regards to the 2nd example where they don’t even show the actual questions.
I’d question if those worst examples are genuine text books or fake books with gratuitous left-wing ideology to justify banning all the others - a similar effect to provocateurs infiltrating protests.
Even I’m not that cynical, though you have made me wonder if I should be.
CNN included 2 others related to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
Note: I go to cnn.com for confirmation of their headline bias and clickbait headlines. Occasionally I will click on something that looks like it contains facts. I also go to usatoday.com for similar reasons, but most of their stuff is now pay-only. Generally, I follow the news here at GoA.
It’s (not) funny that this is possible…
From the linked article above