Monday letters: Best job program is education

Apple CEO Tim Cook said recently that he would prefer to return iPhone manufacturing to the United States, but there aren’t sufficient workers with manufacturing skills. He said the United States has only a couple dozen technical colleges that train students for manufacturing jobs, while China has a thousand schools training workers. Apple is just one example; there are more than five million good-paying jobs in the United States that can’t be filled due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Education can be an important economic driver, but it seems to be given little priority in South Carolina, where ideology reigns supreme. Notice how much is said in contrast about tax cuts as a way to grow the economy.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, studies over the past six decades have found that top tax rates “have had little association with investment or productivity growth,” but cutting them led to greater income inequality. In other words, the “cuts don’t affect the size of the economic pie, but can affect how the pie is sliced.”

Come on, South Carolina: Let’s put priority on funding and installing best practices in our K-12 and higher education systems.