Idi Amin and Donald Trump - strong men with unlikely parallels

US President Donald Trump and African dictator Idi Amin - different, but the same.
EPA and Reuters

US President Donald Trump’s norm-breaking campaign and early reign has been compared to several other divisive historical figures, especially previous American presidents.

But when it comes to the style in which he communicates, there’s an uncanny resemblance to a notorious African dictator from the 1970s. For those that lived during Idi Amin’s vicious reign in Uganda between 1971 and 1979, there are clear echoes four decades later in Trump’s speeches and press conferences, or when he fires off his notorious tweets.

Let me say up front, Trump, who was democratically elected, can in no way be compared to Amin when it comes to how the so-called “Butcher of Uganda” came to power or the brutal way he dealt with dissent during his eight-year regime. One of the most barbaric military dictators in post-independence Africa, the death toll of his own citizens under his rule, is put at 500,000.

The comparison I am looking at is the similarity of styles and tone of communication. Even though Trump and Amin are from completely different eras with different modes of communication, there are clear parallels between the two telegenic men.

Decrees with flourish

Amin’s numerous decrees were announced on radio and television and carried in newspapers with flourish. One such decree was the expulsion of the Asian/Indian community from Uganda.

In front of international television cameras and newspaper journalists Amin accused the Indians of being “smugglers who carried five passports”. He blamed Britain for bringing them to Uganda during the colonial rule. Amin claimed that the expulsion decision was taken in the national economic interests of Uganda:

I took this decision for the economy of Uganda and I must make sure that every Ugandan gets the fruit of independence. I want to see the whole Kampala street is not full of Indians.

Fast forward 44 years. At a campaign rally Trump promised to deport illegal immigrants from Mexico, some of whom he called “rapists”. Trump also announced that he was going to build a wall barring them from entry into the United States which Mexico was going to pay for.

“Mark my words,” he said. Afterwards he proclaimed that he “loved Hispanics”.

In similar style Amin said “it’s not my responsibility to offer them (expelled British Asians) transit camps! The British High Commissioner is here and it is his responsibility”. Remarking afterwards that the British “are my great friends”.

For Amin’s Uganda, it was a devastating decision. The expelled Asians/Indians were the entrepreneurs, bankers, professional class who had formed the country’s middle class since colonial times. Six months after their departure the country’s hitherto promising African economy spiralled into recession.

Trump’s America may not suffer the expulsion of unwanted foreigners but its regional entrepreneurs such as potato and vegetable growers will suffer from the absence of cheap available labour from across the border in Mexico.

Impulsive use of technology

The two presidents have similarities in their impulsive use of quick communication technology. Trump is a compulsive tweeter while Amin loved dispatching telegrams.

Amin telegraphed disgraced American President Richard Nixon wishing him a “quick recovery from Watergate” and to Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, his erstwhile foe, a peculiar message in lieu of peace talks at the height of a war between the true countries:

If you were a woman I would have married you … although your head is full of grey hairs.

There were even more bizarre ones to the Queen of England, saying he expected her to send him “her 25-year-old knickers” in celebration of the silver anniversary of her coronation. There was an offer of assistance to Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister to save the British economy,

If you would let me know the exact position of the mess.

A Trump tweet to Iowa voters who voted against him in the primaries had similar condescending tones:

Too much Monsanto in the corn creates issues in the brain?

It was later deleted.
There was another tweet about James Comey, the FBI Director he fired:

And then there’s this tweet about a topic that has often occupied his mind, namely his predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy:

Being fired on television

Amin loved firing his officials on radio and television. A minister of culture, Yekosofat Engur, attended a public function as guest of honour not knowing that his junior had just been appointed in his place on Uganda’s broadcast media.

Former FBI chief Comey learned in a similar fashion of his fate. He learned of his firing while addressing agents at a field office in Los Angeles – breaking news flashes on television of Trump sacking him, was the first Comey heard of it.

There are also parallels in their sabre rattling. Amin threatened to invade Israel, not holding back:

If am to prepare the war against Israel completely, I don’t want very many Army, Air force and Navy, just very few and strike inside…

“I love war,” Trump declared his passion for violence during a campaign speech in Iowa in late 2015. He added:

I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way, but only when we win.

Low opinion

The two presidents both have a low opinion of women and not shy to express that. Amin remarked that he was a “good marksman” (with women) while showing off his numerous children. He had four wives and more than 30 children.

