Entrepreneurship Education, a private, non-profit corporation founded at the Ohio State University in 1982. The consortium’s goal is to “champion…entrepreneurship education at all levels of education and across all disciplines in America and the world.”
During the two-day market on campus, KagES students sold services and products using the business concepts they’ve learned in the classroom. They have to return the “seed money” they borrowed — $100 per team — and keep the profits. They then discuss how their business plans fared during the market days. This way, kids get an idea of how the economy works. They learn how to appreciate money, how it is actually earned in the real world, and how entrepreneurship can help develop their problem-solving skills.
Despite all the generous taxpayer-funded programs out there that supposedly aim to produce a skilled local workforce that will allow the gradual phase-out of the guest workers program, the CNMI education system is still mass-producing future politicians and government bureaucrats whose primary task is to ensure that a guest-worker-based economy will continue to pay for the expenses of an overspending, wasteful, bloated government. CNMI taxpayers are basically paying the education of future government officials who will, in turn, overpay themselves while giving their friends and supporters non-essential but well-paying jobs.
I’ve been here for 15 years and I’ve met several brilliant young locals, fresh from college, idealists all, brimming with hope and talent, yearning for real change, now! They all ended up working for the same government that exasperated them in their younger days.
What choice do they have? What company in the private sector can afford to pay them? Sure, they could be the people’s advocates, speaking their minds and saying the truth…but at the risk of being denounced and slandered by demagogues.
What the CNMI needs are more entrepreneurs and fewer bureaucrats. It has to shrink the size of government by allowing the creation of a private sector that can attract more locals. This is easier said than done, and has been discussed endlessly for years now. And we’re still talking about it. Which is probably why nothing happens.
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The problem with the judiciary’s embarrassing defense of its personnel’s salaries is that…well, I’ve said it already. It’s embarrassing. The judiciary talks about the importance of its “independence,” the “great sacrifices” made by justices and judges, their “legal knowledge” and the “drive and dreams” of CNMI students. Yet we’re only talking about a 10 percent pay cut to be imposed on officials who will still get over a hundred grand a year if Senator Frica’s bill becomes law.
If, moreover, judicial officials are really concerned about CNMI students, then they should volunteer heftier budget cuts that will go directly to, say, MHS for example. I may be wrong, but I really don’t think that reducing the salaries of justices and judges will dash the dreams of the CNMI’s aspiring lawyers. And if the paycut, as the chief justice claims, will “discourage children from choosing public service,” then this bill ought to become law pronto. The CNMI is overgoverned by thousands of public servants already, so I don’t think it’ll hurt to dishearten a few kids out there dreaming of landing a cushy government job one day.
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