Wonks Anonymous makes his living crunching numbers and to do so he uses some pretty big iron. He will not even begin to guess at the total cost of the hardware and software that he works with every day. One thing he knows for certain. The whole heap of computers and software packages that he and his colleagues use every day to provide the management of certain a major health care producer with data would be so much junk without the skills and training of the people who work on them.

Management is always pursuing the dream of fully automatic production but really nothing ever gets done without workers' skills and training - Human Capital. Human Capital is not, however, a great concern for public policy. Sure they tell us all to stay in school and call themselves the education whatever but do they really spend money on it? Hardly. There are no investment tax credits for education, you cannot deduct your children's college tuition or the interest on your student loans - unless you are in a very low tax bracket.

None of the tax incentives offered for investment in physical capital are available for investment in human capital. Of course state funding for lower education is meager at best and for higher education minuscule.

And, of course, income from human capital comes as additions to our earning power. We all know or should know that labor earnings in this country are taxed at the highest rates of any form of income. People who work for a living pay 7.5% tax for Social Security, more tax for Medicare and, of course income tax, starting at 10%. Money that we put aside for retirement is taxed for Social Security and Medicare before we put it aside and will be taxed as income when we use it after retirement.

Sometimes Wonks Anonymous wonders what he was thinking when he got his PhD in economics and learned all of the skills that have served him well in his career as a data monkey. He could have gone to work at McDonald's or some factory and put his savings into stocks. Any dividends that he got would be untaxed and any capital gains would be taxed at a maximum of 15%. Which rate is far below the 28% or so tax rate he now pays.

Indeed, until just recently if a young person were faced with a choice between a career in real estate speculation and medicine, the most profitable choice would be real estate speculation.

Lucky for us people do not make their choices based on "the almighty dollar" alone. Still we do need to ask ourselves. Why do we make it so hard for people to get educated?