Trump has had a long trial of sexist comments such as this one:

You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass …

What the two share most is their sense of self importance.

In 1977, after Britain broke diplomatic relations with his regime, Amin declared he had beaten the British. He titled himself “Conqueror of the British Empire”, short for, “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE”. He said he would be happy to accept the Scots “secret wish” to have him as their monarch, hence the Hollywood movie title “The Last King of Scotland”.

Amin also wrenched a Doctorate of Law from Uganda’s Makerere University and henceforth considered himself in the same league with medical doctors.

As Salon wrote, the only two words former reality show host Trump has uttered more frequently than “you’re fired” are “I’m smart”. He said about Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school:

Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.

They both share a passion for control and love to be loved. The New Yorker’s Jeff Seshol reckons that Trump’s chief complaint about his own yes-men seems to be that they don’t say yes energetically enough.

It’s easier when you’re a dictator. Amin was clear:

As minister, governor, high-ranking people and the people of the country, they must love their leader. This is the point number one.

Turning into Amin

Respected East African commentator Charles Onyango Obbo believes that,

The genius of Trump is that he understands what adept guerrilla leaders figured out ages ago – do that which the opponent thinks is impossible or so unthinkable, they have not planned how to defend it.

The same went for Amin who for a long time was considered a comic buffoon while he terrorised a whole country and fanned international terrorism.

Some may think it’s alarmist, but Onyango Obbo has warned that with all the similarities,

Trump – or indeed any leader in an “advanced” democracy – can turn into an Idi Amin.

Geoffrey Ssenoga, Lecturer of Mass Communications, Uganda Christian University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How ANC presidential elections trump South Africa's constitution

ANC leaders greet party supporters at a recent rally.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

South Africa’s Constitution is clear on a number of issues related to the relationship between the country’s parliament and its executive. It lays down that if the National Assembly passes a vote of No Confidence in the cabinet, the cabinet must resign and the president must appoint another one. Or, if it passes a vote of no confidence in the president then the president and the entire government must resign.

In a presidential system the president is directly elected by the voters, normally has a fixed term, and can only be removed through processes of impeachment. This usually require passage of votes of no confidence, or their equivalent, in the responsible legislature or congress.

In contrast, in a parliamentary system, a president or prime minister assumes office by virtue of his or her capacity to command a majority in the legislature.

Despite various hybrid features, the South African Constitution is more of a parliamentary system than a presidential one. The party enjoying a majority presents its candidate to the National Assembly for election – as required by the Constitution. In practice, that person has been chosen by the governing African National Congress (ANC) outside the legislature.

That’s not to say that the ANC is acting inconsistently with parliamentary practice. By selecting its leader outside the legislature, and getting the National Assembly to rubber stamp its choice, it’s acting in a manner fully consistent with parliamentary practice. But where it’s departed substantially from that script is by making a sharp distinction between the party and state presidencies.

The terms of office of the two presidencies are not in sync with one another, resulting in a “dual power” structure operating. This is because there’s a long gap between the ANC’s election of its president and the general elections which determine which party will have the majority in parliament, and consequently who will become president of the country. This gap is a recurrent source of potential instability so long as the ANC remains the majority party.

Party president v state president

The ANC elects its presidents at its five yearly National Congresses. Notionally, the process of election is a grass roots one. Branches vote for their preference as leader. Their preferences are funnelled upwards through regions and provinces, with provincial delegations casting their vote for one of the candidates.

President Jacob Zuma.
GCIS

Other ANC-linked organisations, such as the Youth League and Womens’ leagues, can also cast their votes at the congresses. But they contribute just 10% of the delegates to the National Congresses. This means that the person elected to the presidency can notionally claim to be elected by the mass of the party’s membership.

All well and good – except that in practice the ANC electoral process is distorted by money, patronage, factionalism, vote-rigging. and, quite often, violence . It can be argued, with good reason, that ANC practices negates the democratic legitimacy that it claims. Nevertheless the way in which it chooses its own presidents remains its own business, and is in no way in violation of the constitution.

What’s more problematic is first, that the ANC insists that it “deploys” its party president to the state presidency. In practice, this means that if he or she wants to remain secure in office, a president needs to command a majority in the party’s National Executive Committee. A second issue is that there is a substantial period – usually between 16 and 17 months – between the election of a party president by a National Congress and the election of a state president by the National Assembly.

