Oh, I see. We pay into public education to repay for the education we received as children.

Not why I think any functioning society would think education was in the public interest. Job 1 of any civilization is to stay alive as a civilization. What with science, technology, and modern economy, doing that without an educated population is a fool's errand.

But if you need to tie why you should pay for the future, you might consider that it is because generations before you paid for their future which became your present and enabled you to make more than a $1 a day. Even today in the world there are people who work hard just to stay alive, yielding only a few bucks a day of output, and it is because they are doing this without infrastructure. Meanwhile anybody posting on this board is taking advantage of infrastructure that was ready for their exploitation when they got born or immigrated to the west.
If the infrastructure of my training and the output of all the other people around me allows me to make $100,000 a year instead of $1,000 a year in one of these, what are they called, sh1tholes, then how much of that extra $99,000 should I insist is entirely due to my efforts and therefore off the table for public purposes?

R: