You're going to have to backup that claim that the majority of people that graduate from college are functionally illiterate. I call bullshit on that being true.
The American food system is one of the safest and most regulated on earth. You may disagree with some of its practices, but that does not make it unregulated nor unsafe. The claim that America has a complete lack of food safety regulations is laughable, you couldn't be more wrong.
America has always had for-profit colleges, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. They work perfectly fine. America has had by far the best university system for many decades and still does. The rest of the world has nothing like it.
Massive subsidies for fossil fuels? In fact the subsidies are not massive compared to the industry and dollar figures in question, even if those subsidies should not exist. If you want to talk per capita fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment from that, let's talk about Norway's output - that bastion of everything America is supposed to aspire to.
America merely contributes upwards of half of all global science and innovation. Given the immense output record the US possesses, you're going to have to do a lot better to discredit it than throw out an empty soundbite.
You're wrong in your claim that the majority of college graduates are not functionally literate.
2% of college graduates fall below a basic level of literacy.
14% of total adults fall below basic on prose; 12% on document; 22% on quantitative. The numbers of college graduates are vastly lower than those.
And further, digging into the data, I'd be willing to bet that half of those numbers of people that struggle on basic literacy - in english - do so because their primary language is either not english and or they have very little command of the language (first generation immigrants etc).
It is certainly interesting that the "National Assessment of Adult Literacy" report indicates that only 13% of adults can perform that sample task of "computing and comparing the cost per ounce of food items".
Same for comparing and contrasting two newspaper articles, which is probably even more relevant -- if you can't do that, then you're immediately disqualified from pretty much every profession that pays a living wage. And that's not even a very high bar, considering that newspapers are written at what's supposed to be a 6th - 8th grade reading level.
Sure, the bar of 'fully understanding' is ridiculous. People don't have 100% accuracy with anything. Most people would also fail the same measure if the document was spoken vs written so despite the name it has little to do with literacy.
Note: The bar for functional literacy includes banking paperwork which is intentionally designed to be confusing. If more people understood it they would rewrite it to be less clear. Also, your failure to understand what you linked precludes you from the ranks of 'functional literacy'.
PS: While high, you might reasonably interpret at least intermediate as an acceptable level for college graduates and that's well over 80%.
Talk about fraud. The site mentions "proficient" in quotes trying to make that sound like a low level of performance when in fact it is the highest rating on the assessment (2 spots higher than "Basic")!
I'm guessing the rest of your bullet points are a stretch as well (at least they seem like stretches and now we know you cite bogus sources).
The American food system is one of the safest and most regulated on earth. You may disagree with some of its practices, but that does not make it unregulated nor unsafe. The claim that America has a complete lack of food safety regulations is laughable, you couldn't be more wrong.
America has always had for-profit colleges, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. They work perfectly fine. America has had by far the best university system for many decades and still does. The rest of the world has nothing like it.
Massive subsidies for fossil fuels? In fact the subsidies are not massive compared to the industry and dollar figures in question, even if those subsidies should not exist. If you want to talk per capita fossil fuels and the destruction of the environment from that, let's talk about Norway's output - that bastion of everything America is supposed to aspire to.
America merely contributes upwards of half of all global science and innovation. Given the immense output record the US possesses, you're going to have to do a lot better to discredit it than throw out an empty soundbite.