When there’s consensus between the party and state presidents there is no problem. This happened after Mbeki’s election as party leader in December 1997 to succeed Mandela, who stayed on as state president until the April 1999 election.

Yet when there’s tension, the constitutional authority of the National Assembly is directly undermined. This occurred after Zuma’s victory at Polokwane in 2007, with Mbeki remaining as state president until he was told to resign the office by the party in September 2008.

It was probably more by accident than design that the elections of ANC presidents and state presidents are so badly misaligned. The ANC’s negotiators during the transition to democracy probably simply failed to identify this as a potential problem. Yet the “dual power” situation which can arise, with a state president not knowing whether or not his or her actions might be countermanded by the party, is inherently destabilising, and a recipe for intra-party factional struggle.

It’s a situation South Africa can ill afford.

The next round

The ANC’s recent National Executive Committee meeting made it clear that any MP voting for an opposition party sponsored motion of No Confidence in the president will be disciplined. This means that the motion will be defeated, even if there is a secret ballot. True, there may be a handful of dissidents on the government’s benches prepared to speak and act openly against the president. But they will do so in full knowledge that it may cost them their seats in parliament.

ANC secretary general warns party MPs not to support to oust President Zuma.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

If Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (the president’s former wife and favoured candidate) is elected party president at the next party congress in December 2017, it’s possible that Jacob Zuma may ostensibly bow to popular pressure and resign as state president. This would enable the ANC majority in the Assembly to elect her as state president.

Alternatively, Zuma may opt to remain as state president, allowing his former wife to mobilise support for the ANC around the country prior to the 2019 general election. Even if Zuma does stand down, allowing the two offices to be combined, we may assume that he will continue to be the power behind the throne, and that Dlamini-Zuma will be kept on a tight leash – at least until the election.

A victory for the Zuma faction in December 2019 could provoke the breakaway of the defeated faction, which would probably be headed by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa. This could herald the reshaping of the South African party system and the formation of a coalition government following the 2019 election. Many would say “Bring it on!” to the idea of a split within the ANC, although a triumphant Zuma faction is likely to make major efforts to prevent that happening.

Alternatively, if the anti-Zuma faction was to win, and Ramaphosa was to be elected party president, he would likely face a massive backlash from Zuma loyalists, who would fear the loss of patronage positions and gravy. A divided ANC in which the present factional battles continued to openly wage is an ANC which could well go down to defeat.

Whatever the outcome of the present battles within the ANC, the party would do the country a favour by bringing the two presidencies into alignment. The person elected to the party leadership should be immediately presented to parliament for election as state president.

Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Community leader shot dead after massive Khayelitsha land occupation

Backyarders vow to continue battle for land

By Thembela Ntongana
1 June 2017

Community leader Mthunzi ‘Ras’ Zuma was shot dead at the weekend. Zuma was a well-known leader in the ongoing land occupations in Khayelitsha. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks

A group of Khayelitsha backyarders, who orchestrated a large land occupation in Cape Town two weeks ago have vowed to continue their fight for land. This follows the fatal shooting of one of the group’s leaders Mthunzi ‘Ras’ Zuma on Sunday night. Police spokesperson Noloyiso Rwexana said no arrests have been made.

One of the land occupiers, Mabhelandile Twani, said that they would not stop fighting for the land. “We will not stop even if it means I will die. I would have died fighting for a decent place to stay. The struggle continues,” he said.

Hundreds of people, mostly backyarders in Town Two, began their occupation on 15 May,
demarcating hundreds of sites on vacant pieces of land in the area. One of the pieces of open land is next to the Khayelitsha Magistrates’ Court. The other two sites were in Makhaya and Kuyasa.
Last week, GroundUp visited the area where some of the erected structures were being demolished. Hundreds of sites were also demarcated on the land. The occupation is one of the biggest in the city in recent years.

The backyarders say they are tired of renting and living with their parents, while a large piece of land has been empty for years.

On 28 May, community leader Zola Booi told GroundUp that the shooting occurred after they had barricaded the road next to the vacant land.

“A car came and two people got out and asked what was going on. Ras explained to them. The driver then got out and asked whether he was Rasta. He was then shot in the head,” said Booi.
Booi now fears for his own life.

