system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
&gt; Would you personally want to "focus on the cure" via enhanced government funding of the issues you identified? 

Depends. If the government sat down, looked at *all* the options (not just the trendy ones or the obvious stuff either major party proposes) and fixed the VA so that it provided a quality healthcare experience at reasonable costs, I'd be significantly less opposed to single payer than I am now. I can't say what I would and wouldn't support in the future without specifics, but I can say that if we can't make public healthcare work for a subset of the population, my faith that we could make it work for the entire population is zero.

I'm theoretically in favor of increased resources for education; but my understanding is that compensation for teachers is heavily tied to seniority and fairly divorced from any concept of merit. I don't pretend to know how to figure out merit in teachers (I've had good and bad teachers but I don't know how to measure goodness or badness), but especially if we're gonna seriously solve the problem I want to see someone at least try to figure out how to make sure excellent teachers receive excellent compensation. I don't think throwing a blank check at the school system without any changes is going to help anything.

So on and so forth down the line. I think the general principle for me is that I'm willing to invest more resources -- up to and including paying more taxes myself -- but the bare minimum I need is an expected return on investment. I think the reason that so many American public systems are broken is that there are deeper problems lack of funding, and I'm highly skeptical of just throwing money at them until those problems are solved. 

&gt; I know you don't have to support government funding in those areas to believe that something needs to be done, I just kind of got the sense that you were suggesting support for that, and I'm curious what your thoughts are.

A major not-just-more-money approach (I don't know if it's libright or not, don't really care too much about specific quadrants) to solving poverty is a deep, fundamental rethinking of how we do education. I mentioned incentivizing merit earlier, but this means everything from what courses we offer to how kids advance from one level to the next.

There was a kid in my class growing up who was as good as anyone at math, but didn't have strong English skills. As we increased in age and went through grades, he kept up in math but not so much in English, and the frustration with English slowly robbed him of any interest in English. Well, why do we force every kid to progress in English at exactly the same rate, and force everyone to progress in math at the same rate as English? Why don't we largely break the heavy connection between age and educational progress? If a kid is faster in math than average, let them go and do more advanced math; if they're weaker in English let them take their time and focus on it instead of just booting them further along. 

And I think everyone knows our fixation on four-year degrees is unhealthy. I have a bachelor's but my brother who is 7 years younger than me went into a diesel mechanic apprenticeship program out of high school and he makes about the same as me. I don't regret going to college, but the crazy thing is there are *zero* resources for kids who want to go into fields like that (at least in my experience). The guidance counselor at our school was good for telling you when the next SAT was or what the application deadlines for different schools were, but other than that you were pretty much on your own. My brother got lucky that they changed shop teachers and the new one pointed him to that program, before then his only real option was the military because he had zero visibility on other possibilities. 

How many students are less lucky than my brother, reach the end of high school without a clear next step or any skills or passions they can pursue, and just resign themselves to careers they hate for salaries they have little command over? And how many of those students could have otherwise thrived if they'd received instruction in interesting and useful topics, and developed the intellectual skills to identify career paths and realize them under their own power, without needing to follow a pre-existing trajectory?

If we give many more students a better experience in education, and equip them to develop their own skills in pursuit of where the high-paying jobs actually are, the idea is that we can probably make significant strides against poverty without necessarily spending any more money. If we make some of these changes and realize "hey, there are high paying jobs for artists in animation and video game development but we don't have teachers that can do both traditional art and digital graphics", I will absolutely pay more taxes for that.

If the best we can do is "hey, we want more money for a mediocre teacher whose been mediocre for 30 years to funnel kids into the student-debt-and-office-dronehood pipeline", I can't see why anyone would reasonable consider that acceptable.

EDIT: Expanded on a point
gpt
I wish I knew how to quote specific parts of your comment but the bit about accelerating students in specific subjects is definitely something that happens in some districts, but I have no idea how common it is. 

In my (public) middle school you could skip a year or several of math depending on how good your grades were in elementary school. Then in high school you could skip the freshman science course if you tested over some kind of threshold in 8th grade. We also had choices as to which science courses we took as long as certain criteria were met. Many schools also offer honors, AP and/or IB courses to students who want to show off in the college admissions process and earn college credit.

I agree with almost everything you said but for education it seems to me that throwing money at the problem is a good solution as long as it’s used to provide opportunities to students.