The City confirmed to GroundUp this week that it owns all the occupied sites in Khayelitsha, with the exception of two plots owned by the Western Cape government.
Backyarders don’t trust organisations

Occupiers said they had lost all trust in the organisations working in the area. These include the Khayelitsha Development Forum (KDF) as well as Khayelitsha Community Trust (KCT).
KCT is responsible for developing the occupied area in Town Two. The organisation signed a land availability agreement with the City in 2003.

Part of the occupied land has been earmarked for gap housing, which would accommodate people earning more than R3,500 and less than R15,000 a month. “The gap housing still wouldn’t accommodate us. We are here during the week so we don’t work, and don’t even have an income,” said resident Martin Xabangela.

KCT CEO Mkhululi Gaula said that the 22 hectares of the land was meant to be developed in 2015. He said there was a delay due to “legal matters” as well as the transfer of land from the City to KCT. The transfer process has not yet been completed.

“We have had two meetings with the occupiers, and have made it very clear that it is not acceptable [to occupy the land], and that they will be accommodated when the development is done,” said Gauda.

Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements Councillor Xanthea Limberg urged residents to register on the City’s housing database in order to access the housing opportunities planned for the area.

A memorial service for Mthunzi ‘Ras’ Mosiah Zuma will be held on 4 June at 2pm at Kilombo Village, Joe Modise Street, Makhaya, Khayelitsha

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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Study: US cities have worse inequality than Mexico, with rich and poor living side by side

Skid Row in Los Angeles, a city where rich and poor live in very close proximity – for better and for worse.
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The cities of the Americas are unequal places.

US census data and recent American Community Surveys show that in most modern American metropolises, resources are unevenly distributed across the city – think New York City’s lower Manhattan versus the South Bronx – with residents enjoying unequal access to jobs, transportation and public space.

In 2014, New York City’s GINI inequality index was 0.48, meaning that income distribution was less even in New York City than in the US as a whole (0.39). It was also higher than the most unequal OECD countries, Chile (0.46) and Mexico (0.45).

Latin America, which is the world’s most unequal place, is also by far the most urbanised region of the globe. More than 80% of its population lives in large cities.

Between 1950 and 2005, the region’s big cities grew precipitously. Both Mexico City and Sao Paulo jumped from just under three million people to, in both cases, nearly 19 million.

Data on urban inequality is largely unavailable, but it is clear that this rapid urbanisation has been far from equitable. According to a 2012 UN Habitat report, the large majority of Latin America’s non-poor population lives in major metro areas, while the poorest live in rural areas.

What does inequality look like?

No matter where you live, measuring inequality is tricky, because its incidence and extent changes in different parts of the city.

Sure, there are rich neighbourhoods and poor ones: high-income and low-income households sort themselves across cities according to preference (for local public goods and neighbourhood composition) and needs (according to budget, job location and housing prices).

But not every neighbourhood is comprised fully of households with the same income. Income sorting across space is often “imperfect”, meaning that rich and poor households might live in the same neighbourhood and share common social ties and local amenities.

As a result, a very specific and local kind of inequality emerges within neighbourhoods. This phenomenon is sizeable in US metro areas, Census Bureau data shows. Not only do unequal households live very close together, but neighbourhoods also represent small communities where local inequality, on average, seems to track overall urban inequality.

For example, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles all have neighbourhood income inequality at least 20% larger than Washington’s, which matches the difference in the cities’ GINI indices. We found that inequality within individual neighbourhoods has also been rising precipitously over the past 35 years (even in very small neighbourhoods), indicating an increase of income heterogeneity at the community level.

This unexpected finding is likely related to the comeback of North American cities over the past decade – the so-called great inversion. Across the Americas, jobs and firms are moving back into major metro areas, attracting more skilled people, who are generally young, receive higher wages and prefer to settle down where their jobs are.

As high-income young couples buy up homes in historically distressed neighbourhoods long dominated by the working and renting class – and gentrify them – they push up income heterogeneity in those places. This is happening in cities across the Americas.

Gentrification has occurred in many North American cities, increasing local income inequality and, in some cases, tensions.
Michael Premo/flickr, CC BY-ND

Keeping up with the Joneses

We wanted to better understand this phenomenon. Why is local income inequality rising? How can we quantify it? What are the trends in uber-localised inequality? And what does it all mean for city dwellers?

Those were the questions driving our study – So close yet so unequal: Reconsidering spatial inequality in US cities – which focused on US cities. Our preliminary findings were recently published in a Catholic University of Milan Working Paper.

Unlike traditional assessments of inequality, which accept administrative partitions of the city as the unit of analysis and measure income inequality in those neighbourhoods, we look at inequality among neighbours, putting people at the centre of our analysis.

The underlying thought experiment consists of asking individuals to compare their income with that of neighbours living within a given distance range (from few blocks to entire census areas), thus quantifying income inequality in that particular person’s neighbourhood.

In doing so for every person in a city – any city – one should be able to measure two aspects of spatial inequality: the average income inequality within individual neighbourhoods (is my neighbour richer than me?), and inequality among the average incomes of each neighbourhood (is that neighbourhood richer than mine?).

We found that these two indices define a typology of cities that mirrors what urban planners have found at the city level. Some places are “even cities”. Like Washington DC, they display relatively low income inequality everywhere.

Other metro areas, among them Miami and San Francisco, show high urban inequality, but high and low-income households are rather evenly distributed throughout the city. These are so-called “mixed cities”.

The largest US metro areas also have the most unequal neighbourhoods. In New York and Los Angeles, the way high and low-income households are distributed across the urban footprint reflects what planners call the “unstable city” model.

The Great Gatsby in the ‘hood

Such substantial and increasing inequality appears to imply several contradictory things for cities and their residents.

As shown in Figure 1, lower neighbourhood inequality is associated, on average, with large upward mobility gains for young people who grew up in poor families, a phenomenon reported in recent work by Stanford University’s Raj Chetty.

FIGURE 1: Upward mobility in America’s urban neighbourhoods

Upward mobility gains/losses for children living in poor families in 2000, by Commuting Zone.

Children of better-off families benefit, too, from living in a homogenous local community, thanks to “positive contagion” facilitated by social interaction among wealthy young peers.

Both findings are evidence of a “Great Gatsby Curve” in America’s neighbourhoods. That is, greater income inequality in one generation amplifies the consequences of having rich or poor parents for the economic status of the next generation.

Yet greater income inequality within individual neighbourhoods may actually be a good thing for poorer locals. Figure 2 shows that they experience life expectancy gains, perhaps due to positive health modelling and increased aspirations among poor adult residents.

FIGURE 2: Life expectacy in America’s urban neighbourhoods

Addressing inequality

For policy makers, then, our findings create an intergenerational trade-off. A “mixed city” model would seem to promote life expectancy gains for poor adults who live there, while the “even city” ideal furthers economic mobility of young people who grow up poor.

Lessons learned from such a policy debate in the US could have important international consequences.

No one has yet applied our neighbourhood-based inequality analysis to Latin America’s unequal cities. But we can see that in metropolises such as Mexico City, and São Paulo in Brazil, as well as in smaller cities, uncontrolled sprawl and lack of urban planning has increased the distances between high, middle and low-income households.

The view from the Rocinha favela, in Rio de Janeiro, where ‘urban renewal’ is now encroaching on some of the poorest parts of the city.
AHLN/flickr, CC BY

This is the “polarised city” model, and our paper found little evidence of it in US cities (with the exception of Detroit and Washington). Such places have substantial heterogeneity in income across neighbourhoods and relatively little heterogeneity within neighbourhoods.

In Latin America’s polarised cities, the poor are separated from the rest of the population. As a result, they have lower access and opportunities for education, employment and services. This inequality has been exacerbated by gentrification and by the region’s growing global economic engagement. This has strengthened urban elites’ connections to the world while relegating Latin America’s poor further into the periphery.

In such cases, increasing the urban income mix seen in New York City might actually have beneficial effects for the city’s neediest residents. This is a relevant area for future study. It would be interesting, for example, to plot cities across the Americas on the same graph, examining regional trends in longevity and mobility based on neighbourhood-level inequality.

Such hyper-local analysis would offer both policymakers and international agencies the kind of information they need to improve the lives of today’s city dwellers, both now and in the future.

Eugenio Peluso, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Verona and Francesco Andreoli, Post-doctoral researcher, Luxemburg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How Trump's harsh education cuts undermine his economic growth goals

A student learns to operate a mill in an advanced precision machining class.
AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

The Trump administration has some ambitious goals that include trillions in tax cuts, a significant military buildup and a fresh investment in infrastructure.

The White House released details of how it plans to pay for it all in its full budget request for fiscal year 2018: by slashing spending on pretty much everything else, but also by boosting economic growth enough to generate more than US$2 trillion in new revenue over a decade.

What the president’s team is failing to consider is that many of its spending cuts, such as reduced investment in welfare and education, will actually impede the administration’s ability to achieve its target growth rate of 3 percent, up from about 2 percent today.

My own research focuses on how career and technical education (CTE) has implications for growth by promoting educational attainment, training and productivity. Trump’s proposed cuts to CTE offer an illustrative example of the economic consequences of reducing social spending.

Taking an ax to education

The administration’s budget seeks to slash spending on the Education Department by $9.2 billion, or 13.5 percent, which is the biggest proposed cut since President Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully tried to gut the agency in the 1980s.

In K-12 education, the administration would like to eliminate at least four distinct programs – including Title II grants for teacher and principal training and programs designed to help lower-income students transition to college – and make significant reductions to many others. On the other hand, there’s a big investment in a few programs to support school choice and vouchers, an articulated priority of Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The higher education budget faces severe cuts as well. Trump wants to eliminate subsidized student loans as well as a loan forgiveness program, and slash federal work study spending in half. These changes would substantially undermine efforts to help lower-income Americans attain a college degree, which would be a further drag on economic and productivity growth.

Of particular concern to me, however, is the $168 million, or 15 percent, reduction in block grants to states, called Perkins funding, which are used to support career and technical education in high schools and community college. Given the administration’s preference for funding programs that promote economic growth, the cut to CTE – which disproportionately benefits Trump’s base of largely white working-class voters – is bewildering.

CTE, also known as vocational education, exposes youth to practical, hands-on skills as a complement to academic coursework. Historically, CTE has included programs like auto mechanics and cosmetology but increasingly also includes high-growth industries such as information technology and health services.

By supporting these kinds of career paths, CTE tends to train students for positions that could support small business growth, and that fill demand in the high growth fields of health services, information technology and advanced manufacturing.

How CTE helps the economy

Though CTE is on Trump’s list of cuts, it is the area of education spending that my research suggests has the most potential to boost economic growth. These benefits would be realized through better-paying jobs and fewer dropouts, which also help achieve other positive economic and social outcomes.

Career Academies, which began about 35 years ago, are one such approach to providing CTE in high school by integrating career pathways into the school curriculum. They boast some of the best evidence on the effectiveness of CTE. A 2008 report on the program suggests it can help students earn 11 percent more in wages compared with their peers.

My own recent work using data from Arkansas shows that students who took more CTE courses in high school were more likely to be employed and earn more money – about 3 percent to 5 percent – than their peers who took fewer. Furthermore, I also found these students were more likely to finish high school and go on to college, both of which improve job prospects.

Evidence from Massachusetts shows similar educational benefits of CTE. Specifically, I found that students enrolled in vocational programs were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and attain industry-recognized certificates in specialized fields like IT.

Increasing high school graduation is critical; there is ample evidence that higher levels of educational attainment result in higher wages and better long-term employment prospects.

Studies show that a high school graduate will earn 50 percent to 100 percent more in lifetime earnings than high school dropouts and will be less likely to draw on welfare or get tangled up in the criminal justice system. The graduate’s higher earnings also mean she’ll pay more in taxes.

Beyond improving individual outcomes, investment in education and training fuels broader economic growth by bolstering productivity. The decreased demand for social services and welfare also frees up more state and federal resources to be invested in other areas of the economy.

Ideology over sound policy

The Trump administration has claimed the high price tag of its tax cuts will pay for themselves through higher economic growth. A budget that aims to gut important social programs – which not only improve individual lives directly but also boost the economy – would make that a lot less achievable.

In the end, the Trump budget, it seems, is motivated more by ideology than sound, evidence-based policy. In education, the administration is clearly prioritizing school choice at the expense of bedrock areas like CTE that are known to promote achievement and a variety of economic benefits.

As a result, education development will suffer, as will the administration’s rosy economic growth projections.

Shaun M. Dougherty, Assistant Professor of Education & Public Policy, University of Connecticut

This article was originally published on The Conversation.